A Kind Of Rigorousness

Boynton: Why do you write so often about children?

LeBlanc: The perspective of children enhances my consciousness; imaging their perspective requires a kind of rigorousness. Say something happens on the street—a fight, or a flirtation, some kind of transaction—and children are watching. I often try to imagine how they make sense of what they see. Children also generally don’t edit their reactions the way adults learn to do…Also, the reader tends to be sympathetic to children. The natural sympathy that the public used to extend to adolescents involved in the criminal justice system has eroded. It’s practically a requirement that I have to keep getting younger and younger subjects in order to generate a human connection.

Robert Boynton interview with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
from The New New Journalism

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