I would talk to all these people, and the same details would come up story after story. Henrietta’s funeral - that one scene - I interviewed probably a dozen people. There was this wonderful high school librarian there who had been saving all this great documentation for decades - she’d been saving peoples letters from the town - a lot of the narrative details came from. I was so young - I didn’t know what I was doing in terms of interviewing techniques. These guys were in their 80s and 90s getting them to remember their childhood was this unbelievable adventure. When I first started working on the book, there were several of her cousins who she grew up with who were still alive. RS: I think I did more research on that one chapter! Months and months and months and months talking to people, going through archives. ![]() In some ways, it started to feel like that.ĬK: In the book’s opening chapter, you describe Henrietta Lacks’ childhood growing up poor on a tobacco farm vividly and intimately. It became part of the story, for the Lacks. ![]() For the Lacks family, the first publisher folding was because Henrietta didn’t like that publisher. The HeLa cells have almost a mystical quality to them, that she’s sort of out there, orchestrating all this stuff. She had been guiding my life, working me like a puppet: Go over here and study science, go over here and study writing. RS: Once I won their trust, Deborah said, joking, Henrietta chose me, from an early age. I didn’t feel like I was harassing her, I felt like I was slowly figuring out the story and giving her pieces of it as I went along.ĬK: Your interactions with the Lacks family are a major part of the book. Later, she and I would joke about it - she would just sit there and listen to those stories - she really wanted those stories, but she was scared to pick up the phone. But, you know - part of it was that I knew from that one phone call with her that she really wanted that information. I have no idea how I would handle it differently. Did you actually call every couple of weeks for months on end?ĬK: Did you ever think, maybe, I should stop annoying these people? ![]() And spending my days watching him get poked with needles, he was bruised from all the treatments - a lot of things coming together all at once grabbed my attention.ĬK: You write about repeatedly calling Henrietta’s daughter Deborah and leaving messages on her answering machine. I think that’s why I latched onto the story - my teacher said there’s this woman named Henrietta Lacks - my first question was, does she have any kids? What do her kids think of this? I think that was because at that very moment I was dealing with my father being used in research and trying to grapple with that. I was in the midst of learning about the highs and the lows of it. At the same time, we were really mad, because people were getting better and he wasn’t, and they weren’t really communicating with us. I was in the midst of learning firsthand the hope of science - we were putting everything into this study and thinking, OK, maybe this is going fix him, and he’ll go back to being my dad. It clearly wasn’t helping my dad, but definitely some people were getting better. There ended up being a lot of ethical questions about the study - they had promised that if the drug seemed to help they would give it to everyone. I would drive him to the hospital for these experimental infusions four times a week and sit there with him while he was getting treated. He couldn’t drive, and I’d just gotten my license. He ended up enrolling in a drug study, where he was essentially a guinea pig. Not long before that, he was a marathon runner - he was my superdad! So it was like the house felt like death. Two floors up, if I had a friend over and we laughed, that would really be painful for him. He was hypersensitive to stimulus, so he couldn’t really have lights on, there could be no smells. ![]() He was completely invalid - we had a recliner in the living room where he basically lived he couldn’t walk upstairs. I was doing intense school stuff, dealing with my father being sick, and he was very sick. Rebecca Skloot: My famously sick father, he’s written a lot about living with brain damage that happened when I was 16. Carolyn Kellogg: So you were in high school when you first heard the name Henrietta Lacks.
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