AUTHOR’S NOTE: Below is an essay I first published for The Ochberg Society, a now-defunct grassroots group of journalists who cover trauma, upon the publication of FACTORY MAN in 2014. I’ve been thinking a lot about the people featured in my essay and in that book recently. Last week on Election Day, I traveled back to Bassett, Va., to talk about my just-out book, TRUEVINE, a nonfiction narrative about race, exploitation and greed.

In the front row sat a 63-year-old white man, a trucking company owner named Jerry Hatchett, decked out in “Make America Great Again” regalia — red Trump hat that matched his red suspenders. To his left sat a septuagenarian former sharecropper and furniture factory worker named Janet Johnson, who is featured in TRUEVINE. Janet is black, and the title of one of my chapters,  “White Peoples Is Hateful,” was a direct quote from my  interviews with her. After my talk, which centered largely on racism and its tentacles, the two had a pleasant exchange.

Hatchett, who still lives on the dairy farm where he grew up in rural Sontag (just three miles down the road from the rural crossroads of Truevine, Va.), bought five copies of “TRUEVINE” at the event. When I called him up later to ask what he thought of the election results he told me, “I run a small business” with 20 employees. “The regulations passed in D.C. are killing small businesses,” he said, citing studies that truck-related deaths have decreased greatly in the past 50 years, and yet the regulations keep tightening.

Hatchett assured me he was not racist, and I believe him. “I’ve got a lot of black friends, and I’d rather have them in my house than about three-quarters of the white people I know.” But he’s concerned about soaring health insurance premiums, which he blames on Obamacare. He’s concerned about the growing number of people in his region, black and white, who can’t pass a drug test. “People out here are hurting, and nobody in Washington has done anything about it.”

Time will tell whether president-elect Trump, who has a long history of outsourcing his own products, will actually do anything about joblessness, soaring disability rates and food insecurity in places where “the China shock” has decimated the livelihoods of so many. In places like Bassett and Truevine, where factories once hummed, I believe people want their dignity back, not painkillers. They want jobs.

More than anything, I believe Donald Trump won the election, despite just about every pollster prediction to the contrary, because Democrats and journalists failed to grasp and report on the aftermath of globalization in small towns across America. I fielded a number of reporter phone calls during the campaigns, asking for my “Factory Man” sources and their phone numbers and wanting to pick my brain, from The Wall Street Journal to The Guardian. I helped the reporters, based in Washington and New York, because that’s what members of the journalism tribe do for one another.

But what I really wanted to say to them was this: Why are you just now getting around to writing this story? NAFTA was signed in 1994; China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Across America, dying factory towns held unemployment-rate records for more than a decade. What took you so long? And why were so many of my regional-media colleagues also unable to illuminate that story? (I describe more fully the impact of dwindling journalistic resources on smaller, regional media here.)

Democrats and most of the mainstream media ignored what was happening in rural America until the morning after the election. And they ignored it at their own peril.

The former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey once told an interviewer: “Some bones broken will forever be weak. They will ache and cause pain. The best we can hope for is acknowledgment. What drives me crazy is when people don’t want to acknowledge!”

She was talking about racist events of the past, but the same idea could be applied today to the pain inflicted by globalization, when 5 million American factory workers lost their livelihood through no fault of their own. And the only government program designed to ease them into new work was an outdated Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) run by people who looked down their noses at the displaced. (My personal favorite exchange, from a TAA training session I attended: “We’re not gonna pay for you to be in school and find out you’re in Myrtle Beach,” a presenter said, stressing strict school attendance. “Who here has money for a vacation?” said the laid-off worker sitting next to me. “I’m worried about losing my house.”)

It’s wrong to name-call all Trump voters as “deplorables.” It’s wrong to discount all rural voters for “clinging to their religion and guns.” As George Packer opined recently in a New Yorker story on the psychology of the Trump voter: “If the Democrats were no longer on their side — if government programs kept failing to improve their lives — why not vote for the party that at least took them seriously?”

Further, as the lives of rural Americans grew smaller, whiter, and less hope-filled, identity issues surrounding race became harder to unpack and more fraught to discuss, giving “Trump the aura of being a truth teller,” according to Packer. “The ‘authenticity’ that his followers so admire is factually wrong and morally repulsive. But when people of good will are afraid to air legitimate arguments [and discuss sensitive issues such as sentencing reform and urban crime], the illegitimate kind gains power.”

I hope the first step in bridging the divide is the airing of such arguments. The acknowledgment of one another’s pain. 

As I write in FACTORY MAN: “The people [in trade-decimated communities] wanted their stories told. … Their world was not flat, and they wanted a witness to it. Someone to describe the creeping small-town carnage created by acronyms like NAFTA and WTO and an impotent TAA, all of it forged by faraway people who had never bothered to see the full result of what globalization had wrought.” 

Perhaps those faraway people are beginning now to see the picture. It’s not a very lovely one. At Henry County’s Community Storehouse, where a converted textile-plant conveyor belt has found new life as a food-distribution device, people still arrive two hours before the doors open, some of them leaning on canes and walkers — for a box of old food.

But I take solace in the words of the poet-singer Leonard Cohen, who died last week and whose work elevated humanity’s brokenness: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” 

I don’t presume to have all the answers for these complicated times, but I hope my essay, below, sheds a little more light on how the national media selectively ignored a wide swath of its citizenry.

And to all those daring to parachute in again, I say: Come on back. And stick around a while when you do.

At the Community Storehouse in Ridgeway, volunteers can divine what people used to do by their ailments: Women who’d been bent over sewing machines all day making sweatshirts had humps on their backs. The men who culled lumber were missing fingers. | Photo by Jared Soares

When I first met Wanda Perdue in the spring of 2012, she was studying at a community college tutoring center in rural Virginia. She had missed the technology boom entirely. When everyone else was learning about Word and Excel, Wanda was tacking trim pieces onto dining room tables and gluing molding onto dresser drawers. When Stanley Furniture laid her off in 2010 along with 530 of her coworkers — moving most of its production offshore to China, Vietnam and Indonesia — Wanda barely knew how to turn on a computer.

Wanda Perdue | Photo by Kyle Green

When I met her, she was finishing an associate’s degree in office administration. She’d struggled mightily in the beginning, especially with college math, but soon she would be graduating with a 3.3 grade-point average. Wanda was a young 58 then — trim with pretty copper hair, Southern manners and a work ethic honed by decades of standing through sweltering, eight-hour shifts, just as her parents before her had done at a competing furniture-maker in nearby Bassett, Va.

“What I want [a prospective employer] to know is, if you need a job done, she’s going to find a way to do it come hell or high water,” said Kay Pagans, one of Wanda’s professors.

And yet, over the next two years, every time I phoned Wanda for an update on her job search, the story was the same: The only work she could find was part-time, without benefits, at Walmart, where she ran the cash register and stocked shelves in the health and beauty aisle. On the phone in August, Wanda sounded more desperate than ever. Walmart had recently announced they were cutting her hours in anticipation of Obamacare, part of its new labor-savings strategy. The world had gotten flat, as columnist Thomas Friedman likes to say. But Wanda’s side of the story rarely got reported: the 5 million factory workers who’d lost their jobs to offshoring had been utterly flattened, too.

According to the prevailing media narrative, the recession ended in 2009, and manufacturing has been slowly bouncing back. Only it hasn’t really. The official unemployment rate may have declined, but the full employment picture was not quite the smiley face that economists and business reporters were leading everyone to believe. The number of people toiling at temp work and part-time jobs, and those who have simply stopped looking for work — the so-called U6 rate — is almost double the official rate.

As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson conceded not long after Wanda lost her full-time job, the unemployment stories were waning because the political will to fix the labor market had faded. “It’s hard to blame the media too much for resisting to write feverishly about nonexistent efforts to fix a static unemployment problem,” he wrote.

I’m not so sure. Even when the media was still reporting full steam on unemployment, a 2009 Pew Center survey showed the recession was largely being covered from the top down, told primarily through big business with stories datelined in Washington and New York. As if that’s where all the unemployed people live. The ratio of stories featuring ordinary people and displaced workers? Just 2 percent.

Thompson may blame the problem on the lack of political will, but I have another theory to add to the mix. With a few exceptions, the national media tends to cover the people it already knows, most of them found in the same ZIP codes and Facebook/Twitter realms where they live and work. National reporters rarely venture anywhere near the hollowed-out little towns where people suffering the after effects of globalization would practically grab a visiting journalist by the collar, ready for a witness to the carnage. Reporters out of Washington and New York rarely turn up in quirky Appalachian towns like Galax, Va., where all but one furniture factory has closed, or in the once-prosperous city of Martinsville, Va., which lost almost half its workforce to the offshoring of textile and furniture jobs.

I haven’t seen any of the major news outlets reporting from tiny Fieldale, where another former Stanley worker approached me last summer and spilled his story before I could ask a single question. Now 59, Samuel Watkins’ employment benefits had run out eight months earlier, and he’d plundered his 401K. He’d cobbled together work mowing lawns and weeding gardens for $8.50 an hour. He had no health insurance and had recently maxed out his credit card to have an infected tooth pulled. He hauled his tools and lawnmower gas around in the back of a dented 1999 Ford Explorer.

Samuel Watkins | 2013 Photo by Beth Macy

Samuel had no idea I was a journalist writing a book about the aftermath of globalization when we bumped into each other in July 2013, the same week that Hope Yen of the Associated Press wrote up new data showing that four in five American adults will face poverty during their lifetimes. It was one of the first national stories I’d read that directly connected poverty to the increasingly globalized economy and the decimation of factory jobs.

When Samuel struggled to explain to his Virginia Employment Commission caseworker how demoralized he felt asking the government for help, she told him, “Get a grip. You’re not going to be making $13.90 again.” Unfortunately, she was right.

In small towns like Samuel’s, the local press does what it can, covering job fairs and the opening of temp agencies, dollar stores and call centers. The opening of Martinsville’s call center StarTek, for instance, was touted as the savior of the dying town — only to close up operations seven years later and join the cheap-labor waltz to the Philippines. For one former StarTek worker I met, it was her sixth layoff in 18 years.

But that long view rarely gets explored in depth by small newspapers, where publishers and business leaders also tend to be entwined “like roots around a pipe,” as one civic leader told me. One analysis piece I wrote about Martinsville resulted in a worker I’d interviewed being forbidden from speaking to me again — or even responding to an e-mail or private Facebook message — for my book.

The slow burn of a globalizing economy, recession or not, is hard for most reporters to get their heads around. “No one’s really covered the day in and day out of the effects of free trade on the American public,” said Richard McCormack, the founding publisher of Manufacturing & Technology News and the editor of “ReMaking America,” a book published recently by the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “So much of the media is sponsored basically by advertising — Walmart and Macy’s, and if you’re the Wall Street Journal, it’s J.P. Morgan or Chase.”

Secondly, McCormack pointed out, sorting through the thousand-plus documents produced by a single U.S. International Trade Commission case is “really hard for journalists to put their arms around. It’s not cut and dry, it’s not black and white. And the importers and foreign producers have spent millions on lobbyists, lawyers and P.R. people until domestic manufacturers get completely overwhelmed. It’s a goddamn David and Goliath,” he said.

Since newsroom beats by tradition are organized geographically as well as by theme, it doesn’t often happen that a local reporter will follow the closing of a local factory to its replacement location in, say, Indonesia. While small media outlets and regional papers like the one I write for cover every factory closing and every new unemployment stat, we rarely claim the authority, the scope or the resources to pay attention to what’s happening at the World Trade Organization or the Department of Commerce.

That’s left to journalists at bigger news outlets, but these are reporters who usually haven’t bothered traversing the dying factory towns. From where they sit, the trend is barely perceptible.

The full picture of globalization, then, rarely makes its way into the news. No one is minding the back room of this new global store.

In fact, it took a freelance photographer, Jared Soares, driving to Martinsville three times a week for more than a year before I finally grasped the big picture myself, through his images: a textile plant conveyor belt converted for use in a food bank; a disabled minister named Leonard, biding time in his kitchen in the middle of the afternoon; a Trade Adjustment Assistance training session, where the PowerPoint resembled a seventh-grade filmstrip from 1973, and laid-off workers were scolded not to blow all their unemployment benefits at Myrtle Beach. (“The beach?” one woman muttered. “I’m about to lose my house.”)

If the laid-off factory workers wanted their stories told, Jared and I were going to have to help. His project, culminating in a forthcoming photography book, is the result, along with my book, “Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local — and Helped Save an American Town,” which will be published by Little, Brown and Company next June.

With any luck at all, Wanda will land a full-time job before she hits retirement age. She called in August to tell me she was about to have her first interview in many months, as a data entry operator for a local company. Wanda had her interviewing outfit all picked out, she enthused. She was nervous because three people were going to be interviewing her at once. “But I can handle it,” she added.

Turns out the business is just five minutes up a hill from her house, as the crow flies. “If it comes a real deep snow and I had to get there, I could walk,” she said.

A few weeks later, she called back. She thought the interview had gone well, but she did not get the job. “They said they’d keep my resume on file,” she added.

When I caught up with Samuel recently, his luck had improved. He’d been hired as a full-time temp worker for one of the last furniture-related companies in the region, a kitchen cabinet supplier, making $11 an hour. He has health insurance again, and is working hard to catch up on his electric bill, now three months in arrears.

His wife, a 61-year-old former furniture worker, is in the process of applying for federal disability benefits — another rarely reported but escalating trend in towns hit hard by globalization.

Even the economists and some Washington journalists are beginning to notice what Samuel Watkins could have told them four years ago. “If my company stays in business, there’s a chance I can become an actual employee,” Samuel said, hopefully. “Honey, it’s like everything else. There’s nothing promised to you any more. All you do is work till they say it’s no more.”

An obituary in Sunday’s Roanoke Times caught my eye, and before I knew it the tears were puddling on my toast. I’ve profiled scores of amazing people in my  career, but Harvey’s story was among my favorites. I loved his unflinching honesty. I really loved how fiercely he loved his wife.

A World War Two hero and fighter pilot, he had found himself, then in his late-80s, dreaming about the Japanese airmen he’d shot down. I remember him saying, “I can still see their faces. … They had families too.”

To which his wife, Nell, would then counter, comfortingly, “It was kill or be killed.”

Theirs was an ordinary story — a love story — I chronicled with photographer Sam Dean in 2007. They were doing what thousands in the Greatest Generation are doing or have done: moving into a better-than-average retirement community. And Nell was not thrilled in the least. She called her new much-smaller digs at Brandon Oaks “B.O.” for short.

She complained about having to give up her favorite knitting chair, which was ratty-looking and worn.

Harvey had to say goodbye to the duct-taped contraption he’d built to affix the telephone next to his recliner. They had to winnow down their massive collection of clocks. Every one of those clocks had a story, and I listened to them all.

When the movers arrived, the couple bickered gently with their grown daughter about what to keep and what to throw away.

But they were lucky people, and they knew it. When Nell couldn’t sleep the first night in their new abode, Harvey held her hand in bed till she drifted off with the aid of two Tylenol PM. They woke up the next morning to the chiming of the first clock they’d ever bought together in 1960, from a long-gone downtown department store.

Nell died in 2012, the not-quite-last chapter in their epic, 68-year romance. From his Air Force base at the start of the war, he had mailed her an engagement ring with a note that said, “Darling, now you know I am coming back to you.” He wired money home weekly so his mother could buy Nell an orchid to wear to church on Sunday. He named the single-seat P-51 Mustang he piloted Sulkin’ Susie in honor of Nell, whose middle name was Susan.

My newspaper columnist pal Regina Brett used to encourage me to write more stories like this — about ordinary people whose lives illuminate a cultural moment in time. The best ones are transition stories, in which people actively spar with the universal crap life throws their way, from aging parents to difficult children to the pain of losing your dream home. We should not be writing  for the politicians and officials, Regina said, but “for the waitress at Denny’s who’s been standing on her feet all day,”  and wants only to see a sliver of something hopeful, something real.

Harvey and Nell are together now, I’m sure of it, holding hands again and delighting in the holy hullabaloo of all those chiming clocks.

CARE FOR AGES

Roanoke Times, The (VA) – July 15, 2007

Harvey Wilbourne knows he’s a lucky man: Not every couple in their mid-80s get to move from their dream home into a comfortable — some would say posh — retirement community with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

This is what it looks like to be a privileged member of the Greatest Generation during a time when the average 65-year-old can expect to live another 19 years.

If you work hard and save carefully, if you win the lottery on matters of health and family, then it’s possible — though far from guaranteed — that you spend your twilight years perched in the catbird seat.

“They’ve had a great life with no regrets,” said their oldest daughter, Susan Gardiner, on the day of her parents’ June 25 move from their home in the Hidden Valley community to Brandon Oaks, a retirement center in Southwest Roanoke.

Harvey and his wife, Nell, have paid handsomely for a big apartment in a brand-new building, with one daily meal provided and the reassurance of nearby nursing care across the street.

Should they spill their coffee on the new white carpet, someone from the cleaning staff will arrive to shampoo the stain.

But Nell Wilbourne doesn’t feel so lucky. To her, the white walls and white carpeting imply a lack of personality. For months, she has struggled with the decision to move into a place she refers to — only half-jokingly — by its initials.

“I call it B.O.,” she said in March, shortly after they agreed to pay a $400,000-plus entrance fee. “When we built this house, I thought we would die here.

“But I guess going to B.O. is better than going straight to Evergreen” — the cemetery where many of her friends are buried.

‘We’ll keep each other’

The night before their June 25 move, Nell couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even turn over in bed. With her whole body throbbing, she thought she was having a heart attack. It was hours before she calmed down and got a grip on the real culprit: stress.

Harvey, on the other hand, had already sunk into a deep slumber, comforted by the sound of a much-needed rain. Mother Nature was finally taking care of his prized geraniums, something he hadn’t been able to do since the arthritis seized hold of his back.

They had held on to the old house for as long as they could, hiring a housekeeper and someone to mow the lawn.

But last September, doctors found a blockage in Harvey’s heart and rushed him into open-heart surgery.

Nell slept in his hospital room for two nights in a row. She had just given up driving, at the age of 86, and she was afraid to stay home alone at night.

Harvey viewed the surgery as a harbinger of things to come.

“If I had a stroke, she’d have a hard time getting back and forth to see me,” he said.

Their youngest daughter, Martha Cummings, invited them to move in with her family in Virginia Beach, but the Wilbournes couldn’t imagine reversing roles. As Nell put it: “We don’t want people to keep us. We’ll keep each other.”

They put their names on a waiting list for Westminster Canterbury, not far from Martha’s home. Westminster is a “continuum of care retirement community” — CCRCs, as they’re known — not unlike Brandon Oaks and The Glebe in Botetourt County. A burgeoning part of the elder-care industry, CCRCs offer full-service, till-death-do-you-part care that features independent apartment living, assisted living and nursing home facilities all on one campus.

Last fall, when one of their grandchildren moved to Roanoke, the Wilbournes reconsidered staying in Roanoke. It comforted them, too, that many of their former classmates from Jefferson High School were already at Brandon Oaks, where the three-story Dogwood Apartments, part of a major expansion, would open in May.

With entrance fees ranging from $94,100 to $430,000 — not including monthly fees from $1,673 to $4,363 — such options are beyond the financial scope of the average Roanoke-area retiree.

But Harvey Wilbourne had worked hard and saved even harder, retiring from Norfolk & Western Railway in 1980 when it was still Roanoke’s Big Daddy.

Although they splurged on golf, the Wilbournes lived simply. The ranch house they’d built 35 years before had its share of homemade contraptions, including a wall-mount phone that Harvey duct-taped to an end table beside his favorite chair.

And Harvey hadn’t just enjoyed the horticultural challenge of over-wintering his 75 geraniums in the crawl space underneath the house. It saved money, too, because he didn’t have to replace them every year.

With a railroad pension and a home that had more than quadrupled in value, the Wilbournes were able to pick from the priciest housing options, with the provision that their daughters would inherit 90 percent of the entrance fee upon their deaths. (In general, the less expensive the entrance fee, the smaller the refund.)

The deal was clinched when Brandon Oaks called to say an apartment was available on the northeast side with a balcony — perfect light for the begonias Harvey was planning to move with him.

But Nell was the hard sell of the two. “Look at the porch we have now,” she said in March, pointing to Sugarloaf Mountain in the distance. “Look at that view.”

A mile away, from the Brandon Oaks apartment balcony, she could make out the mountains if she squinted.

More prominent was the building that loomed from the other side of Brandon Avenue, that other portent of things to come: the Brandon Oaks nursing center.

And what would happen to all of their antique clocks? The couple had collected 55 in all, some dating to the early 1900s, including a favorite from an old train station in Ivor.

Their apartment at B.O. has room for a few, she said. “Maybe six if we’re lucky.”

Thinking of Nell

During their first two decades of marriage, the couple moved eight times for the railroad, where Harvey had worked his way up to department head.

When N&W moved him back to Roanoke in 1969, the longtime golfers joined Hidden Valley Country Club so Harvey could knock a few balls around during lunch. Every day, Nell made him a tuna-salad sandwich to eat at his desk so he wouldn’t waste his lunch hour eating.

It was during lunch one day when Harvey spotted the lot for sale. He nabbed it — for $6,000 — before the week was out. They paid $50,000 to have the house built.

It was a three-bedroom ranch designed to spotlight its location: The back yard spilled onto the No. 7 hole at Hidden Valley Country Club.

“7th Heaven,” said the homemade sign next to their Keagy Road mailbox, and to the Wilbournes it wasn’t just a pun.

Nearly every day for more than 30 years, the Wilbournes golfed from their back yard. On Saturdays, they hit 36 holes.

When they weren’t playing golf, they were watching it from their glassed-in sun porch. “Made with double-glass Thermapane windows,” he recalled.

A 14-year-old duffer once made the mistake of using a three-wood on the hole behind their house, sailing the ball smack into the glass. “It didn’t break, but he should’ve used a soft pitching wedge,” Harvey said.

The couple were adamant about golf and even more adamant about golf-course navigation: Carts were for sissies. Even in their early 80s, the Wilbournes walked the course — and usually together.

“We’re a duo,” Nell likes to say, their bond forged even before they married in 1944. As a World War II fighter pilot, Harvey flew a single-seat P-51 Mustang named Sulkin’ Susie in honor of Nell, whose middle name is Susan. He wired his mother money to buy Nell an orchid to wear to church every Sunday.

There was less than a 50 percent chance he would come back from the war, and in Harvey’s squadron the numbers were even more grim: Eight pilots from his original group of 32 survived.

“I’m coming back for you,” he wrote, before flying his plane overseas.

Harvey flew 83 combat missions over India, Burma and the Chinese border, shooting down four Japanese planes. Lately, he finds himself cogitating on those days.

“I guess it’s natural at my age,” he said. “I think about those pilots I shot down. They had families, too, I know.”

“Yes, but it was kill or be killed,” Nell interjected. “You know that.”

Between his clock-winding every Wednesday and Saturday, between his meal routines (a turkey-bacon biscuit every morning), between wishing he felt good enough to get back on the golf course — this is what Harvey does more than anything else: worry about Nell.

They’ve been married 63 years.

“We’re still so in love,” he said recently. “I know that sounds so corny, but it’s the truth.”

Moving day

It took six strapping young men from Virginia Varsity Transfer four hours to move just about all the couple’s belongings. The Wilbournes’ daughters came from their homes in Arlington and Virginia Beach to help direct traffic and to wrap pendulums from fragile clocks — and to persuade their parents to winnow down their stuff.

There was the rickety plant stand that had held so many geraniums: “Let Mom pick out a new one of those for your new balcony,” Martha said to her father. “Of all the things you have, it’s really one of the least attractive.”

Harvey relented, finally, but only because the stand held bricks to keep it stabilized, and he didn’t want the movers to have to haul bricks.

There were the chairs Harvey had nabbed years ago when the railroad decommissioned the Powhatan Arrow, its luxury passenger train: “Are you sure you want to take those old railroad chairs?” Susan asked.

The upholstery was ratty and dated, and most of their space at Brandon Oaks was spoken for already with other, better-looking things. (Susan and her husband are buying 7th Heaven to renovate and rent out and, in a few years, they’ll retire and move into it themselves.)

The train chairs remained behind, destined for Harvey-doesn’t-know-where.

There was the holey recliner next to the duct-taped phone: “That’s my knitting chair, and we’re not taking it?” Nell huffed, when Susan told the movers to leave it behind. “It’s my favorite chair.”

“But you’ve got no place to put it, Mom,” Susan reminded her.

Nell waved her arms, another battle lost.

“We’re not going to be very comfortable at B.O. without our old stuff,” she said. “I may have to come back here and spend the night.”

That afternoon, Harvey and Nell sat in the den of their new Dogwood apartment. The furniture looked crowded in the space — a fact duly noted by Nell — and when she reclined in her leather chair, as she is wont to do, it hit the wall.

She didn’t say it, but Harvey knew what she was thinking: The knitting chair would’ve fit better.

Sleepless again

That first night at Brandon Oaks, Nell couldn’t sleep. Which meant that Harvey couldn’t sleep. “I tried to see that she was settled in before I dropped off,” he explained the next day.

As they lay together in the dark, Nell whispered to him: “When are we going to go home?”

“We are home,” he said.

He patted her on the back, squeezed her hand.

The next day, the daughters returned to hang clocks and pictures, and then old friends — some from their Jefferson High School days — started knocking on their door.

The begonias were placed in the northeast sun, and the leather recliner, although it had never been her favorite, was pulled out an inch from the wall.

The second night, Nell took a Tylenol P.M. and slept seven hours in a row. She woke up to the chiming of a mantel clock — the first one they ever bought, circa-1960, from a long-gone department store.

Harvey had moved it himself the day before, still wound and running. Nine of the 55 clocks made the move.

The moment Michael Lewis first spotted the Oakland A’s naked, the germ of the megahit “Moneyball” began forming in his brain. What he saw was this: Fat rolls abounded on more players than not. There was a pitcher with two club feet. Not only was the locker room not a pretty picture of buff athleticism and six-pack abs, it was — most importantly — the counter-intuitive thing.

The fat rolls and dimpled cheeks presented Lewis with a niggling image he couldn’t shake, one that would lead to pure storytelling gold:

How the hell had the A’s cobbled together a winning team out of this holy mess?

For “Moneyball,” that was Lewis’s aha image — the lucky inspired moment that changed everything that came after it.

I had my own hair-on-the-back-of-my-neck book moment the first time I heard that John Bassett III had his factory workers deconstruct a made-in-Dalian dresser to prove that the Chinese were illegally selling furniture at less than the cost of materials. Furthermore, the gritty Galax furniture maker had surreptitiously traveled to the hollows of northern China, with a Taiwanese translator-turned-spy in tow — to find out from whence factory the cheap dresser came. That’s when it hit me: This was a much bigger story than a newspaper article, with tentacles stretching from the hollows of Virginia to the halls of Washington and, finally, to Asia and back.

Or, as my agent put it when he read my first proposal, “Holy shit, Macy! You’ve stumbled on ‘Moneyball’ — with furniture.”

On the eve of the release of his new book, the instant bestseller “Flash Boys,” Michael Lewis spoke Friday to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. I was in Phoenix at the same conference to talk about how one goes about turning an article into a book — from my own new fat rolls (gardnered via 420 pages worth of sitting down, to write “Factory Man”) to dealing with difficult story subjects.

Here are some takeaways from Lewis’s freewheeling talk, delivered breathlessly and cheerfully before he was ushered out of the conference hall for his next media event. (He wasn’t allowed to talk specifically about “Flash Boys” because “60 Minutes” had a story running Sunday and had embargoed the material. But since “Moneyball” had been my guidebook for “Factory Man,” which publishes July 15 by Little, Brown and Company, I really didn’t care. . . .)

1. GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR “BEAT”: The best stories come about when the subjects have no idea they’re doing anything special at all. In the Oakland A’s Billy Beane’s case, they were using data to make business decisions. . . about baseball. “A lot of business is boring,” Lewis said. “The people in it don’t even know how to explain it. People in sports don’t say, ‘Wow, this is just like making plastic.’ ” People who aren’t daily business writers, then, tend to see things beat reporters overlook. (He encouraged editors to turn reporters loose when they have a real passion for an off-kilter nugget stumbled upon on their beat. Even a boring subject can come alive if it’s told through an appealing character.)

2. ALWAYS LOOK FOR THE COUNTERINTUITIVE — the person or event that stretches the bounds of what’s normal in your subject arena: When Lewis first spotted the A’s naked, “I said to the front office, ‘They don’t look like professional athletes. And the second in command goes, ‘That’s exactly the point. We’re in the market for people who don’t look like baseball players. If they’re handsome, they’re overvalued. We’re looking for defective human beings who happen to play baseball.’ ”

3. HOW TO SLOW-COURT A BOOK SUBJECT: “Don’t ask to sleep with them on the first date. Don’t even kiss them.” He interviewed Billy Beane every day, for hours a day, for a year. (Beane didn’t realize he was the main subject until the book came out. His main objection to the book, though, had nothing to do with being misled: It was that his mother would object to his constant use of the word “fuck.”) Leave little crumbs of unanswered questions for later interviews. “You never want your subject to think, ‘How am I going to get rid of this guy? You train them to want to say, ‘He leaves before we’re done!’ ” The goal is to make you and your notebook invisible.

4. STORY STRUCTURE AND NOT NOT SCREWING AROUND: Lewis lays all his notes out — in paper form, not digital — on the floor. “It’s like a river full of rocks. I have to cross the river by jumping rock to rock to get to the other side. How do I get there?” The reporting never stops. He starts writing when he feels he has the first 30-40 pages formed in his head. He gives his publisher mini deadlines “and I hold to ‘em by the hour,” sending 60- to 70-page chunks at the end of every month. “And I gun for that deadline. I screw around without a deadline.”

5. DON’T BRAG ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW; BURY YOUR BABIES INSTEAD. A book isn’t an excuse for you to tell readers how much you’ve learned about the stock market or baseball or football recruiting. A book is ONLY a story. “When I’m done, I’ve hidden how much I know. You want your book to create the illusion that it took you two weeks to write it. You have to have a willingness to ruthlessly get rid of stuff.” Never say, “I interviewed 200 people,” pulling back the curtain on your reporting/writing process. “Don’t flip on the fluorescent lights over a candlelit dinner,” Lewis said.