Eli Saslow is a staff writer at the Washington Post and a contributor at ESPN the Magazine.

It's not really my place to complain about it being hard for me to write. I wrote the story ("After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet") and I got to leave it. And even when I was writing the story, I was only experiencing what they were experiencing in a super fractional way. The hard part is that it was a story where there are no breaks, there's no—it is this relentless, sort of bottomless pain and I struggled with that. … A story can only have so many crushing moments, otherwise they just all wash out. But the other truth is: it is what it is. It's an impossibly heartbreaking situation. And making the story anything other than relentlessly heartbreaking would've been doing an injustice to what they're dealing with.

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Show notes:

@elisaslow

Saslow on Longform

Saslow's Washington Post archive

[14:45] "Life of a Salesman" (Washington Post • Oct 2012)

[23:30] "In Florida, a Food-stamp Recruiter Deals With Wrenching Choices" (Washington Post • Apr 2013)

[30:30] "After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet" (Washington Post • Jun 2013)

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