In 2021, a New Zealand father and his three young children went missing. When they casually reappeared 17 days later, after apparently camping in the deep bush but neglecting to tell anyone where they were going, it sparked a heated debate among the country’s parents: Was the father, Tom Phillips, putting his kids at risk and wasting police resources? Or was he simply a rugged, nature-loving dad who had taken his children on an usual adventure?
In an article for Slate, writer Dan Kois says that he was initially “sympathetic” to the latter perspective. Kois, his wife and their two daughters had traveled the world for a year in 2017 and lived in New Zealand for several months, “specifically to capture that spirit of adventure.”
But when Phillips disappeared into the backcountry again — this time without coming back, and later allegedly involving his children in a bank robbery and other thefts — Kois writes that he quickly felt his prior “admiration of Phillips wash away.”
“Basically when he didn’t show up for his court date, that was when you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s just weird,’” Kois told The Sunday Long Read. “Now he wants to think of himself as an outlaw and a bandit, who’s fighting the ‘idiotic’ New Zealand justice system with the help of his community, and everything he does now seems in service of that particular self-presentation.”
For Kois, blending a dash of his own personal history and perspective into a complicated, stranger-than-fiction story is a skill he’s been perfecting for years.
“I almost exclusively end up writing long features about things that have real resonance with my own life. I write six or seven features a year, and they’re very self-driven. So it inevitably becomes stuff that I’m thinking about a lot, that I’m really obsessed with, and that relates to something that I’m going through in some way,” he said. “I’m not exactly a character in these pieces, but you often see my mind at work and my opinions changing, or my ideas changing over the course of these pieces.”
Aside from being a writer at Slate, Kois’ novel “Hampton Heights” will be published in September. He’s also the author of the novel “Vintage Contemporaries”; “How to Be a Family,” a memoir; “The World Only Spins Forward,” an oral history of “Angels in America” written with Isaac Butler; and “Facing Future,” part of the 33 1/3 series. He is a host of the Martin Chronicles, a podcast about Martin Amis.
The following interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you first find out about this story of Tom Phillips and his kids? Were you following local New Zealand news after living there?
We really loved the country and the people we met there. After we left, I kept following New Zealand news; I was very involved in the New Zealand literary world and I was on New Zealand Twitter. So in 2021, when they first announced this missing persons case and when the pickup truck was discovered on the beach, it was all over New Zealand Twitter that day and the local news. I was immediately captivated by what I thought the story was, which was a tragic tale of an entire family washed out to sea.
You know, having seen those New Zealand waves and having told my own kids to stay the hell off the beach — like almost every single day that we lived there, because the waves are bananas — I was very compelled by this story that was unfolding. I was hoping that the family would turn up, but I also thought that it was sort of quintessentially New Zealand: this lonely beach and the single pickup, and then an entire community mobilizing, even though they all assume the worst, to try to rescue a family from whatever fate it was that they were encountering.
Was this something that you wrote about initially, during their first disappearance?
For a while I thought about covering it beat-by-beat from a distance, but that’s not really Slate’s mode. For starters, we don’t do a huge amount of international news, and we don’t typically cover stories in that way. For me as a writer, especially when Phillips showed up again and the story got significantly more surprising and deeper narratively, I wanted to watch it as it unfolded and try to figure out if there was a way for me to write about it, as an outside observer of New Zealand culture but someone who had thought a lot about parenting and family life within that culture.
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When I was reading this, it was making me think about “Into the Wild” and how there were such divided opinions about Chris McCandless. You know, is he a true adventurer, or is he putting his family through the wringer? Is that kind of how you viewed Phillips, before the second disappearance and before the story got darker?
When we were in New Zealand, the real revelation for me was how much it changed your view of the natural world. You live in a place where nearly everyone, even if they live in a city, is intimately connected to that natural world and makes time to engage with it, and immerse themselves in it regularly. We’re not experienced campers or trampers, and we’re not particularly outdoorsy people. But being in New Zealand, where family life revolves around taking your kids out into the wilderness and parents frequently bemoan the fact that kids don’t have the exposure to the bush that they had, it really felt very different from our suburban, very safe American life.
I was very taken with that. I fell a little bit in love with this idea of an entire nation where even the tiniest baby gets taken out into the woods to experience the deep wilderness. And so when Phillips first came back, and when the police were initially going to charge him with wasting police resources, I did find that a little outrageous. As far as I could tell, this guy had parked his car in a dumb place, then had gone off on a truly amazing adventure with his children: something that seemed archetypically Kiwi to me, and then he got back and everyone was yelling at him about it.
It seems that with this story, it evolved into a whole separate conversation in New Zealand and elsewhere about how we should raise children and how much time we should spend outdoors. Did this story just become a blank canvas for people to add other elements to?
That often happens with missing persons cases. But it happened particularly in this case because everyone at the center of it was so resolutely blank, no one was talking. Phillips has never talked to the press; his family, with a few exceptions early on in the initial search, has barely talked to the press. And New Zealand has some really specific laws surrounding custody cases and family court, which really tied the hands of local reporters as to what they could dig up and report about the family situation. So you have this case that was consuming New Zealand news, but there was nothing to report and that obviously creates this void into which all these ideas flow. They rushed to fill that empty space. In this case, it was a lot of ideas about the New Zealand national character and what being a parent in New Zealand means, and what the relationship is between the New Zealand “bushman” and the “nanny state.”
Going back to the very beginning of your journalism career, I read that your first job was delivering the newspaper in Milwaukee. How did you get into the writing side after that?
That was indeed a long time ago. Yes, I have a novel coming out this fall about paperboys in Milwaukee in the 1980s.
Very full-circle.
I worked in book publishing for many years, as a not-particularly-successful literary agent, but always wanted to be writing — journalism and criticism particularly. As I was making my way out of book publishing, I actually reached out to Slate many, many, many years ago. Through a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, I got in touch with an editor there, Meghan O’Rourke. And she kindly agreed to have one of those ‘coffees with a young person who seems at sea and who maybe could help your publication down the road somewhere.’ I walked into the meeting with like three pages of story pitches that I had worked on for weeks. I don’t think it was a very socially enjoyable meeting for her, but it was fruitful because I literally just sat down and started reading pitches out loud until she said, “Yes, okay, you can do that one.”
It seems like you’ve had a couple different past career avenues — I also saw that you worked at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Do you think that background in comedy informs any aspect of how you write now?
Yes, before we had kids, I performed at the UCB in New York. A person who does a lot of improv will almost certainly have any number of enormous personality defects. But they will probably feel pretty fearless about asking questions and talking to people in various situations. So I do think it helped make me a more curious reporter. In general, the rules of improv comedy are mostly at odds with what it actually takes to be a disciplined and good journalist and storyteller. In improv comedy, you’re typically looking for the game of a scene, and then you’re looking to sort of ruthlessly exploit it and make it bigger and bigger out of all bounds of logic. And in journalism, you’re trying to get people to go beyond the surface and dig deep to talk to you about what’s real and what matters. But certainly in terms of just talking to anyone, and being willing to humiliate myself and look stupid in a conversation, improv is a great trainer for that.
Fast forward to your memoir “How to Be a Family” and your yearlong trip. Was there any one specific moment or day when this grand plan came to you?
There were a number of them. But the one that really sticks out was just a catastrophic snowstorm in Washington, D.C. — I live in Arlington, Virginia — in 2016. It canceled school for a week, and basically wrecked our professional and personal and family lives for like a month. Being stuck in the house with our kids felt like torture for all of us, instead of any kind of great experience or adventure or fun, because we still had to work the whole time. Our kids needed us and we couldn’t do anything about it, and we were stressed out and upset. It just made me feel like our whole life was broken, and that our family wasn’t working in any way that I would want a family that I’m part of, full of people I love, to work. That was the week where we were like, what if we were just somewhere else?
Other than that memoir, you’ve obviously written a lot about your own life and parenting – with Slate’s Care and Feeding parenting advice column and the Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast. Was there ever a time when you’ve said to your family or your daughters,“I’m going to write about you”? How does that conversation work?
Oh, every time they complained about something on the trip, I was like, “Oh, you’re just giving me material.” This is great copy: your complaints about your Dutch elementary school teacher. They certainly grew up used to the idea that I might talk about them on the podcast, or write about them. For many years, that was funny and fun and exciting for them. At some point when they were teenagers, they said, “Please stop doing that.” And so that is when I stopped being on the podcast and stopped writing explicitly about my family. I had milked them for all they were worth.
A big component of the podcast was parents telling their own stories from their own lives, which was a real reason that people related and still relate to it. The podcast is still obviously going on and is very successful without me. But it was that aspect of it that my kids asked me to stop doing. They don’t care if I give advice to other parents. I think they enjoy reading it and being like, “Pssh, you never did that with us,” but that’s a whole different ball game.
Looking at other writers, is there one particular article or nonfiction book you’ve read that you wish you had written yourself, that you’re envious of?
I’m a big fan of Gene Weingarten’s book “One Day.” He has this view that I love, which is that basically any human being you encounter, if you talk to them for long enough, you will find a future story that you could write about them. So in his book “One Day,” he just spent as much time as he could researching, reading newspaper reports, finding stories, tracking down the people in the stories, interviewing them, and writing an entire book about everything that happened on this one random day. All of the stories are really compelling and interesting. I’m jealous of it because in a lot of ways that’s not my mode at all. He didn’t have any personal connection to any of these stories. He’s just good at finding a story in any well, and I’m jealous of that talent. I really love reading the results, even though it doesn’t feel like something that I necessarily could write.
Compiled by Amanda Ulrich. Photos courtesy of Pedro Szekely/Creative Commons via Flickr.
Amanda Ulrich
Amanda is an award-winning journalist and editor based in Southern California. She has written about tiny, off-the-grid communities in the desert; the unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S.; the aftermath of a category five Caribbean hurricane; the entire towns forced to flee from California’s rampant wildfires; and hundreds of other stories in between.
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