Larissa MacFarquhar interview: ‘People think I’m a total freak for not using the first person’

Very, very virtuous people are easy to dislike. These aren’t the kind of people who are simply nice to their friends and family, and generous to strangers, and donate to charity, and maybe do some volunteering at the weekend. These are people for whom the decision to buy a toffee apple, rather than giving that money to charity, is a source of anxiety. To people like this, human suffering is not a background hum they notice when something draws their attention to it; it is a piercing alarm that calls them to duty. How each responds to that call will differ. One might quit her job, move to a country in the middle of a violent revolution, and found a women’s clinic. Another might decide that he should adopt troubled children, and end up adopting 20. Another might pursue a lucrative career in order to have more money to donate to charity – if not 100% of her income, then 85%. In each case, these people subordinate everyday desires to the more important business of making the world a better place.

Philosophers sometimes refer to these people as “moral saints”. They are a troubling group, since their devotion to ethical perfection is so extreme that it calls into question whether morality deserves its place as the highest good to which all lives should be directed. In theory, a person who bases his every decision on whether it will do the most good for the world will end up leading a narrow life, devoid of many of the things that are usually thought to make life meaningful, such as close relationships with friends and family. After all, going to the cinema with your kids might be fun, but it won’t do as much good as donating the price of the tickets to a charity that could prevent hundreds of children from getting polio. Even visiting a friend recovering from surgery in hospital may not clear the high bar that the moral saint sets for himself. Is comforting a friend really a better use of time, objectively speaking, than saving lives?

The New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar calls such people “do-gooders”, a phrase that hints at our ambivalence about them. But her new book, Strangers Drowning: Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity, is an attempt to challenge our suspicion of the virtuous by studying the lives of real do-gooders, rather than the thinly sketched slaves to virtue who tend to appear in philosophical thought experiments. There is Aaron Pitkin, an American who has decided that the most effective way to reduce global suffering is by lobbying on behalf of chickens; there’s the Japanese Buddhist priest Ittetsu Nemoto, who counsels the suicidal; and there is Baba Amte, who set up ashrams and hospitals in India for people with leprosy. Alongside profiles of these individuals, MacFarquhar strolls through the history of attitudes to do-gooding, moving lightly from the 18th century to the era of Sigmund Freud, when altruistic acts were commonly thought to conceal selfish motivations, to the present day, when biologists and evolutionary psychologists have defended the idea that altruism can spring from genuine empathy.

MacFarquhar admits that she cherrypicked her subjects. “I’m sure there are do-gooders out there who would make a very convincing case for the idea that do-gooders are inhuman and unappealing,” she says, over coffee in Brooklyn earlier this autumn. “But I didn’t want to write about those people. I eliminated people whose beliefs were insane or obviously silly.  

That MacFarquhar should approach extreme altruism through a series of profiles is no surprise. Over the last two decades at the New Yorker, she has written about people as varied as Quentin Tarantino, Diane von Furstenberg and Paul Krugman. In doing so, she has quietly expanded the possibilities of the magazine profile; quietly, because she has no website, does not tweet, and, until now, has published no books.

MacFarquhar was born in London to the China scholar and former Labour MP Roderick MacFarquhar and Emily MacFarquhar, a former East Asia editor for the Economist. When she was 16, the family moved to the US. (She still retains her English accent, although she says that it shifts depending on whether she’s speaking to an American or a Brit.) In her early 20s she worked as an editor at Lingua Franca, a monthly magazine that covered quarrels and controversies in academia. After a couple of years studying American literature at graduate school, she became a New Yorker staff writer in 1998.

Her early New Yorker pieces were filled with elaborate descriptive set pieces that seemed to delight in their own virtuosity. A profile of the fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer began with a 150-word description of her feet. A profile of the judge Richard Posner described him as having “the distant, omniscient, ectoplasmic air of the butler in a haunted house”. A profile of the literary critic Harold Bloom featured such a detailed account of his physical presence that one felt a little dirty after having read it. It included the phrases “swollen sensing instruments”, “heroic nose”, “congested eyebrows”, “like a giant mother” and “overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive”.

One of MacFarquhar’s favourite writers is the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, whose early work was similarly baroque. “I really feel like in America there is a prejudice against overly decorated writing,” she says. “What I find frustrating is sentences that just get from A to B in the shortest possible route. Some people think that’s the mark of good writing – take out every word that you can possibly take out like you would take off all the jewellery and just wear black. I don’t think that’s the most exciting way to write.”

Over time, MacFarquhar developed a style that relied heavily on free indirect speech, a device common to novels but rare in non-fiction, where a character’s voice momentarily creeps into the narration unannounced. In these profiles, the writing took on something of the character of the person being profiled. When the subject was quiet, sensible, measured – such as Michael Frayn – the prose was quiet, sensible, measured. When the subject was hyperactive, attention-seeking, given to overstatement – like the “enfant terrible of English lit”, Stanley Fish – so, too, was the prose.

Once she had explored this mode, MacFarquhar took the next step: inside her characters’ minds. In these later pieces, the writing was so saturated in free indirect speech, so infused with her character’s thoughts, that it became difficult to tell whether the voice narrating belonged to MacFarquhar or the person being profiled. Her first extended trip into her subject’s consciousness came in 2005, with a profile of the American poet John Ashbery. It began with a bravura description of what is essentially indescribable: how a poet, confronted with a blank page, actually comes up with a poem. The opening scene takes place in the present tense, in real time, as Ashbery struggles for inspiration. (“It isn’t words that he has in his mind but a shape, a hazy sense of the physical thing, the page or stack of pages that his poem will become.”)

MacFarquhar attributes her restlessness with form to getting “productively bored”: “For a profile, I do try to make the piece sound and feel as though it were written by the person themselves, rather than by me. What I’m trying to get at is a sense of intimacy, a sense that you are, insofar as is possible, inside the mind of the person, so that you understand why they’re in love with the ideas they fell in love with, what moves them, what drives them.”

These principles guide most of her stylistic decisions. Anything that diminishes the immediacy of the reader’s access to her subject is thrown out. “People think I’m a total freak for not using the first person,” she says. “The way I think about it is that if you’re making a conventional feature film, all it takes is for the director to walk across the camera just once and you have a completely different relationship to the whole story. For that reason, even though it sometimes means sacrificing great scenes, I take myself out.”

In Strangers Drowning, she developed new ways of closing the gap between her writing and the interiority of her characters. “I took out all the physical descriptions because if you’re looking at someone’s physical appearance, you’re on the outside. Similarly quotations, which seem as though they should be the most intimate form, because they come directly from the person’s mouth. Again, in fact, the only way you hear someone speaking is if you’re outside them. So if you translate quotation into interior thought, which simply means taking away the quotation marks and saying ‘he thought’ rather than ‘he said’ – that’s a more intimate way of encountering someone.”

This approach is particularly helpful when it comes to characters who might initially seem odd or unappealing. Near the end of Strangers Drowning, MacFarquhar notes that when people heard she was writing about do-gooders, many said, “But aren’t they mentally ill?” By placing her readers inside the minds of her characters, MacFarquhar undermines the notion that do-gooders are unfathomably strange. For this same reason, the final profile in book focuses on a woman named Stephanie Wykstra, who has spent her life searching for moral clarity. After rejecting Christianity as a child, Stephanie turns to academic philosophy. When she becomes disillusioned with it, she turns to unlimited altruism. Eventually, though, she falls out of love with that. (“She disliked feeling that she was obliged to focus only on the most effective ways to do good – that more personal but less efficient ways … were not a good use of time.”) At the end, she is left wondering whether she needs the firm moral foundations she has always relied on. MacFarquhar says: “I hoped that someone reading the book would have experienced enough uncertainty and bewilderment in the course of reading these lives that that would reflect something of what they were feeling.”

Lurking behind MacFarquhar’s desire for intimacy with her subjects is also a kind of “fiction envy”, she says. “It’s not envy of writing fiction – it’s the intimacy and knowledge that a fiction writer has of his character that I envy.” Strangers Drowning grapples with fiction in another way, too. One of its most interesting chapters puzzles over why novelists rarely choose to depict virtuous characters, and why, when they do, such characters are usually the object of satire. “Part of my hope for this book is as an advertisement for fiction writers, saying, ‘You should be interested in this kind of character! Why don’t you write about them?’ I had a conversation with a novelist when I was starting out, and I asked, ‘Why do you think that novelists don’t write about this kind of person?’ He got this look on his face like I’d asked him, ‘Why don’t novelists write about bunnies and butterflies?’ Total disgust, like, ‘If you don’t know this, I can’t really have this conversation.’”

Next year, when MacFarquhar teaches a course at Stanford University on the art of non-fiction, one of her aims will be to alert would-be writers that fiction is not their only option. “It’s my sense that with writing students at universities, most think [their only option is] fiction. So I wanted to place before them the idea that it’s a choice,” she says. “Non-fiction is so exciting! The world, reality, is so exciting!”

To order Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar for £14 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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