It was really helpful to read these four incredible long form pieces and see what they shared (and didn’t) in structure. The first three pieces that I read, “The Mother Who Changed: A Story of Dementia” by Katie Engelhart, “Anger and heartbreak on Bus No. 15” by Eli Saslow, and “When can we really rest” by Nadja Drost, to my eye, were all structured similarly despite the very different stories they were telling. Each started with a vivid scene and used its characters to illustrate the story of a larger issue, weaving back and forth between the story and historical and, at times almost scholarly, context.

I found “The Mother Who Changed” particularly interesting structurally. Englehart didn’t just weave between the story of her characters and the broader context, but had to tell almost two versions of the story as told by Diane’s daughters and by Denzil – the very basis of the piece was in the “then-self” v.s. the “now-self” of dementia, and in the ways that the people in dementia patients’ lives understand them differently.

Engelhart’s two sets of sources had diametrically opposed understandings of what had happened in the battle over Diane’s care, and yet Englehart managed to present them both respectfully without seeming to choose a side – this is the power and importance of the third party observer. Englehart would switch every few paragraphs from telling the story through the eyes of Diane’s daughters and from those of Denzil, consistently showing two different versions of the same moments.

When Englehart did throw in her own voice, however, was in the large sections of the piece that went through the history of the frameworks for assessing capacity. These sections felt almost more like academic writing – she would write for many paragraphs using scholarly sources and quotes from academics, and even include her own analysis and claims. One moment that stuck out to me was when she wrote that,

“In our own lives, we insist on the right to make our own choices, even bad ones — what is sometimes called “the right to folly.” As independent agents, we are free to be unreasonable and unwise and to act against our own best interests: maybe because of flawed reasoning, or just because we want to. But with older relatives, we often insist on prudence over passion.”

I read this as her own analysis, not as coming from a source – it’s cool how with long form at this level, journalists can play with the rules.

The Darien Gap and bus pieces similarly used a specific set of characters as a framework for telling a larger story, gliding between anecdote and context. The final piece I read though, “What Bobby Mcilvaine Left Behind,” felt different. Senior told the story from a personal perspective – her relationship to Bobby and his family was a key part of the story. The piece read almost as a profile of Bobby and of his family, rather than using it as an illustration for a bigger phenomenon.