Childhood Experiences and the Path to Becoming a Writer

Roxanna Asgarian is the author of We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America.

“Every once in a while, I'll have someone just freak out at me. And it keeps you honest, in a way, because they don't owe you anything. People don't owe you anything as a journalist. ... But everyone reacts to trauma differently and some people really do want to talk about it. And I think the families in this book really wanted to talk about it and it felt like no one was even paying attention to them.”

Show notes:

• @strawburriez
• Asgarian's Texas Tribune archive
• We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 2023)
• 12:00 "Child in viral Portland police hug photo missing, 5 family members dead after California cliff crash" (Shane Dixon Kavanaugh • The Oregonian • Mar 2018)
• 12:00 "Devonte Hart family crash: Sarah Hart sent alarming 3 a.m. text to friend ... then silence" (Shane Dixon Kavanaugh • The Oregonian • Apr 2018)
• 13:00 "Devonte Hart family crash: 'It's just devastating,' says aunt who fought for custody" (Roxanna Asgarian and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh • The Oregonian • Apr 2018)
• 34:00 "Devonte Hart's biological mom: They gave my kids 'to monsters'" (The Oregonian • Apr 2018)
• 45:00 "Before Children’s Grisly Deaths, A Family Fought for Them and Lost" (The Appeal • Jul 2018)
• 45:00 "A Mother Grapples with an Adoption that Led to Deaths" (The Appeal • Feb 2019)
• 45:00 "His siblings were killed by their adoptive mother. He was left in foster care to suffer a more common fate." (Washington Post • Dec 2019)
• 46:00 Broken Harts (Glamour and HowStuffWorks • 2018)

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