AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT
Patrick Radden Keefe Philip Montgomery
epidemic but a multigenerational saga about the rise and fall of one family, tracing the roots of the Sackler dynasty from the early days in Depressionera Brooklyn to the bitter legal endgame of recent years. It’s a book about the dark secrets behind a great American fortune, about philanthropy and greed and the profound mark that this family left on our world. Empire of Pain is in many ways a very different book from your last one, Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Was there anything similar about the process of reporting and writing them, though? On the surface, the books seem very different, but there are thematic similarities: Both books are interested in secrets and denial and the deceptive stories that people tell themselves and others in an effort to justify their own actions. And my process tends to be the same from project to project: intensive archival work and interviews, then a lot of effort to take all that research and distill it into a literary narrative that, if I’m doing it right, has real depth and momentum.
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of three books, including Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in North ern Ireland, which was a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize and the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest book is Empire of Pain: The Se cret History of the Sackler Dynasty (Doubleday, April 13), which our reviewer called a “definitive, damning, urgent tale of overweening avarice at tremendous cost to society.” Keefe answered some questions by email. A lot of excellent books have been written about the opioid epidemic. Why did you want to write about the Sackler family? It was through some of those terrific books that I first learned about the role the family played in the opioid crisis. But I wanted to write a different sort of story—not a full spectrum account of the opioid 54
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15 november 2021
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nonfiction
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What was it like having a book come out in 2021? How did you connect with readers in this socially distanced year? It was very strange! I had released a podcast at the outset of the pandemic, so I had some experience with the weird world of promoting something via Zoom. But after a couple of years working mostly in solitude on the book, sitting at my desk, staring at my computer, it was surreal to find that the “book tour” would entail…sitting at my desk, staring at my computer. Like winning a pie-eating contest in which the grand prize is more pie. But I was grateful for the opportunity to connect with readers, even remotely, and hugely encouraged by the warm reception to the book. Who is the ideal reader for this book, and what do you hope they take away from it? One thing I remind myself of a lot when I’m writing is that I’m not writing for specialists. I’m not
kirkus.com
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