Tamara Jones’ story “Sons of the Mothers,” an account of one woman’s quest to understand the 9/11 hijacker who killed her son, was published in the Washington Post on Monday, the fifth anniversary of September 11. Jones, 48, has been a feature writer at the Post since 1993. Previously, she was a national and foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, and for the Los Angeles Times. She was a Pulitzer finalist in feature writing in 2004.
Edward B. Colby: How did you come across Marilynn Rosenthal and her quest?
Tamara Jones: Well, that’s kind of a long and convoluted journey. I have a literary agent in New York — Richard Abate, at ICM — and he handles magazine freelance contracts for me, and is often looking for a book project that I might take on, and he called me because Marilynn had been compiling all this research thinking that she could turn it into a book, and she’d sent it to ICM, and Richard was contacting me to see if I had any interest in meeting her and possibly working with her on doing a proposal on the book and taking it on as a project. And when he told me about her story and put us in touch so I could talk to her on the phone, I was just blown away by it — it was such an interesting story. And I went back to them and I said I am definitely interested in the story, but I would really love to be able to tell it in the Post first, and do it as a newspaper story. I said that would give me a chance to interview her more extensively, and she could also spend some time with me and see if I was somebody that she wanted to work with down the line, and it just seemed to make a lot of sense and they agreed to that. And so I went to Ann Arbor and spent, I guess, four days interviewing her, and did the story for the Style section.
EBC: At one point Marilynn says, “I am not a person who expresses emotions easily.” How much prodding did it take to get her to tell her story?
TJ: Oh, no prodding at all. It’s a story that has been unfolding for the past five years in her life, and she’s very eager to tell it. I mean, it’s difficult to get the emotional landscape of her, because she is an intellectual, and she processes things that way, and she’s by her own admission very reserved. So that took a lot of just patience and talking — we had spent seven and eight hours together every day, sometimes longer if we were having dinner together, talking and interviewing, and as I said, this was over four days.
EBC: Marilynn has basically been reporting the story of her son’s death since 9/11. Were you surprised by how much information she was able to uncover?
TJ: Yes. I was surprised, and as a journalist, I was incredibly impressed, because her research is so thorough and so methodical, and she pulled every thread that she found. She really went about it the way very experienced investigative reporters I’ve known would have tackled it. It was hard for me and a challenge for me to think about conveying that to readers — hoping that readers would get her on that level — because as a journalist, I understood what she was doing immediately. I mean, it made perfect sense to me, and when I would tell colleagues about the story I was working on, people would say, ‘Oh, I would do exactly the same thing.’ So I think we get it in a way that I was wondering, I was curious, well, will the layperson understand this? And that was the part that I was probably most worried about in the story. Because she’s not your typical crusading mom kind of story, and she’s not obsessed in a frantic way. She’s obsessed with it, but she’s obsessed with uncovering information, not trying to prove a point that she’s already predetermined. I guess she’s just determined to find out as much as she possibly can about this single event, and it didn’t have to lead her to a particular conclusion. … She was just gathering every tiny stone of this mosaic of 9/11 that she possibly could.
EBC: Do you think her status as a September 11 mother opened many doors that otherwise would not have been opened?
TJ: I think so, and I think … she would say that herself. And she always identified herself as both a sociologist doing research and the mother of a 9/11 victim. And she said that people were eager to help her when she said that she was researching this because she had lost her son, and I think where it may have gained her access that others might not have had is maybe with some of the confidential briefings that she got — off-the-record briefings that people in government were willing to give her.
EBC: Your story is essentially told from Marilynn’s point of view. How much work do you do in your reporting to give yourself alternate perspectives so that when you sit down to write this kind of narrative you have enough distance from your main subject?
TJ: Oh, there were other interviews done for this story — I didn’t include them. It was more to get an understanding of Marilynn and to give myself the confidence of presenting her. In this case, I did interviews with a person on Capitol Hill who she had approached for help, I talked to the litigator at Motley Rice, the law firm heading the lawsuit against the Saudis that she joined, I spoke to a couple of family friends of hers … I also had read her manuscript. I got rebuffed — I tried to make contact with the ambassador, the American ambassador in the UAE, but I couldn’t get an interview there. So I had a good feeling that I had researched the person I was presenting.
This is an unusual story, I think, in terms of the amount of material that is coming from one person’s point of view, because the whole story, it’s not just about her, but it’s about her developing that point of view. And I thought about whether to quote people that she had encountered on the way, saying, ‘Oh, well, she seemed very determined,’ or things like that that they were saying, and in the end I decided not to do it because it didn’t add anything that she wasn’t conveying herself, and I had confidence in the material and decided to do it as her story.
EBC: At the end of the story Marilynn is still outraged, and “doubts she will get what she really wants out of all this.” How much solace has her research given her? Do you think she’ll eventually become less restless?
TJ: That’s hard to say, because I don’t know her that well, to speculate about that. … She already does feel more comforted, she says, now with what she’s learned and with what she knows than she did, say, two years into the research. I mean, her search hasn’t brought her all of the knowledge that she’d like to have — and knowledge and truth, as we all know, are sometimes very different things. Will anyone ever know the full, absolute, complete truth about the events leading up to and after 9/11? I don’t think so. I don’t think any single person will ever have that.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.