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The Book Review
Patrick Radden Keefe on Taking "Say Nothing" From Book to Show
00:44:07
As part of The New York Times Book Review's project on the 100 Best Books published since the year 2000, Nick Hornby called "Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland" one of the "greatest literary achievements of the 21st century." The author Patrick Radden Keefe joins host Gilbert Cruz to talk about his book, which has now been adapted into an FX miniseries.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. This summer, when we here at the Book Review published the results of a survey that asked more than 500 literary luminaries what they thought the best books published since the year 2000 were say nothing, a true story of murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, came in at number 19. Nick Hornby, the great Nick Hornby, who wrote about the book for us, called it one of the greatest literary achievements of the 21st century. In say Nothing, the journalist Patrick Redden Keefe gives us a history of the Troubles, the name for the 30 year conflict in Northern Ireland between the British and the Irish, through a series of characters, the most prominent of which are Dolores Price, one of the first female frontline soldiers in the Irish Republican army, the IRA, and Jean McConville of a widowed mother of 10, whose abduction and killing by the IRA remains one of the conflict's most infamous moments. Say Nothing has now been Adapted into a 9 part FX series, all episodes of which are streaming on Hulu. And one of the show's executive producers, also the book's author, is our guest this week, Patrick Radden Keefe. Welcome to the Book Review Podcast.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Thank you so much for having me.
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Gilbert Cruz
Hopefully many of our listeners have already read say Nothing, but in the event they haven't, do what you've been doing for the past six years and tell us about it.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
It's a book about a handful of people. It's not really a history of the Troubles. It's a book about a particular episode that happened in 1972 which kind of bound together a handful of people. So one night in 1972, and this is in the early years of the Troubles, there was a woman named Jean McConville who was a widow and a mother of 10, and she lived in a big public housing complex in West Belfast, and a gang of masked intruders came to her door and they pulled her out of the apartment. They told her children, we just need to talk to your mother for a few hours. But the kids never saw their mother again. She disappeared and it emerged that she was a Victim of the ira, the Irish Republican Army. But the kids didn't know that, and so they were sent off to orphanages and grew up in this kind of strange sort of purgatory of uncertainty about what happened to their mother. So the book starts with this disappearance. It's kind of a mystery, right? Where did this woman go and who did this to her? And then there's another big character, who's the woman you mentioned, Dolores Price, who was a very different sort of woman who joined the IRA in the early years of the Troubles. And later on it would emerge that she had something to do with that disappearance. It's a story about those two very different women, one a victim and one a perpetrator, and the way in which their histories were joined by this terrible act of violence that then continued to echo down through the decades in terms of its impact.
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Gilbert Cruz
I knew when I said my intro that you would take issue with part of it because you've said over the years that this is not a history of the Troubles. But I will maintain that, that I learned more about the Troubles by reading this book than I think I ever would have by reading some other book, which I probably wouldn't have read, because I'm not going to read a history of the Troubles. It's the same way where I said to myself, I don't know if I want to read about the opioid crisis. And then I picked up Empire of Pain, and I felt like the entire history was there. Part of the reason that's true in both cases, I think, as a reader, is because you tell the story through these characters, through these two characters, and through two other characters, Jerry Adams and a bunch of others. When did you realize that this was the way to tell both a mystery, a story, and to insert all this history in it in a way that really ended up being very digestible for readers.
- [04:21]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It's funny that we should be talking on a New York Times podcast, because it really started in 2013 when I read the obituary of Dollar's price in the New York Times, and really in embryo, the whole story was there in this brief, elegant little obituary. I thought that the. To me, to the degree that I'd been aware of the Troubles as a subject, it had been this very male story. And so I was intrigued by the idea of these two women. And I think I always tend to take with any story. This started as a story in the New Yorker and then became a book. And with any story that I do, I tend to take a pretty ground eye view. I'M looking for individual people that I can build a story around. Ideally, I'm not having to strain to connect those people. They're already connected in some fashion by the events in question. The thing about Northern Ireland is that it's a tiny place. Everyone knows everyone. And so from a narrative point of view, it's an ideal place to set a story because it's like a pinball machine. Everybody's constantly bumping off of everybody else. And I think when I had that intuition originally, it was for the purposes of this piece, which was quite a long piece that was published in the New Yorker in 2015. But this was one of those pieces where, as I was finishing, I felt as though there's so much more here. And I'm so pleased to hear you say that about the Troubles and the way you approached it, because my hope would be that the book would reach people who would never pick up a history of the Troubles, but that after reading it, they might pick up a history of the Troubles. And there's a huge literature, obviously, including many good books about different elements of the Troubles, a lot of them mentioned in the endnotes of my book. But I was very deliberately trying to write something that would be approachable to people who couldn't find Northern Ireland on a map. I wanted it to be something, a story that anybody could find some kind of emotional purchase in, not just people who have a more kind of scholarly inclination to learn the history.
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Gilbert Cruz
I read that you have credited a professor from Columbia that you studied with in teaching you how to write narrative nonfiction in a way that would be, as we say, very approachable, which I think is probably harder than anyone thinks it is. What do you remember him teaching you? Was it a set of precepts? Was it always think of the reader in mind when you're going out there and writing your paragraphs?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
So the professor was Simon Chama, the great historian Simon Chama, who I studied with at Columbia and worked for as a research assistant. And he became a really significant mentor for me when I was young and I think took me seriously as a writer at a point where I don't know that I took myself all that seriously. There was so much that I learned from him. I did this seminar on narrative history with him. And a lot of it was, listen, part of it was looking at his own career that he had written these books that were scholarly but also were designed to be for anyone. At the. At that time, when I was working for him, he was the art critic for the New Yorker. He was making These big documentaries for the BBC. He was a popular historian, and he didn't think of that as a pejorative. I think in his mind, the alternative was that you're writing for a kind of pretty small scholarly clique of people. And that was really by design, not what he was doing. More concretely, what he. I remember, I mean, writing papers for him, they weren't even really papers because they were these kind of narrative accounts of things. But he would say, tell me what it looked like. If you can tell me what it smelled like, what did it sound like? Paint a picture, put me there. And that's a challenge when you're writing about something you haven't experienced firsthand. I think it puts a real burden on you to dig deep in whatever the source material is and find those kinds of details. But it does mean that. I'll give you just one example, but there's a moment when I was doing my research for say Nothing, where I found this obscure documentary about the history of the car bomb and Marion Price, who stole her. Price's sister, who's a character in the book. She had given a brief little interview for this. It was the only time I'd ever seen her do an interview on camera. And she talked about how when they were mixing explosives, that the explosives smelled like marzipan. And that's the kind of thing that I think, honestly, coming out of that seminar when I was probably 20 years old with Simon Sciamma, that's the sort of detail when I hear the explosive smell like marzipan. It's like the hair stands up on the back of my neck. It's so exciting to me to have a detail like that, because I think that it immediately, for the reader, that immediately just brings you in there and you feel it, you experience it in a visceral way that if I just tell you about the chemical components of whatever explosives they were mixing, it's not going to be the same sort of.
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Gilbert Cruz
An appeal to the census. We had Robert Caron a few months ago for the 50th anniversary of the Power Broker, and I always think about him being able to describe the dirt in the Texas hill country because he went and lived there and probably touched it all the time and knew what it felt like under his feet and knew what it smelled like. Those are details that you can only summon if you've been there or if you're digging deep enough.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, I should say nobody has gone further in pursuit of this principle, probably than Robert Karo.
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Gilbert Cruz
But yes, yes, that's the extreme. God bless him. I think there's a lot of space in between that and what you've done. And it's still a grand success. Really funny, because I also heard you say when talking about this book that you think of yourself as someone who tries to write nonfiction, but is trying at times to borrow the tools of fiction. And I'm curious, as someone who has to read both fiction and nonfiction for this job, why is reads like a novel the supreme compliment when it comes to nonfiction? It feels like, why can't the one live on its own?
- [10:12]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I think sometimes these phrases are a little over determined. And it's always. Cinematic is another word that I sometimes bristle at a little bit because I'm a big believer in nonfiction. I'm a big reader of nonfiction. I think nonfiction canon should be what it is and not be a sort of aspiring to be something else. Having said that, the feeling that I have when I read certain novels, certainly not all novels, but good ones, even what my parents would refer to as like a first rate, second rate novel, is this wonderful feeling of undertow where you submit there's something about the force of the narrative, the coherence of the personalities, the characters that you're meeting. You feel as though you're in the hands of someone who's really giving a lot of thought to. When you deal out each card in the deck. There are sort of structural considerations in the storytelling that I think candidly, a lot of the time you don't get in nonfiction, even sometimes very good nonfiction. I will often have the frustrating feeling that somebody has done incredible research and then when it comes time to tell the story, they feel as though most of my work is done. Now what I need to do essentially is take this big compost heap of research that I've assembled over the last few years and just push it across the table at the reader in no particular order or in a kind of ham handed way where you. And you've experienced this, I'm sure, where you get a kind of gripping opening and then you finish chapter one and you get to chapter two and they say, and now we go back to the beginning and I'm gonna give you all of the boring exposition.
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Gilbert Cruz
Yeah, here's. Let's tell you about this person's grandparents.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Exactly. First we need to go back to the deep history of Korn. What I love is whether it's in a newspaper or in a magazine or in a book, nonfiction that feels just much more carefully constructed. Where for me, particularly with expositional stuff, the background Stuff if it can be folded in such a way that I don't even notice where there is no section, where it's kind of like now all the boring history that you need to know as a prerequisite to understand the story. My favorite nonfiction reading experiences are the ones where it's like you slip it into my pocket and I don't even know it. You gave it to me and I didn't even recognize you giving it to me. And then when I need that little piece of background information, it's come to me already. I think that's hard to do. And so I savor that as a reader and I aspire to do that sort of thing as a writer.
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Gilbert Cruz
I know exactly what you mean. We talk about nonfiction books all the time here at the Book Review and private conversations and big histories, big biographies. And you'll have all this amazing information, amazing archival research, new stuff you'd never heard before about this topic or this person. And it's a slog. It's workman, like is the word we use, which is. It is a terrible word, a cursed word. If you are the author of that book, you know, oh well, the prose is workman. Like. You participated in our Buy the book feature in 2022 and you talked about how you've learned about structure in part from screenplays, possibly. And I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit because I do think one of the tools that any writer, fiction or nonfiction can use is structure, is pacing, is, as you say, knowing when to enter a scene, when to exit a scene. Which is one of the sort of main things you learn, I think, in screenwriting.
- [13:39]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, it's funny again, that word cinematic gets thrown around and I don't love self consciously cinematic writing. In nonfiction, when there's a little too much emphasis in the scene work in the scene setting, you feel a little bit as if somebody's basically auditioning for a Hollywood option. I feel like let the piece of writing be what it is. The sense in which I have learned from screenplays, both from writing them, because for years I was a part time working screenwriter in Hollywood. Nothing got made. But there were a bunch of scripts that I wrote for studios and also in reading them. I love to read screenplays. And I think there's so much you can learn about structure and about juxtaposing scenes and just about distillation. If you think about any television show or movie that you watch, if there's a four minute scene, that's a long scene and a lot of the time you're actually getting in and out of a scene in 30 seconds, the speed with which you can convey information and a little bit of the flavor of the dialogue and the characters in just a few, you know, a B, A B. We're in, we're out. That's it. It's incredible what you can do in half a page of a screenplay. And I think. I increasingly think of my own writing as actually a process of subtraction. Strangely, it's like I'm accumulating all this research and then I'm just peeling away everything I can. What is the leanest version of this? And so with say Nothing, for instance, there were chapters in say Nothing that started out at twice the length. And I had to just go through and pretty ruthlessly think, how can I make this more lean?
- [15:20]
Gilbert Cruz
Your editors must love you.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
I should say what happens is I turn in something that I think of as so lean it is emaciated. And they say it could be leaner still.
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Gilbert Cruz
The eternal problem of the writer. You've said that part of what drew you to this story, the story that you present in say Nothing, was this idea that moral clarity, particularly of the young, can later, in older age, turn into moral confusion or regret. I'm curious why that theme in particular was one that resonated for you in this story.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
When I first read that obituary of Dolores Price, the thing that was so interesting to me was that she was someone who, in her early 20s, had gone to these incredible extremes in pursuit of a political idea deal. Doing things that you or I might not do, that we might find morally repulsive. But at the time, she really believed in as a means to an end. And then she got older and maybe it was like incipient middle age. For me, this is 10 years ago now that I. If my wife were here, she would say, you were already middle aged 10 years ago. But maybe it was my own experience of middle age. But I think I was just intrigued by the idea of a lot of these IRA people. They thought they would die as martyrs. They had a real fixation with Che Guevara. There's all this kind of Christ like imagery in the iconography of the ira. And to me there was this interesting question, which is, what happens if you're not martyred? What happens if you get older and you get out of prison and you put down the gun at a certain point, maybe you get married, maybe you have kids. How do you think about those decisions you made when you were in your early 20s and then connected with that was a separate idea, which is that we talk a lot these days in a way that I think is really good and overdue about trauma and about the kind of lasting trauma of various kinds of terrible encounters, violence, what have you. And generally speaking, we think about trauma for the victims, but I was very interested in the idea of trauma for the perpetrators, that the people who actually carry out violence often live with a distinctive kind of trauma of their own.
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Gilbert Cruz
And one of the reasons that Dolores and her sister Marian carried a certain sense of trauma years after they left the RA is because of the fact that they were imprisoned for a very long time. And despite the fact that they both did terrible things, they themselves suffered greatly in prison.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
They did. So they went on hunger strike in Brixton Prison, a men's prison in London. They had bombed London in 1973. These two young women who were just. Marion was still a teenager, Dolos was just out of her teens, and they were caught, they went to prison and went on hunger strike. And that was a real ordeal. And I was just interested when I started my research because I remembered Bobby Sands and the male hunger strikers who died in the early 80s. But they had eclipsed these two sisters who went on hunger strike in a way that was. It was front page news at the time in 1973. And it was interesting. These are these two young women who in some ways had been very committed to the idea of violence as a logical extension of radical politics. That you living in a system of oppression, the system doesn't seem to change. Peaceful protests won't do it. And so you take up arms against the state and they get into prison and they go on hunger strike. And there is a sense in which it's as if they're taking that same kind of tool of aggression and turning it on themselves.
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Gilbert Cruz
These women, as I said, as you write in your book, did terrible things. Why did you want to explore their trauma? These are people who did bad things. Who cares?
- [19:04]
Patrick Radden Keefe
This is a thing that I come across often in my writing and sometimes in reactions to my writing. I'm not particularly interested in stories of caricature, ish, good or evil. Not that those stories don't exist, but I just don't know that people who are unequivocally saints or sinners in an almost cartoonishly two dimensional way aren't particularly interesting to me as subjects to write about. I'm really interested in the humanity of people who do awful things and how it is that they came to do those things. There have been a couple of Cases over the years where I've had stories where there's somebody in it who's just a psychopath. And they're always the least interesting characters to me as characters. So in the case of the Price sisters, there is a way of thinking about them, thinking about people who are in the ira, thinking about people who use terrorism as a tool or kind of paramilitary violence as a tool, where you say, I have nothing in common with that person. I'm not interested in their motivations. That is an evil person. I don't want to know anything about it. But I think that's a kind of overly simplistic view of these types of people. I don't think it's going to really shed any light or help us understand the phenomenon. And I think, worse, there's a kind of moral vanity in looking at someone like that and saying, I could never find myself in a situation where I would do the things that they'd done. The more queasy, uncomfortable question is, how would I respond if I were putting in the situation that they were? So in Dolores Price's case, she grows up in this kind of an IRA family. Her mother and her father have both been to prison. Her aunt was also in the ira, not as a frontline soldier, but helping in an auxiliary way. And when she was a young woman, was moving some explosives and they detonated, blowing off her hands to the wrist and blinding her. And so little Dolores Price, age 9, has the job of her aunt. Brady was a chainsmoker. And sitting with her on Friday and putting these cigarettes between her lips so she can take a puff. Just imagine being nine years old and you live with this kind of living martyr to the cause of Irish independence. Think about how it might affect you psychologically, emotionally. Think about the roads that might take you on. All those questions are really interesting to me. And I think that there's a way of examining them that is curious and even compassionate, but that doesn't reserve judgment or kind of paper over the terrible things that somebody like Dolores did.
- [21:43]
Gilbert Cruz
We'll be right back.
- [22:00]
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- [22:28]
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- [22:58]
Gilbert Cruz
Welcome back. This is the Book Review podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz and I'm joined this week by Patrick Redden Keefe, author of the book say Nothing, which has just been turned into a nine part FX series. Patrick, one of the things that people who read this book, in my experience, always tell someone that they're recommending the book to is also he solves a murder in this book. That was not your intention when you started writing this book, but it has become something that is known about the book. What was that like in the moment? And then how does it feel to have this thing be there? It's essentially in the last chapter of the book, chapter 30, you introduce yourself, you say, I came across this information and holy cow, I think I solved the murder. I think I figured out the person who pulled the trigger on Gene McConville.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, it was a strange thing. I spent four years on this project, starting with the piece in the New Yorker and then culminating in the publication of the book. So my first trip to Northern Ireland was in 2014, was 10 years ago, crazy to consider. And I always knew that the event that precipitated this whole story for me was the abduction and murder of this woman, Jean McConville. But during the four years I was working on the book, I didn't think of it as a whodunit. I didn't think of that as being the story that I was telling. On some level, I had always assumed that the killer was like Anonymous IRA gunman number three. And I had been at pains. When I was writing the book, I had a rule which was essentially, you are focused on this handful of people and we are going to see this story through their perspective. And if there's some big important thing that happened in the Troubles that they didn't experience firsthand, you're not going to give it a lot of real estate. There is literature out there, people can consult it. So there are big moments in the Troubles like Bloody Sunday that get just a couple of sentences in the book because none of my central characters experienced it. And I figured whoever it was that killed Jean McConville wasn't one of my central characters. And so on some level, it just wasn't that important to me. And I had been working on the book for Four years. I had actually written the final chapter, and I was just going back over a transcript of an unpublished interview that I had that Dollish Price had given. I had already read it several times. And this is a real lesson to any other writers or researchers out there, is that the. I found this to be so true in my work that you read something once, and then if you're spending months or years on something, all of your kind of. Your ambient awareness of all these other factors is just slowly accumulating over time. And so it's often a really helpful exercise to go back and reread a source that you read six months or a year ago. And in this case, I reread something and it triggered a memory of something else that someone had told me, and suddenly I had figured it out. And the bizarre thing is that it turned out that the killer was somebody who was already a character in the book.
- [26:14]
Gilbert Cruz
We are not going to say who that person is. For those listeners who haven't read the book, and if you haven't, you should definitely go read the book. But you. It was a revelation, an unexpected revelation for you when you figured out who it was. Did that require you going back and reworking the book? You know, sort of amping up that person more in certain parts of the book or reframing it in a different way?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
The first thing, and I should say, just to be perfectly clear, it's obviously a huge thing to accuse somebody of a murder who's never been publicly accused of it. And this is one of the most notorious war crimes of the Troubles. When I initially made the discovery, I'd say I was 95% sure I was right. I then did a bunch of additional due diligence to just make sure that I was 100% sure. Because if I really had any doubt at all, I would not have published this person's name. This person is still alive. So that was the first thing. And then the second step was a great deal of lawyering, literally, in New York and London and Dublin and Belfast. All these different lawyers poring over this and thinking, can you do this in a book? Can you name somebody who's never been arrested, never been questioned by the police in a killing like this? And then there was this bizarre moment where I thought I should do exactly what you just described, which is I should go back to the manuscript and I should lay in some foreshadowing so that it'll be more satisfying on a literary level for the reader when they get to the end and they discover the truth. And it was the eeriest thing. But I went back to the book and the foreshadowing was already there.
- [27:51]
Gilbert Cruz
Really?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. So I hadn't known. Like, the clues were all right in front of me to a point where literally I had written them into the book, but I hadn't known until. So I actually didn't end up adding anything retroactively. But there was this kind of bizarre thing where there are a few lines in the book that in some ways, if I look at them now, feel like tells. Except when I wrote them, they were subtle enough that even I didn't pick up on them.
- [28:18]
Gilbert Cruz
Now, this person, as you say, is still alive. And as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, has not been held legally responsible in any way. There was no witnesses who are still alive. There's no evidence tying this person directly to the crime. Given that this was not your intention in writing the book. But it was a byproduct, and yet it happened. And that this person is still out there living their life and not being held responsible in some grander way. Is that an odd feeling to you?
- [28:47]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It is and it isn't. I think that the. I went to law school before I became a writer. I always wanted to be a writer, but I wasn't completely sure I'd be able to.
- [28:58]
Gilbert Cruz
Just hedging your bets.
- [28:59]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Get go of it. Yeah, exactly. And so I went to law school and never practiced. But I do think about the fact that the burden of proof for me as a writer is different than it is for a prosecutor or for a cop. And I think that's totally appropriate. They wield a power that I don't. And so there's a much, much higher threshold of proof that they would need to satisfy. I think of myself as, in fundamentally a kind of different business. I'm in the truth business. And if there is something that I know and I can prove and I feel really confident of, then I want to put it out into the world. And on some level, I don't give too much thought to what happens next. And I certainly don't think of that as a measure of the success or failure of what I've done. The analogy for me here would be the Sackler family, who aren't going to prison anytime soon. And it's unclear exactly what the nature of justice for them will look like. But almost certainly it will fall very short of what a lot of people think they should face. But I didn't think of my book as, like, a work of activism or a sort of prosecutorial work. It was more a situation where I felt as though there was a kind of a truth that was worth documenting and putting between two covers just as an artifact to put out there in the world. And then the world will make of it what it does. But I try not to get too. I'll put it to you this way. If I was always taking a kind of consequentialist view of the work that I do and thinking what kind of change did it produce in the real world, I think that would be quite demoralizing and I'd have trouble getting out of bed in the morning.
- [30:32]
Gilbert Cruz
I agree. And that clearly through your writing one can tell that's not the kind of journalism that you do. Just is curious. This is such a bizarre case. This is not. As I say, you didn't go into it with the intention of cracking the mystery for your true crime podcast. You actually were trying to do something else, which was to tell the story of these people well.
- [30:52]
Patrick Radden Keefe
And I wouldn't have thought if I didn't end up figuring out at the end, I wouldn't have thought. I think that for readers it is unquestionably true that the book has a kind of. There is a sort of literary satisfaction in the conclusiveness of the kind of the that last piece clicking into place in the last chapter. I've heard from enough people to know that's the case. But I wouldn't have felt like absent that piece, I wouldn't have felt that the book was a failure or that I had somehow failed to deliver. And I think it's often. Listen, it's the nature of life that often we're writing about mysterious stories that we're not able to conclusively solve.
- [31:26]
Gilbert Cruz
Let's turn to the adaptation here. You are an executive producer on the show, but of course you and I know that can mean anything, right? It can mean lots of things. It could mean you just get the paycheck or you're very hands on. Where did you fall in between those two poles?
- [31:42]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So I have had cases where I was an executive producer, but nobody was really asking me for much at all or particularly enthusiastic when I volunteered. Things that weren't asked for in this case, because the book is very close to me, because it's about real people, many of whom are still alive, because I had really labored to capture a specific tone in the book. I never shopped this to Hollywood or showed it around the town. There was only ever one pair of producers that I showed it to, Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, who I had known for years. They have a company called Color Force and they're very good with book adaptations.
- [32:27]
Gilbert Cruz
They're the ones behind American crime story. The O.J. simpson.
- [32:30]
Patrick Radden Keefe
They did the O.J. simpson people versus O.J. simpson, which I thought was a kind of exemplary instance of an adaptation. This was a book by Jeff Toobin adapted, I thought really well. It was about race in America. It was about an extremely sensitive, tricky issue. And I thought it was great. And in different ways it's funny because they do movies as well, from the Hunger Games to Crazy Rich Asians. And those are very different. But I think actually in both cases, those are films that really capture the DNA of the books that they're based on. Adapting books is hard. And so I showed it to them, they asked to read it. And when they came back and said, listen, we'd like to do this, their pitch to me was, you will be an active partner with us from beginning to end. It won't be a situation where you give us the rights and we come back with a TV show that we made. I was very. It's been a five year process and I was right in the sandbox the whole time.
- [33:26]
Gilbert Cruz
Is it true that you did some more reporting as a result of working on the show?
- [33:31]
Patrick Radden Keefe
A little bit? Not on really big significant plot points. It was more that. I think that authenticity was really important to all of us. And in some cases I was going back to sources and saying, what would this character have worn? What was Dolos Price's wardrobe like? Or asking questions of that degree of kind of specificity. And it was like production design questions.
- [33:58]
Gilbert Cruz
And where was this filmed?
- [34:00]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So we filmed. It was a long shoot, it was a nine month shoot and we filmed all over. We did film in Northern Ireland, in Belfast and around Belfast. We filmed in Liverpool and in Sheffield. It's interesting if you want to recreate Belfast in 1972, you can't really do it in Belfast today because it's been so modernized. But particularly in Liverpool, we found these long stretches of that kind of 19th century sort of brick, two up, two down workers housing of the sort that was very typical of the Lower Falls Road in Belfast. And then we built a big backlot on the outskirts of London, which was essentially our studio, where we recreated a big chunk of the Lower Falls Road and did a lot of shooting there as well.
- [34:43]
Gilbert Cruz
You published this book in 2018, correct?
- [34:47]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, late 2018 in Ireland and the UK, early 2019 here.
- [34:52]
Gilbert Cruz
So what was the reaction in Belfast then, which I imagine you've talked about and more to the point now, what is it like to go back there? Are you running into people who are like, oh, it's you again?
- [35:04]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why do you keep coming back? It was really weird, to be honest with you. I. I wasn't sure who would read the book when I was writing it. And during the years I was writing it, my elevator pitch. I could see people's eyes glazing over when I talked to them about what I was doing, that is people here in New York. And so I thought that the book wouldn't make a ripple here in the US And I thought that there would be feverish interest in Ireland and Northern Ireland and England. And I had it exactly wrong. It came out first over there. It was met with almost complete silence. Most of the major newspapers in the UK didn't even review it at the time. Which I think was probably a combination of the fact that the Troubles is still a very sensitive subject over there. There's probably a little bit of a Kohl's to Newcastle, like, who is this Yank to tell us about our own history thing going on. Legally speaking, I'm not sure that they knew how to handle the revelation at the end. It was just a kind of a hot potato. So it wasn't even reviewed over there. Initially here I had thought, in part because I grew up in an Irish American family in Boston, and I was aware of some of the kind of myths of Irish America about the Troubles in the ira. I thought that the book would feel too ambivalent, certainly to Irish Americans. And I was startled that right from the start it was widely reviewed here and people really read it. And I think it turned out that lots of people shared my ambivalence. And then what happened was I started going back to Northern Ireland and slowly people started to read the book. And it won some prizes, which I think actually, strangely enough, people were attentive. Not necessarily the average reader, but certainly in newspapers and places that might review it, pay attention to that kind of thing. And eventually I went back on a kind of book tour to Northern Ireland. I did an event, I did the Belfast Book Festival.
- [37:02]
Gilbert Cruz
When was this? What year this is?
- [37:04]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It's later, I think this is maybe even post pandemic. And I did an event at the Sheamus Heaney home place, which is in Balahi, which is Seamus Heaney's hometown. And it's for both events. And the thing that was interesting was it was all young people, people in their 20s and 30s. And when they came up afterwards they would say I was born after all of this. My parents went through it, but they never talk about it. And I've gotten that from people in England and people in the Republic of Ireland as well, that it remains this kind of awkward subject. But that the book, in a strange way, and I would argue actually maybe even particularly because it's written by an outsider, creates an opportunity for younger people to engage with this history in a way that their parents generation is just very unwilling to.
- [37:52]
Gilbert Cruz
Is this series. I don't know what the streaming rights are. Is this gonna be shown or available in Ireland? Northern Ireland it is.
- [37:59]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So it'll on fx, Made it. It'll air on Hulu here, but on Disney everywhere else.
- [38:05]
Gilbert Cruz
Got it. Do you expect to hear from anyone else after it goes up?
- [38:09]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I'm already hearing from people.
- [38:10]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay.
- [38:11]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I heard from people after the trailer dropped.
- [38:14]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah. What did they say?
- [38:16]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It's a fascinating mix of reactions. I guess the first thing that I should say is I think the show's good that I, in being as involved as I have been, I don't have the kind of plausible deniability that I would have if I were an executive producer in name. But I can tell you honestly that I've been nervous about it because it was really important to me that we get it right. And this series is much different than the show in a lot of ways. The series has to be. It's a dramatic series. It's a different thing than a nonfiction book, but I think it captures the DNA of the book. So people responded to the trailer? There have been some. It's mostly people in the press who've had the opportunity to watch it. And I think generally the reaction has been good. But listen, it is a very sensitive subject and it's a kind of an edgy story to be telling in 2024. The story about young people basically embracing political violence and then taking the long view of their lives and how they feel about that. The kind of cost and consequences of that decision over the decades. And that's a pretty raw subject.
- [39:20]
Gilbert Cruz
Do you think you've learned anything about storytelling in the process of taking this story from magazine article to book to nine part TV series?
- [39:32]
Patrick Radden Keefe
One thing that has definitely come across. Well, there's two things I would say. One is just on the level, the kind of experiential level of the author who becomes a producer on a television series? There's a great podcast in England, the Adam Buxton Podcast. And Adam Buxton did an interview at one point with Ian McEwan and Ian McKeown was telling very funny stories about his experiences in Hollywood. And he says, when you're a novelist, you control. Your domain is this tiny little patch of land, but you are the absolute ruler of that patch of land. And when you're working on a movie, you're like a minor lieutenant colonel in this vast army. So some of it, for me, was just learning to trust collaborators, right? Learning that you're not going to be the absolute authority on every single decision. You're a voice in the room, an important voice in the room, but not the only voice in the room in terms of storytelling. I try to write in a way that is as visceral and engaging as possible. I really want to feel as though I am pulling you into the story and holding onto you for dear life. Nobody's required to read, but I write. And so I want you to keep turning the pages, and I will hang onto you by hook or by crook. But the toolkit that you have when you make a series is so much more visceral, it's almost kind of thistle in its power. So whether it's the abduction of Jean McConville, which is the opening scene of the series, or any number of other moments in the book, these are things that I can make as vivid as possible in black and white on the page. And you're my partner in that because hopefully you're seeing it in your mind's eye. But to actually see an actress playing Jean McConville, this brilliant actress, Judith Roddy, to see the faces of her children as she's taken out, to hear the screams, it affects you, I think, almost physiologically in a different way, in a really profound way. And so I was there on the set when we filmed that scene, and everybody's standing around the monitors. And each time, filmmaking is grindingly repetitious. But each time we filmed it, you would look around the monitors, everybody was crying. You're feeling it in your guts and your solar plexus in a way that, at best, you can on the page. But it's just a very different, I think, and in some ways, more potent medium.
- [41:45]
Gilbert Cruz
Does it make you want to return to screenwriting, that thing you tried long ago when you weren't a staff writer?
- [41:51]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I don't know. I want to go back to my tiny little patch of land where I'm the absolute sovereign.
- [41:56]
Gilbert Cruz
Jerry Adams is a character in the book, as a character in the series. The series. Each episode ends with a title card. The title card reads, jerry Adams is always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in. In any IRA related violence. Have you ever heard from Jerry Adams?
- [42:16]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Never heard from him.
- [42:17]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah, but you have to put this in.
- [42:19]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, I think, listen, I wasn't party to that decision. That was the legal people at the studio. There is an absurdity to it in the sense that the only person who maintains with a straight face that Jerry Adams wasn't in the IRA today is Jerry Adams. That's a plot point in the book and it is in the series. You encounter it. And it's an interesting aspect of this story is the kind of quicksilver nature of Adams. And it's funny because as a magazine writer, I think about this, right, because occasionally you'll write a long piece about someone and they will essentially deny everything in the piece. And there's a funny way in which certain pieces that I've written, if it's a long piece about somebody, say, I'm writing about you. And I say, gilbert, X, Y and Z. And then parenthetical, a representative for Gilbert says, this is not true. And then we go and I tell them. But in this particular summer, Gilbert did this. And the other, a representative for Gilbert says, it's one of these things where the more you trot out that parenthetical denial, there's this kind of interesting sort of self disqualifying element to it where the more you deny these things that the reader fundamentally understands to be true, in a strange way, it actually erodes your credibility. So I think this is the trick with Adams, is that you end up with that disclaimer at the end of every episode, which we have to put there for legal reasons. But my sense is, for a certain kind of viewer, it's gonna function as like a bizarre punchline.
- [43:52]
Gilbert Cruz
That is a grim punchline.
- [43:54]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It is a very grim punchline. But I also think that we have to say, in fairness to Adams, that this is someone who, dishonest though he may be, about his own personal history when it comes to the Iraq, steered the IRA out of this conflict. You know, there was this grinding, bloody conflict that people thought would go on forever, that lasted for three decades. And this was the guy who took this armed group and cajoled them to the negotiating table and achieved this diplomatic miracle of the Good Friday Agreement. That's the peace agreement that ended the Troubles in 1998. And to me, it's kind of all part of the story. It's part of what makes this, in my mind so rich and fascinating is it wasn't despite these lies that Jerry Adams managed to emerge as this kind of historic figure, this peacemaker. I think the really uncomfortable thing to contemplate is it might be because of the lies that he did.
- [44:58]
Gilbert Cruz
Patrick Raden Keefe, author of say Nothing, which has just been turned into a series that is now airing on Hulu. Thank you very much for appearing on the Book Review podcast.
- [45:09]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Thank you so much for having me.
- [45:12]
Gilbert Cruz
That was my conversation with Patrick Radden Keith, author of say Nothing. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thank you for listening.