It seems to have become customary to save family for the end of the acknowledgments, in a last-but-not-least kind of way, but in this case, there is no book—indeed, no reason to make one—without my children. I made this book for my daughter, R., and my son, M., and I made it as a way of returning to them from the darkness in which I had become for a while disoriented. My daughter’s questions and wisdom suffuse This Brilliant Darkness from its title to its final page—on which my son, M., poses this book’s final query, one to which I believe the world offers a hopeful answer. M. was not even a year old when this book began, so he is only now coming of an age when, like his sister, he likes to make up poems and songs and stories. But like his sister’s, his stories sustain me and shape my own—not just as a father but as a writer who has learned to listen closest to the language of those closest to me. That includes their mother, Julia Rabig, who’s a storyteller, too.
Then there is my father, Robert Sharlet, with whom this book begins. When I was younger I thought I became a writer because of my mother, who died long ago; she’d wanted to be a writer, and I felt I was picking up her dream. As much as that’s true, I realize now that as an adult, I am a writer because of my father—a writer himself, of a different kind, a scholar—who picked up my mother’s dream for me the countless times I misplaced it. Without his help as a reader and moral conscience, I could not have carried it forward.
I write at the start of this book that my father, like me, survived his heart attack, that he had become healthier than ever before, but between that draft and these acknowledgments, he fell suddenly ill, and on January 26, 2019, he died. It will remain a sorrow to me that he will not see the finished book, in which he believed more steadily than any other. But it is a solace that as he lay dying, I could read the above acknowledgment to him. This book remains dedicated to my children, as he would want it to be, but it is for my father.
Twenty-seven years ago at Hampshire College, Michael Lesy introduced me to Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Diane Arbus, Gordon Parks, and many more. Most importantly, he showed me the power of snapshots. He has been a friend and an adviser since. I wrote my first book with Peter Manseau and continue to depend on him as a careful reader. Ann Neumann read my work in progress as well, as did Rianna Starheim and Kathryn Joyce, a journalistic comrade who not only read a draft but also lent me her apartment to write the piece that was missing. I met Randy Potts, a.k.a. @thephatic, on Instagram, and as of this writing I’ve yet to meet him in person, but he has become such an insightful reader of my work, as I hope I am of his, that I feel like he’s an old friend. Paul Reyes is an old friend, and also my editor and collaborator at the Virginia Quarterly Review. He helped me shape the crucial final pages of this book and, through our long, wandering conversation over the years, the ones that precede it, too. Eric Sullivan, my editor at GQ and then Esquire, is one of the best editors I’ve had the pleasure to work with. I’m also indebted to Luke Zaleski in his capacity as GQ research director and to Esther Kaplan and The Nation Institute. The International Reporting Project took me to Kenya. Photographer Pieter Hugo let me watch him work on Skid Row. Many pages herein were inestimably improved by his sharp eye and open heart. Photographer Tanja Hollander invited me to teach words+pictures with her at Hampshire College. She generously read drafts with insight, taught me visual truths, edited photographs, and introduced me to new ways of considering the flow of imagination and perception. Kathy Anderson, my agent, is one of my oldest friends and subtlest readers. More than twenty years ago, Alane Mason, an editor at W. W. Norton, wrote me about a story of mine and asked if I’d thought of a book. That first book we discussed is still to be written, but I owe something of my life as a writer to her early enthusiasm, and much of whatever is good in this book to her wise and perceptive editorial vision. My mother was a production editor for a small press. For years after she died, in 1989, I didn’t know much about her work; in the Internet age, though, it became possible to search for references to her in acknowledgments such as these. I’m grateful to those authors who named her contributions to their books, and grateful to all those at Norton who contributed to this one, especially Mo Crist, Sarah Daniels, Julia Druskin, Rebecca Homiski, Susan Sanfrey, Will Scarlett, Sarahmay Wilkinson, and William Willis, and to my copyeditor, Bonnie Thompson.
Mark Armstrong, the editor of Longreads, published an early selection of this work. Jessica Lustig at the New York Times Magazine commissioned the essay that became “#Rise&GrindMF$.” William Boling and Dawn Kim invited me to co-edit a special issue of their photography journal, Documentum, dedicated to writing on Instagram. Emily Smith at Ecotone and Michael Kusek at Take Magazine featured work in progress. Tara Wray invited me to publish some small pieces of this work in the literary journal Hobart and then did me the honor of sitting in on one of my courses at Dartmouth College, despite the fact that she is far the superior photographer. Other former students who became friends have shaped this work through their own experiments with the form, among them Jamie Alliotts, Sadia Hassan, Sarah Khatry, James Napoli, and Meera Subramanian. At Dartmouth, Aimee Bahng was my closest colleague before she left for greener pastures, but I’m glad she and Bill Boyer-Bahng remain among my closest friends, the kind through whom all the questions of this book were filtered. I’m indebted to another one of my closest friends, Jeff Allred, for conversations about documentary art that made this book what it is, and to both Jeff and his wife, Gretchen Aguiar, for the kind of friendship that makes it possible to even imagine writing. I’m grateful, too, to my Dartmouth colleagues, especially Cynthia Huntington, who helped me walk again after my heart attack and whose writing helped me see before it and after. Quince Mountain and Blair Braverman, who make several appearances in these pages, are comrades as well as friends: fellow travelers, night shifters, and reporter-gatherers. When I try to think of an audience for my work, it’s them.
And finally, genuinely last but not least, last and most of all, the community of this book: the night bakers, the last-call drinkers, the strangers you meet after all the bars are closed; frightened people—fugitives from God, underground abortionists, men in closets within closets—and frightening people—men with guns, men with knives; the homeless, the houseless, and people who live in motels; the usual suspects, those whose lives are organized around addictions, and those whose livings depend on the sale of their bodies, and those simply trying to hold on to their minds. All of you who allowed me glimpses of lives beyond value, and who allowed me to snap your picture, frozen moments clipped from the beauty of your continuity. I especially want to thank the families of Charly Keunang and Jared Miller; Pastor Cue Jn-Marie; Mecca Harper; Pete White and the heroic organizers of Los Angeles Community Action Network; Zhenya Belyakov, Elena Kostyuchenko, and all the brave Russians who could not share their full or real names; and Mary Mazur, wherever you are now—may Bandit be with you.