Daniel Bergner and George Packer in Conversation

GP: Journalists write magazine profiles all the time, then move on to the next one. What made you stay with the story of Ryan Speedo Green for years after your original piece was published in the New York Times Magazine?

DB: I've never been good at moving on. And Ryan--and his story--wouldn't let me. He's a radiant human being, yet as a kid, he was driven in leg shackles to Virginia's juvenile facility of last resort; he was locked in seclusion cells. How did he get from there to here, starring on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera? No magazine piece can answer such a profound question. And no magazine piece can go deeply enough into the complex questions about race that Ryan's story raises. This had to be a book.

GP: To write this book, you had to win the trust not just of Green but of the other members of his fractured family. How does a stranger, an outsider, do that without getting into the middle of relationships that could have blown up the project?

DB: There's something essential here that you and I share: an almost limitless desire to understand experience outside our own. Please forgive the possible hyperbole, but listening can be a spiritual act. People respond to this. But then, as you rightly point out, there's a book to be written, and there are always worries that the talking will break down before I've gathered the most important details and understood the deepest layers of the story. For me--and now this is getting pretty personal--faith is involved: a prayer, without a certain answer, that what I'm doing has a little bit of value beyond my own needs as a writer; a belief that things will work out if they're meant to.

GP: You wrote 'Sing for Your Life' from very close to the point of view of your protagonist. Why did you choose that method? What are its difficulties and benefits?

DB: The proposal I sent around to publishers a few years back included a fair amount of me, but the more I learned of Ryan's story, the more I wanted the reader to be swept away by it the same way I was. I wanted immediacy--his experience, his emotions, his thinking on the page. He's almost like someone out of Ellison or Dickens. Occasionally I do speak directly on the page, but mostly I just hoped to make the paragraphs as compelling and beautiful as I could and otherwise stay out of the way. I've received an email or two from readers who are fans of the book but who nevertheless wished for more of my explicit opinions, particularly about race. Opinions can take us only so far. Stories, I think, can lead us toward more resonant connections and truths.

GP: There's an air of real authority and knowledge about opera and music generally in your book. Were you already literate in the subject, or did you research it, and if so, how?

DB: I had the benefit of a three-year personalized seminar with Ryan's teachers--a renowned baritone, a pianist who's performed at the White House, an accompanist who's recorded with the greatest singers in the world. They were patient with me, and I was spectacularly lucky to be learning from them about the voice, about creating gorgeous sound out of the amphitheater of bones and tissue inside our heads, about the way music can penetrate us so powerfully.

GP: We live at a time when writers and artists are hyper-conscious of matters of identity. I don't know if anyone has accused you--a white writer--of 'appropriating' the life story of a black opera singer, but I can imagine someone might. What would be your answer? If Green had been white, would your thinking about the book have changed dramatically? Would you have even wanted to write it?

DB: Let's start with the easy answer. If Ryan had been white I would have written his story as a magazine piece and then let it go. I would not have written the book. Back when I was applying to college--it pains me to say how long ago that was, forty years--I wrote my personal essay about an interracial friendship that I, in the end, betrayed. I've been writing about race ever since. About the issue of 'appropriation', I can only say that I worried about it--asking myself often whether a black writer would tell Ryan's story differently-- but that I was never stopped by it. Writing literary nonfiction is an act of empathy, of acknowledging unbridgeable distances and yet trying to bridge them. Maybe we should all be doing more of that, not less.

GP: I think 'Sing for Your Life' is the crown of the Bergner corpus--and there's stiff competition from your other books. How do you feel about it? Did writing it change you as a writer and person? How does it fit with your other work, past and future?

DB: That is awfully good to hear from the likes of George Packer. I'm not sure how to rank my own books in my heart. But I know this book changed me, made me more hopeful about what we're capable of as human beings and shifted my perspective about race and identity and civil rights history. Floating behind the pages of the book is a lot of reading about that history. Ryan's story gave me a deeper appreciation of King's expansive message in the year or two before he was killed, of his emphasis on racial transcendence over racial identity, of the campaign he waged in the face of harsh, humiliating criticism from other black leaders. Ryan's story challenges preconceived boundaries of racial identity. His voice carries us to an unsettling, unbounded, unmapped place.