Often, I'm spending months with a person in a very intimate context, getting to know the ins and outs of what they ate for breakfast, not to mention dredging up the most traumatic experiences of their lives, digging through their documents and photographs from difficult times, all of that. And that process, I think, can be extraordinarily strange for subjects who've never been interviewed before, especially if you don't acquaint them from the get-go with what you're trying to do, what it entails, and why you care.

Workers are actually being starved on the largest military base in Baghdad, and women are being raped with impunity - and because it doesn't fit into a Hollywood context it's not going to fly.

The tremendous challenge of narrative journalism about subjects that are underreported is, how do you make people care about something they think they already know about, or think they don't need to know about?

There’s no such thing as being totally ‘found’…the fun, I think, is in the searching.

The journalist's job isn't to be someone's friend, or their psychologist, or anything other than what we actually are. And at the end of the day, that can definitely seem like such a strange, extractive relationship.

For me, the part of reporting that's the most rewarding and energizing is just hearing directly from people whose voices haven't often been heard, or incorporated into mainstream media. That stuff is really, really gratifying, and so to realize that you could make a career of that part of it, that appealed to me.

What narrative journalism does is create a language or open up a space where someone can say, "Oh, this happened to me, too."