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| Nina Burleigh |
Nina Burleigh is the author of five books. Her most recent is The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox.
Q: Your books cover a wide range of topics. Is there one
particular region of the world or time period that has become your favorite to
write about?
A: If you’d asked me this a year ago, I probably would have
answered that the Middle East is my favorite region for great stories. Two of
my books are set there, one in Egypt and one in Israel, and I have had many
adventures there. But after spending about two months there last year, I might
have reached my quota of time in the region for the decade. I am extremely fond
of Italy and I could be quote happy stationed in Rome, but alas, no editor has
dispatched me there. I do like the desert, but there are other deserts
besides the Sahara and the Negev in which to roam. Last year I became quite
fond of Arizona, reporting a story on a troubled Iraq war veteran who was
sleeping on the streets of Phoenix.
As for era, I am still very intrigued by the people and
events in the early Cold War years, the generation that endured the creation
and first use of the atomic bomb. Am somewhat lazily seeking to find another
book project set in that period.
Q: What drew you to write about Amanda Knox, and how did you
do your research for that book?
A: The answer to that is partly sublime (by that I mean
serious) and partly ridiculous. I had been looking for a subject that
would allow me to explore what happens to girls, young women on the verge of
maturity. What are the perils, the challenges, how has the porn-ification of
culture affected their self-image and the ways in which they become sexual
beings?
When I heard about the Amanda Knox case, I joked with my agent, who is
an Italophile, that if she could get me a book contract, she could come live in
the villa while I reported and she translated. Well, she got me a book deal.
And we moved there as a family and I learned some Italian and I learned a lot
about the dark side of Italy, and the perils that lurk in wait for young
girls. It turned out to be a hard year and a hard subject, there was so
much that was occult about their society and their judicial system, and some
creepy things happened, my laptop was hacked, for example. But I am
extremely proud of that book. I think it’s my best.
Q: Your first book, A Very Private Woman, also dealt with a woman’s murder—that of
Mary Meyer, who was a Washington socialite and a mistress of John F. Kennedy.
Do you see any comparisons between the two stories?
A: Now that you mention it, there is at least one huge
similarity: a dead white woman, presumably murdered by a black male. And
that is unfortunate because I am most definitely not obsessed with that
particular sort of incident. Other than that, I suppose researching both
stories involved trying to get through the gates of some notoriously secretive
and well-guarded institutions, to wit, the CIA and the Georgetown social x-rays
in the first book, and the Italian judiciary and occult societies like the
Masons in the latest.
Q: You worked for Time magazine and People, and have written
for a variety of other publications. What do you think of all the changes
occurring these days in the news business?
A: I find it somewhat daunting that the industry in which I
have made a career is undergoing such profound change. I am adapting.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have had a weekly column at the New York Observer for
the last several months, which is great fun. I have been writing lot of
journalism for various magazines over the last year; my next story will be in
Town and Country, interviews with men and women recalling growing up as
children of the founders of the CIA in the 1950s. I am desultorily looking for
another book idea. I will know it when I see it. I’m also toying with the idea
of writing a little fiction again.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I have been doing a bit of motivational speaking. I like
it and hope to do more of it. We all need encouragement to live our lives
authentically and creatively.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Burleigh went to Italy with an agenda and imposed it on the facts. Native Italians say that her caricature of their history and their culture betrays a tourist-level understanding. She repeatedly leads readers up the garden path to very convincingly instill a completely wrong impression. The interview snippet above illustrates perectly how this works: Most people would read her answer to the question to mean that her interpreter was her agent Deborah Grosvenor. In fact her main interpreter was one of Amanda Knox's closest friends, Giulia Alagna. Nowhere is this disclosed in the book. The upshot of the book is that it's a mixed-up topsy-turvy patriarchal world in which institutions are to be mocked and Knox--who is described as an "eight-year old boy in a gorgeous body" ... "with boundary issues"--is to be celebrated as some sort of feminist triumph. Meanwhile a young woman is dead, her friends are grieving and the Kercher family has been nearly bankrupted trying to fight back against the Knox family's media-financed million-dollar defense. That story scarcely interests Burleigh. She breezily portrays it as all the fault of Italy, and of men "habituated by Internet porn." Give me a break.
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