Patrick Radden Keefe

Patrick Radden Keefe's new book is Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

From his Q&A with Entertainment Weekly's David Canfield:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I’m curious about how this project evolved. What story did you set out to tell here?

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: In my day job at The New Yorker, I write this big, sprawling, often investigative narrative pieces. I only do three or four of them a year. This book started as a piece of the magazine. I read an obituary in The New York Times in 2013, of Dolours Price. What initially drew me in was the outsize drama of the life of this woman. Then, in that obituary, it mentioned that she had implicated herself in the disappearance of this woman, Jean McConville, in 1972. That was the seed for this story — the idea you could tell this story of these two women, one of them an IRA soldier, and the other a victim, and through their intertwining stories tell a larger story about the Troubles.

You’re coming at this mystery as a total outsider. Was that a benefit in your reporting?

At the beginning, I thought it would be a disadvantage, just because the history is so complex there and I felt that there was a very steep learning curve for me in terms of grasping some of the politics and almost tribal dynamics of...[read on]

Visit Patrick Radden Keefe's website.

The Page 69 Test: Chatter.

Writers Read: Patrick Radden Keefe (June 2007).

--Marshal Zeringue