Elliott’s “Invisible Child”: A Model of Narrative Non-Fiction

Sixty-six books have won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction since that award began in 1962. Two of the books — sociologist Matthew Desmond’s Evicted (the 2017 winner) and journalist Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child (2022 Pulitzer) — portray people in and out of homelessness. I criticized Desmond’s work last month: He communicated an unmodulated despair. Last week, though, I recommended E. Fuller Torrey’s American Psychosis, and this week I want to recommend Invisible Child‘s nuanced hopefulness.

Let’s start with Elliott’s depiction of the heroine she makes visible: “Dasani is tiny for an eleven-year-old and quick to startle. She has a delicate oval face and luminous eyes that watch everything, owl-like. . . . In class, Dasani raises her hand high and speaks in forceful sentences. She seems unaware of how tiny she is — exuding a muscular confidence that carries over into the schoolyard.”

Elliott found a star because she spent weeks looking for her: New York City in 2012 hosted 22,000 homeless children, but “by the time I landed at the Auburn shelter, what mattered more to me than any demographic profile was finding a child who could breathe life into this story. And on that sunny afternoon in October 2012, she was staring right at me. Dasani crackled with energy. She was precocious, daring, full of adventure.”

Not only that, but we learn that Dasani can fix a dripping sink: “In a shelter with a $9 million budget, operated by an agency with more than a hundred times those funds, the plumbing has fallen to an eleven-year-old girl.” She designs dances for her siblings and herself to perform on subway trains: “They arrange themselves behind her in the shape of a diamond, with Dasani at the tip. She is choreographer.” That’s one of the ways she helps keep her family of ten afloat.

Ten? A sociologist would have found a single mom and two children, but the family’s size provides a particular poignancy when things fall apart and three of the children stay with an aunt, three go to two different foster care providers, one goes to prison, and Dasani triumphs temporarily at a private school/residence that spends $85,000 per child. (She then gets kicked out for fighting, goes into foster care, pierces her tongue, wears a red bandana and joins the Bloods, then gets suspended from her new school after pounding a boy into the sidewalk.)

Elliott also models good journalism by giving us sights that show poignant aspiration: In the homeless shelter, “slipping out from her covers, Dasani goes to the window. On mornings like this, she can see all the way past Brooklyn, over the rooftops and the projects and the shimmering east River. Her eyes can travel into Manhattan, to the top of the Empire State Building. . . . Dasani can get lost looking out her window.”

And not only sights, but sounds: “Different noises mean different things. She sorts them like laundry. The light noises bring no harm — the colicky cries of an infant down the hall, the hungry barks of the Puerto Rican lady’s Chihuahuas. . . . The sound that matters has a different pitch. It comes loud and fast, with a staccato rhythm. The popping of gunshots. The pounding of fists.”

Elliott, unlike a writer who might gain fictionalizing freedom by using pseudonyms, pledges to readers that “this is a work of nonfiction. No facts have been altered and no names have been changed.” She follows standard journalistic rules of engagement, telling Dasani and her family that “unless a person tells me something is ‘private,’ whatever I observe would be published in an article read by many people.” Elliott does not pay for interviews. (She does pick up the tab for restaurant meals and sometimes brings groceries or helps “in other ways — especially at Christmas. I am, after all, human.”)

Above all, Elliott is a worthy Pulitzer winner and model for young journalists because she relies on street-level experience, not abstract theory. Elliott writes, “The word ‘understand’ comes from Old English — understandan. Literally, it means ‘to stand in the midst of.’ It does not mean we have reached some ultimate truth. It means, to my mind, that we have experienced enough of something new, something formerly unseen, to be provoked, humbled, awakened, or even changed by it.”

She explains her openness this way: Whenever she thought she knew the answers, “something else would happen, revealing a new layer. This sequence of revelation filled the arc of the book. Dasani began as a homeless girl in the shelter system and wound up a foster kid in the child protection system . . . [A]s I followed Dasani’s path, I saw how these systems interacted and overlapped.”