I’m not going to pretend that today’s cover story is an easy read, but I believe in you and I think you can handle it. CW: child death, religious hypocrisy. Kerry Howley is a parent of young kids, and she managed to write this article over the course of six months. She cried every day. Also, the families of the drowned girls had to live through this. The least you can do is read about it! I talked to Kerry about her work.
What was it like to report and write this article?
I view myself as someone who can compartmentalize, and it just didn’t work in this case. But while it was hard and deeply emotional to have these conversations, writing this piece also felt incredibly easy. A lot of times when you’re writing, you’re beset by these questions: Does this matter? Does anyone care? What are the stakes? This time, those questions were not present. I would wake up early and stay up late, and that just felt instinctual. In a way, it was like the easiest six months of writing I’ve had. I was carried along by the necessity of this piece and the sense, also, that the story had been told, in some quarters, incorrectly.
How did you figure out the structure?
For a long time, I wasn’t sure if I would tell the story of that night because I wanted us to be with the parents. They’re lost and they don’t have access to where their children are and they’re literally miles from the camp — like, physically miles from where they last knew that their children were safe, and they’re not getting information, and there are these terrible press conferences where they’re just being stonewalled. I wanted us to be with them and kind of desperate to know and unable to get that information. So, then, when do you reveal what happened? Once the parents have fully pieced together the horror of what happened that night — and particularly how close those girls were to safety — that is the time to tell it. That’s why I withheld that information until the end.
Not to clumsily tack easy morals onto your story, which is very psychologically complex, but the response to the drownings seems to me very MAGA: “We’ve learned lessons in resilience from this unavoidable tragedy.”
I just think it’s deeply American. Prior to MAGA, it’s not like we did anything about school shootings, right? We still said, “There’s nothing we can do.” So many of the stories about Camp Mystic told on morning television or even the local news have a positive spin, like, “Oh, here’s how they found hope in their sorrow.” And ultimately I don’t think this is a story about resilience or hope. It’s a story of a complete failure of accountability.
How do you feel now that this is done and published and out in the world?
I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I feel physically changed. I feel like my body is different, lighter. I do feel like I’ll carry it with me every time I make one of those decisions about entrusting my children to somebody, but I don’t even know if it’s that personal. There’s something about the way we treat people who encounter our own worst nightmares, the way this country treats children who have died in school shootings, calling them “crisis actors.” There’s something about the large psychological group dynamics that I’ll never stop thinking about.
