People answer better with narrative. When they are in the thread of a narrative, they get comfortable and will speak more fully,” David says. In a job interview, he focuses

especially on someone’s high school experience. Did the person feel like an outcast in high school? Did they empathize with the poor and the unpopular? “The only thing you can be certain about every person is that nobody escapes high school. Whatever your high school fears were, they are still there.” David’s getting at a person’s vulnerabilities, trying to see the person whole.

A 2012 study by Harvard neuroscientists found that people often took more pleasure from sharing information about themselves than from receiving money. The Belgian psychologist Bernard Rimé found that people feel especially compelled to talk about negative experiences. The more negative the experience was, the more they want to talk about it. Over the course of my career as a journalist I, too, have found that if you respectfully ask people about themselves, they will answer with a candor that takes your breath away. Studs Terkel was a journalist who collected oral histories over his long career in Chicago. He’d ask people big questions and then sit back and let their answers unfold. “Listen, listen, listen, listen, and if you do, people will talk,” he once observed. “They always talk. Why? Because no one has ever listened to them before in all their lives.

Perhaps they’ve not ever even listened to themselves.” Each person is a mystery. And when you are surrounded by mysteries, as the saying goes, it’s best to live life in the form of a question.

He had grown up to be a novelist and writer of great compassion, faith, and humanity. He had come to realize that excavation is not a solitary activity. It’s by sharing our griefs with others, and thinking together about what they mean, that we learn to overcome fear and know each other at the deepest level. “What we hunger for perhaps more than anything

else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else,” he wrote in his book Telling Secrets. “It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are...because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier...for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own.

I read Strength in What Remains with a kind of awe. Kidder not only created a rich, complex portrait of Deo; he enabled us to see the world through his eyes. When I called Kidder to talk about the book, Deo’s brother was staying at his house, and had become a

family friend. Deo himself had gone back to Burundi to open a health center for the kinds of people he grew up with, including members of the Hutu tribe that had tried to massacre him. Kidder’s curiosity about Deo was still pulsating as we spoke, though it had been a

decade since his book came out.

Chapter 9: Leave no Mark: Escape

“The story my parents want to tell is different from the one I want to write.

My dad wants to recount the political history of South Africa and the Movement. He wants to tell me about the comrade-uncles in Lusaka and London who I knew as a toddler and young child, explaining how they – and he – fitted into the broader trajectory of the ANC. My mum wants to tell the story of the people who shaped her activism, like Joe Gqabi, who guided her as she told him about the discontent at Phefeni, and her friend Baba who turned up with his Beetle on June 16. The story she wants to tell is one of shared effort and history.

The story I want to tell is of my gentle yet courageous dad, and how the path he chose cost him dearly. It is the story of my beautiful mum, barely in her 20s, with bravery I cannot imagine ever possessing. It is of both of them in love, idealistic and determined. It is of my feisty, fearless and fun-loving aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, the quiet revolutionaries.