RS: Praying for Sheetrock (1991), your award-winning book on McIntosh County, Georgia, contains an epigraph from Savannah attorney Sonny Seiler: “You can’t learn anything riding down I-95 with the Yankees. You’ve got to go the old way, 17, what we call the old way.” I’m wondering if you see in the epigraph something akin to your own approach to storytelling.

MFG: First, amazing timing to this question, as the inimitable, irrepressible Frank W. "Sonny" Seiler died this week at the age of 90. Savannah attorney and owner of all the UGA mascot bulldogs named Uga, he was a great source to me for Sheetrock and a great friend and colleague to my husband over the years (including in the murder trials that inspired the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) (… speaking of mixing fact and fiction.) And yes, I think his epigraph stands for my approach and that of most other journalists! It’s a warning that becomes more relevant every day, with the pandemic-like buyouts and closures of small-town newspapers across the country, which leaves local and regional reporting to coastal news-show hosts and half a dozen national newspapers: the equivalent of “riding down I-95 with the Yankees.”

RS: Your story for The Atlantic, “Can an Unloved Child Learn to Love?” (2020), covers a lot of ground, balancing history, psychology, and a profile of Romanian orphan Izador Ruckel. How did you come to, as you’ve said, “venture into the melancholy landscape” of adults who had been raised as “irrecoverables” in Ceausescu’s “child gulags?” How did you find Izador and how did you first approach him about doing a story?

MFG: My husband and I are the parents of nine––four by birth and five by adoption. In 1999, we adopted a four-and-a-half-year-old boy from a rural Bulgarian orphanage (in an era when it was easier and more transparent to adopt from abroad than from American foster care; the reverse is true now.) Bulgaria was not Romania, but it wasn’t good; and we saw some shocking scenes. I learned a lot from the parents adopting from the Romanian orphanages; online, and in some reporting for other pieces, I followed their trajectories and their heartbreaks for years. People who had been promised, by their naive adoption agencies, “Love is enough!” ended up writing memoirs with titles like, When Love is Not Enough. The “attachment” relationship––the vital early-in-life bonding of a baby with one or two caregivers––is everything. If it doesn’t happen on time, when the baby developmentally needs it, it’s almost impossible to ever close the gap. We were lucky in all our adoptions of older children that—though orphaned—they’d known love. But I never forgot the stories of some of those families who—again, naively, and without expert advice because no one knew much about it then—ended up trying to raise children who’d been deprived of “attachment figures” in infancy and early childhood. When I realized we were approaching the 30th anniversary of the overthrow of Soviet-Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and the subsequent unveiling, to the world’s horror, of his gulag-like system of orphanages, it gave me a news-peg. I reactivated some of my 20-year-old contacts (though Yahoo Groups had disappeared – that’s where the adoptive parents of Romanian orphanage children used to meet online) and began informational interviews. I found willing parents right away, and several invited me to visit and meet their adult children, but most of the invitations came from families whose sons and daughters had been cognitively impaired by their brutal childhood. The challenge was to find a survivor capable of reflecting back upon orphanage life. I heard Izidor Ruckel’s name, found the memoir he’d self-published in his early 20s, and knew––probably four pages in–– that, if he would talk to me, I had found my protagonist. He generously consented.