The SLR Podcast revisited: Jeanne Marie Laskas

During the holidays, The Sunday Long Read is returning to some of our favorite episodes of The Sunday Long Read Podcast. In the spring of 2019, Jacob Feldman spoke to author and journalist Jeanne Marie Laskas about her work about former President Barack Obama, the story that became the movie “Concussion,” and her 2013 GQ profile of Vice President Joe Biden, which had resurfaced at the time of the interview, when Biden choose to run again for President. 

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Jacob Feldman: Your book “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope” began as a New York Times Magazine story. How did that happen? Did you have the idea to turn into a book before that went to press?

Jeanne Marie Laskas: Definitely not. The magazine story was one of those stories that’s kind of a one-off in your mind.

I found out that Obama had been reading 10 letters a day and I was just so curious about that and it was kind of an interesting time to look back at what that sort of experiment was about, for him and for the people who wrote to him and just that conversation. And at the time I was reporting it, of course, the polls all showed that the election was going to Hilary Clinton. The story took on a totally different turn the day of the election and the day after when I was there in the mail room and suddenly, it was just like a totally different story.

What is the first step when you say, “OK, this is going to be a book”?

In this case, it was a book that needed to happen fast. And so I put together a team of people that I sometimes work with and we had a room full of mail to go through and to sift through and we asked ourselves “Which letters should we use in the book?” and “Can we reach these people to get their permission? The sheer volume of material was crazy and then I wanted to go on a tour of America meeting these people who wrote.

Was the physical mail aspect of it a big attraction to you?

It definitely was, especially the actual handwritten letters. They are so amazing, they’re like artifacts and in fact in the book, that’s why we used a lot of them, especially the handwritten ones. This is the story of America in those eight years, this is us, this is what we were thinking. Most of the letters are not like writing to a president—like a lot of people wrote to Obama in their hours of need like, when they were lonely, like it was a shrink or something. So you get these really intimate conversations.

We can segue from that a stone’s throw from the White House to the GQ Joe Biden profile that you wrote early on in their second term. When do you get that assignment or write that story, do you think it will have a decade-long shelf life?

Two words to that: Hell no. I’m thinking: “How can I get access to this guy so I can write a real story?” To me the hardest profiles ever to do are of anyone in politics, partly because of the access problem and partly because of the scripted external selves that those folks present. In Biden, the scripted part was never an issue. It’s just the access. I was researching that thing forever and almost gave up on it for a while. I went to the Vatican for the Pope’s inauguration, thinking “surely that would give me a scene,” but it just wasn’t Biden yet. It wasn’t until I got to hang out with him in Wilmington, in his childhood home, that it became like a really cool opportunity to write about him.

For the most part, the story stays in that one day in Wilmington. And I think that’s probably the reason why it still feels contemporary. I’m curious if that was the plan going in? By my count you kind of spent 400 words on his 40-year history, out of 6,000 words. 

To me, it didn’t matter who he really was. With any profile, for me, it’s always about “How can you evoke a character?” and “What are the moments when that character reveals him or herself?” The rest of it doesn’t even quite matter—it’s just backstory. My contribution to Biden’s political history isn’t really all that valuable to the world—there are better people at that. However, when you do all your research into this guy, it did seem to me that he was so misunderstood, and that there were pieces of his background that had kind of fallen off and especially the stuff about his stutter and how he overcame the stutter and that all was linked to those moments in Wilmington. I mean, we were on the front stoop where he remembered putting rocks in his mouth and trying to overcome this stutter. And also this stuff about his wife, the car accident, and his kid dying. These things were so immediate for him. Those pieces of his biography that revealed themselves during that time in Wilmington, I thought this was a moment to pause and think about them and how those contribute to who this guy is today.

Do you think about it as if making it interesting, even if it wasn’t the vice president? Is that kind of how you’re thinking about it?

Most definitely. My favorite thing is characters, all the time, and I take a really similar approach, whether they’re famous or not famous. I don’t really care about what makes them special. It’s almost what makes them not special that is more interesting. I usually choose to write about people that people have never heard of, so when I go to write about people who everybody’s heard of, it’s just sort of like a lens I look at it through.

You write in the GQ profile : “The job of vice president is important, really it is, way more important than it used to be, but not in that fucked-up way Cheney made it important. I got the feeling Biden would have loved to say ‘fucked-up way Cheney made it important.’ But he didn’t say that, not with all the tape recorders going, and the staffers there, and him in his breakfast-with-the-king-of-Jordan blue suit.” It’s interesting you wrote “I got the feeling.” Were you conscious of not putting words in the vice president’s mouth in this case?

This was a scene set in the Naval Observatory, his home, and it was a formal setting where everybody’s there with a tape recorder and everybody’s dressed up and it was just a really boring interview because that’s what they are. It was before I got with him to Wilmington and it was me sensing there was a lot more to this guy and I’m almost signaling to the reader “I’m going to get there.” Like I have a feeling this guy putting on this front right here really would like to say that, you know, “that fucked-up way that Cheney thought of it.” I don’t know that he did, I don’t know that he would, but “Hey reader, I think this is where I’m headed and this is why I’m going to stick around and I’m gonna find out if that’s really that guy.” 

You wrote about Dr. Bennet Omalu, who became the focus of the movie “Concussion,” for GQ. How did that story first come to you?

This was via Andy Ward, who was my editor at GQ at the time. I was writing lots of stories for GQ and I was not a sports writer and I knew nothing about sports and it was for this reason that Andy kept throwing me sports ideas because his idea was “Well, you’ll do a profile of a football player in a way that people who know about sports would do a different one.” Take that same equation and Andy turns to me and says “This concussion crisis that’s going on, let’s do something about that.” I did not want to do it because it really just seemed like such a stretch. For me, I thought “I’m just going to read about it.” I started with the scientific journals and moved forward in time and there was this one guy, Bennet Omalu, who drops out of the scientific literature mysteriously and he never shows up again, and it seemed like it all went back to him.

And I’m like, “What happened to this guy? Did he die? Why does nobody talk about him?” That was my entire question. As I started trying to find him, I became really interested in the story.

With your interest in characters, I’m curious how plot and narrative arc factor into that? Are you OK writing a story that doesn’t have a beginning and end? And the story I want to ask you about next is “Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns,” so you can take that as an example.

I always think about narrative arc, so that’s kind of the baseline of it all. I’m okay with a barely recognizable narrative arc, but I’ve got to have something there. It’s like a bass line in music. One story I can remember where I was free of narrative was a crazy story about a fake hitman for the ATF (“Oops, You Just Hired the Wrong Hitman,” GQ, 2013). It was just the most ridiculous story of people hiring this guy to kill someone they loved, and then in the end, the guy would say “Sorry, you’re arrested and you’re going to jail and I’m not killing the person you loved.” It was just a darkly comic thing because you never knew so many people wanted to kill somebody. There was no narrative arc because it was just one ridiculous story after the next. I almost gave up on it because I couldn’t figure out how to do it. One day my editor Mike Benoist called me and he’s like, “I keep talking to my wife about this story and she just keeps laughing and laughing and laughing. Every time I tell her a new one she keeps laughing and it occurs to me, maybe we just go for the jokes? We have our character and he’s in these ridiculous situations, and maybe we just do it?” And we didn’t have to worry and it was so freeing, but honestly, that was an exception.

How did you find a narrative arc for “Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns”?

That was a little bit easy because Charlie was a character the second I met him. I loved Charlie. You enter these things and you know it’s this crazy story of guns. But it’s a hard story to tell.

I didn’t know how I was going to do it and I went in and then I met [federal agent] Charlie [Houser], I was like “At least I can hang this thing on Charlie.” But then again, what’s the narrative arc? What we really wanted was a crime and I was going to hang out there as long as I could until there was a crime, some exciting murder or something, and the place was going to get excited and we were going to trace the gun from beginning to end and solve the crime. That’s what we wanted, but it turned out to be such an unrealistic version of what they really do. When you’re reporting you, you start opening it all up and you know, it’s like “How do I render this thing?”