What it's like to kill someone

The sorrow and shame of the accidental killer

In this week's New Yorker, reporter Alice Gregory asks a tough question: What's it like to accidentally kill another human being? The answers she found are remarkable and the story she produced is well worth your time. But we also asked Gregory to tell us about how the piece came together. Here's what she told us.

How did this story come about? Was it your idea or an editor's? How long did it take to report, write, sell and edit the piece?

Last winter I got an [Associated Press] alert on my phone about an update in the legal case of a man who had left his baby in the backseat of a car, and I just sort of casually wondered if there were support groups for people in similar situations. I googled around and was really shocked to see there was nothing out there with the exception of [one] website. That was that. I reported and researched the piece for about two months this spring and then my editor, Carla Blumenkranz, and I fiddled with it throughout the summer. There was definitely something appealing to me, last spring in particular, about working on a story that was serious and important but not overtly political.

What was the hardest thing about reporting, writing and editing the piece? How did you deal with it?

The interviews were emotionally draining to conduct—unsurprisingly—but I think the aspect of the work I struggled with most was more on the technical side. I had never written a straightforwardly sad story before and hadn’t ever really thought about what sorts of writing were and were not appropriate when you’re telling something so awful. There’s not a lot of room for humor, obviously, but also just description and detail begin to look unseemly. It required a lot more restraint than I’m used to.

The story references an "exhaustive" search for resources for people who have accidentally killed others. It's always tough to prove a negative. What made you confident you had?

Yeah, proving this negative was one of the trickiest parts of the piece, and the fact checker was really smart about softening the language in places to allow for the inevitable possibility that of course there is some person out there with a private Facebook group or something dealing with this. But I spoke to dozens of people, contacted lots of organizations, and really nothing came up. At the very, very least I’m 100% confident that what’s out there is absolutely paltry and far too hard to find if you’re a person looking for help in the wake of causing an accidental death. Early on I decided I wasn’t going to talk about soldiers or doctors, because though obviously both deal with a lot of unintentional death they assume a certain amount of a risk that I think distinguishes them from ordinary citizens. But even the doctors I spoke with all said that their ethics classes in medical school didn’t address this issue. It’s really just ignored all around.

What did you find that most surprised you?

It wasn’t until I began to look into the literary history and legal precedents of the issue that I realized just what a modern phenomenon it is in lots of ways. Until guns and cars it was really hard—physically, I mean—to accidentally kill another person. Maybe you leave a pot boiling over an open fire and your neighbor’s thatched hut burns down, but other than that you’re really left with freak accidents so novel and hypothetical they almost seem absurd. In lots of ways this is a technology-enabled kind of tragedy. I spoke with a historian who made a quite profound point that up until the 18th century, chance events were usually interpreted as providential, and fault was outsourced to fate. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that the world became so well equipped with agents of death: revolvers and steam engines and brutally mechanized factories. As fatal accidents increased, so did our willingness to think of them as such.

Did you learn any lessons from this story that could be useful to other writers and reporters?

I think mostly it’s just to take seriously your most intrusive thoughts and consider the possibility that they're worth writing about. I thought about accidentally killing someone constantly for years—still do—and I’m not sure why. I was half-hoping that writing the piece would exorcize the preoccupution my mind but it hasn’t worked yet. If anything it’s the opposite. You should see me cross the street now—I look both ways four or five times, and it really doesn’t feel like a self-protective instinct so much as it does good citizenship.

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