Laura Hillenbrand

It may be tempting to think of Hillenbrand as someone who has triumphed in spite of her illness. The truth is at once more complicated and more interesting. Many of the qualities that make Hillenbrand’s writing distinctive are a direct consequence of her physical limitations. Every writer works differently, but Hillenbrand works more differently than any writer I know of. She has been forced by the illness to develop convoluted workarounds for some of the most basic research tasks, yet her workarounds, in all their strange complexity, deliver many of her greatest advantages. When I asked, for example, how she reads old newspapers on microfilm without traveling to a library, I was stunned to discover that she doesn’t. “I can’t look at microfiche,” she said. “I couldn’t do that even in my good vertigo years.”

Instead, Hillenbrand buys vintage newspapers on eBay and reads them in her living room, as if browsing the morning paper. The first time she tried this, she bought a copy of The New York Times from the week of Aug. 16, 1936. That was the day Seabiscuit’s team — his owner, Charles Howard; his trainer, Tom Smith; and his jockey, Red Pollard — first collaborated at the Detroit Fair Grounds. Hillenbrand told me that when the newspaper arrived, she found herself engrossed in the trivia of the period — the classified ads, the gossip page, the size and tone of headlines. Because she was not hunched over a microfilm viewer in the shimmering fluorescent basement of a research library, she was free to let her eye linger on obscure details.

“There was so much to find,” she said of her reading. “The number-one book was ‘Gone With the Wind,’ the Hindenburg flew over Manhattan with a swastika on it and Roosevelt made a speech saying America would never become involved in foreign wars.” Soon she bought another newspaper, and then another. “I wanted to start to feel like I was living in the ’30s,” she said. That elemental sense of daily life seeps into the book in ways too subtle and myriad to count.
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‘He became a 17-year-old runner for me, or a 26-year-old bombardier. I wasn’t looking at an old man.’

It was in those vintage newspapers that Hillenbrand discovered her next book. “I happened to turn over a clipping about Seabiscuit,” she said. “On the other side of that page, directly the opposite side of the page, was an article on Louie Zamperini, this running phenom.” Hillenbrand had no idea what became of Zamperini in the years to come, as the war broke out and young men gathered on Hamilton Field near San Francisco to fly B-24 bombers across the Pacific, but something about the young runner caught her attention. Maybe it was the mischievous look in his eye or the way he tipped forward when he ran, as if falling toward the finish line. Maybe it was the way, as she would later write, “his ears leaned sidelong off his head like holstered pistols, and above them waved a calamity of black hair.” Whatever it was, Hillenbrand jotted Zamperini’s name in her research notebook on Seabiscuit and promised herself, “I’ve got to find this guy when I’m done.”
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Hillenbrand tracked Zamperini down in 2003. He had just published a memoir, but the more she learned about his story, the more eager she was to tell it. She had always been fascinated by her father’s experience in World War II — dug into foxholes deep in the forest and shelled by mortars through the night, while the trees shattered overhead and his fellow soldiers descended into madness. He remembered opening a can of rations just as the world went black, then awaking in the snow with his hand shredded and blood all around. He was trying to reach a medic when another mortar lofted overhead, and he dove into a ditch for safety, feeling another man jump in after him and the unforgettable vibration of the man’s body exploding as the mortar detonated on his back. Bernard Hillenbrand returned from Europe with a rebuilt hand and scars across his shoulder, but he was never able to discuss the emotional impact of the war, or the year and a half he spent in the hospital coming to terms with his wounds. In Zamperini, Hillenbrand found another way to access her father. “I’d always wanted to understand how hard it must have been for my father, because he doesn’t talk about the emotional consequences,” she said. “Louie was good at really capturing in words exactly what something felt like. I think that was probably, in an unconscious way for me, a way of understanding my own dad.”

Zamperini was happy to cooperate with Hillenbrand, but he was 86 and living in California. Once again, Hillenbrand’s illness posed a reporting conundrum. Neither she nor Zamperini could easily fly to meet each other. Over the next seven years, as she researched and wrote “Unbroken,” they would speak by phone hundreds of times but never meet in person.

This would seem to almost any reporter a terrible handicap. One hallmark of literary nonfiction is its emphasis on personal observation. But Hillenbrand found that telephone interviews do offer certain advantages. No one appreciates this perspective more than the radio host Terry Gross, who performs nearly every interview on her program, “Fresh Air,” by remote. Gross told me that she began this habit, as Hillenbrand did, by necessity: The cost of bringing a guest to her studio in Philadelphia was simply too high. Over time, she said, she has come to believe that there is intimacy in distance.

“I find it to be oddly distracting when the person is sitting across from me,” she said with a laugh. “It’s much easier to ask somebody a challenging question, or a difficult question, if you’re not looking the person in the eye.” Gross also said the remote interview makes it easier to steer the conversation. “I can look at my notes without fear that the interviewee will assume that I’m not paying attention to what they’re saying,” she said. Finally, the distance eliminates nonverbal cues, which can interfere with good quotes. “A hand gesture might be helpful to communicate something to me. It communicates nothing to my listeners.”

By Wil S. Hylton

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