FANZINE: In Comfort & Critique, you write about the press defining victims, but the narrator also makes it known that he is not "blaming the parents or the other particulars or suggesting something about the nature of the press." Still, there seems to be a hazy area where such a critique pops up.

PS: Such a critique of the press or the general media just seems obvious to me. You don't get news reports that are devoid of spin and you don't get news reporters who don't wink at you because of that. So critiquing the nature of the press seems redundant and unimportant. There's a huge market for such examinations, especially in music and film, but it doesn't mean all that much to me. I'm far more interested in how that thinking creates the bodies and personalities it reports on. To be precise, and use the quotes you pull, Sara Payne gradually became the product that the news wanted. Or, at least, the side I'm sold. But not as a concentrated and conscious marketing ploy. Rather as someone, emotionally reduced or not, might respond to comfort and attention, sympathy and flattery, incredible existential and physical loss. It's similar to what most people might say they want in a relationship. I'm not just saying that the press is lying.

FANZINE: Reading Comfort & Critique, there are these multiple levels and philosophical moments. "Critique" has a didactic ring: Is it a philosophy of ethics in the sense of what Foucault was investigating when he died? I also kept thinking of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

PS: The title Comfort & Critique, essentially but not exclusively, refers to a simple journalism construct. Or pretense. The writers who concern themselves with Sara and Michael Payne, for example, who critique the situation, dispatch the news but shave any edges off so that the parents are constantly comforted and cared for. Whether they do this in obligation to their careers or a greater, perhaps humanist, ideal is incidental to my discourse. Of course, the bits you highlight connect this tendency to art. That most art, literature, music, journalism is blurred by a selfish interest in earning a living isn't surprising. What is surprising is that these artists pretend that they're offering an objective honesty. But, actually, I'm more interested in how that fluidity seeps into concepts of respect, love, sympathy, etc; personal and otherwise. Also the way that these journalists write so that they directly address the parents and the criminal at the same time. I understand the Wittgenstein and Foucault references in that they were trying to develop a systemic accuracy, a specificity; that is certainly a personal need of mine.

FANZINE: In the book there's a vacillation between needing/not needing the photos of these children and the mention of needing only the "quickest trigger." Why did you decide to include the images at the end of the book? Is this what Sarah would've looked like?

PS: They're the images that provoked the idea of Sarah. The idea of a magazine came from my wanting to compile these scraps and make something more complete, something better, than the purely functional way they were being personally handled just before. The magazine wouldn't have been adequate. The only way to do what I wanted was to write this book about the impulse.

FANZINE: You mention that "Sara Payne should know about this book." Has there ever been an instance where a subject (or subject's family) contact you about your work?

PS: That quote directly refers to Ian Brady’s book. I said that she should know about that book specifically because she had written an open letter to the “kidnapper” of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. She was offering a plea to the would-be killer. She was seriously out of her element, advice-wise, but definitely in her element public-wise.