The discomfort of profile-writing
My latest piece, and some thoughts on putting it together
Stuart Potts lives in a modest one-bed flat in Greater Manchester. Ever since he moved in, back in 2020, he’s set it up as a makeshift homeless shelter, letting an ever-changing cast of strangers sleep on his sofa and in the caravan he has parked outside. By any measure, this is an unusual thing to do, but Stuart sees it as logical: if you can help, you should. He is always trying to help. A few years back, homeless himself, he squatted in abandoned buildings and set those up as de facto homeless shelters too. For my latest piece for the Guardian Long Read, which came out last week, I profiled Stuart and the extraordinary work he does.
A large part of what made Stuart’s story so compelling to me was Stuart himself. He is doing something worthwhile - letting strangers stay in his house for free and for as long as they need to - that tells us something about the dire state of housing provision in this country. But he’s also funny, straight-talking and slightly off-the-wall. In writing it, I wanted to convey, on a basic level, why he is so interesting to spend time with, so that the reader wants to spend time with him too. Describing what someone looks and sounds like, the kind of stories they tell, can be a lot of fun, especially if someone is as lively as Stuart. (There were reams of our conversations that I regretfully couldn’t include, like a long story about falsifying a drugs test by putting apple juice in a condom.)
I’ve been thinking about what elevates a straightforward interview piece into a profile. The key thing, I think, is not just time spent with the subject, but an effort to understand and explain what makes someone tick. Discussing the art of the profile a few years ago, New Yorker editor David Remnick talked about the importance of narrative and character, adding that a good profile “may even resemble a short story except that it's all factual”. This might mean offering some analysis, a sense of someone’s motivation and the way they move through the world, their way of being. When I was working on this story, my editor David Wolf sent me some examples of writers doing this well. Here’s one of them - Patrick Radden Keefe writing about Anthony Bourdain in the New Yorker back in 2017:
Bourdain, who is sixty, is imposingly tall—six feet four—and impossibly lean, with a monumental head, a caramel tan, and carefully groomed gray hair. He once described his body as “gristly, tendony,” as if it were an inferior cut of beef, and a recent devotion to Brazilian jujitsu has left his limbs and his torso laced with ropy muscles. With his Sex Pistols T-shirt and his sensualist credo, there is something of the aging rocker about him. But if you spend any time with Bourdain you realize that he is controlled to the point of neurosis: clean, organized, disciplined, courteous, systematic. He is Apollo in drag as Dionysus.
Regular readers of this newsletter will know I am huge fan of Radden Keefe and I was interested in his thoughts on profile-writing. I found this interview with him from a couple of years ago in which he talked about writing the Bourdain profile, and the discomfort inherent in the process:
It’s awkward. I remember having a conversation with Anthony Bourdain about this. I spent a year working on the profile, and I said something to him about how if any of us were shown a very close-up photo of our own faces in a harsh light — I don’t mean designed to be unflattering, I just mean in a way that wasn’t airbrushed or tweaked — that would make most of us uncomfortable. In a strange way, if a portrait that I’m writing about somebody doesn’t induce a little bit of discomfort in them, I would almost feel that I hadn’t done my job. It would be weird for me to have somebody come back and say: “Thank God, finally, somebody’s captured my true essence as I see myself in the mirror.” I’m not the ventriloquist for the person I’m writing about. There’s always that little bit of dissonance there.
I recognise this; when you have spent significant time with someone and built a relationship, it can feel strange - intensely personal - writing a description of their physical appearance or the way they talk. It’s hard not to imagine them reading it and hating it. You have a responsibility to the reader, to be as honest and accurate as possible and to make the story as engaging as you can. But you also have a responsibility to the person you’re writing about, to represent them fairly. (I always want someone to recognise themselves in what I write about them, even if they don’t always like every element).
In Stuart’s case, the thing that I kept coming back to was that he couldn’t really explain why he does this extraordinarily generous thing. He is someone who has a lot to say about the cruelty of the welfare system, Britain’s crumbling social safety net, and financial inequality, often talking in an astonished tone as if he can’t believe the absurdity of it all. But every time I asked why he does what he does, he clammed up. This is how I ended up describing it in the story:
Potts is bombastic and funny, full of righteous outrage and profane humour. But when I asked what made him approach Bolton – a stranger to him, someone with a serious drug addiction – and offer to take him in, he was uncharacteristically lost for words. “I’ve always done stuff like that,” he said, then tailed off. “Love of people I guess.” He can’t explain why he did it, and can’t understand why other people find it strange.
You can read the rest over at the Guardian website - I am really proud of this one and I hope you like it.
Reading/listening
I finally had time to read this remarkable New Yorker story about life in Al-Hol camp, the detention camp in Syria where 50,000 people from former ISIS territory are imprisoned indefinitely. We usually hear about this camp in relation to foreign ISIS recruits whose western countries don’t want them back, but this explores the less-discussed fact that people who were victimised by ISIS are also trapped in this forever prison. It’s an incredibly vivid and nuanced portrait of a dire situation.
Loved this Guardian Long Read essay about how the idea of trees communicating with eachother may have accelerated into the popular consciousness quicker than the science justifies. I was especially interested as I wrote a (very different) piece about trees last year, which - among other things - explored why people feel so passionately about them.
It’s a couple of months old, but I enjoyed this New York magazine piece about the podcaster/influencer/academic Andrew Huberman and how he maintained multiple relationships with different women for years.
My recent work
I had a couple of other pieces out last week too, making me appear much more prolific than I actually am. Here they are:
For Hyphen, an online magazine, I wrote about the myth of Muslim “no-go zones”, something which resurfaced this week in the reaction to the mayoral elections in the UK.
Ten years ago, a group of young single mums facing eviction occupied a tower block in East London to protest the housing crisis. I caught up with them to talk about what’s happened since, for the Guardian.
Thank you so much for reading! As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post (or any others) - you can do that in the comments or by replying to this email. And please do share - post on social media, forward to a friend - if you think others might find it interesting. Thanks so much, and I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.