Old Newspaper Clippings

The King's Man: Donald (Doc) Giffin

The job defies a description. I was a newspaperman when I met Arnold. By 1966 he needed a personal assistant [and] asked me to work for him. I have a drawer in which I put anything I consider pertinent to Arnold — articles, newspaper clippings. I'm not overly literate electronically. Arnold has an iPad, but I'm old-fashioned. I almost feel like a brother to Arnold. I'm still going, but I'm not going as strong. Yet I intend to keep working. It's not like we have a logical successor.

PALMER ON GIFFIN: I do have an iPad! Doc has done everything — taken care of my press relationships; any time we had books or anything to write, I'd give him the lines and he'd write the stuff. Sometimes he gets wordy, but he's very good. There are things he knows about me that no one else knows, and that's the way it should be. He better not retire. I don't know what I'll do when he's not around."

• Golf Magazine's Jobs Issue: Read all about the various behind-the-scenes jobs that make the golf world run day in and day out.

Rebecca Skloot on narrating history: “looking for that one family ...

When you turned the book in, what were your hopes for it, and have they changed given its success?

My hope when I turned the book in – which I think is the hope of any writer when they turn their book in – is that it would get out there into the world. I know so many writers who’ve spent decades of their lives working on books that are incredible and that don’t ever get press coverage, or the book just doesn’t take off because of the time of year that it’s published or because of the other books published at the same time. There are so many factors that are out of the writer’s control.

I knew all that going in, but for me, the story itself – just the facts of this story – were so incredible, I always felt like if I could get them out to people, if people could read them and learn this information, they’d have the same reaction I did, which was “Oh, my God. I have to tell people about this.”

As a writer, one of the things that I thought a lot about and that weighed on me as I wrote and revised was wanting to do justice to the story. The simple facts of the story and the narrative of the story are so amazing that I felt in some ways like the only thing I could have done was to screw it up. And so much of my job was to take this incredible natural story and tell it in a way that let readers experience it in the way it really happened, to bring it to life as much as I could while staying out of its way.

And now that you’ve met your original goal?

My hope is that it keeps going. I’m thrilled that it’s still on The New York Times bestseller list. How many months out are we? Like six months – so I’m thrilled that it’s still there.

A lot of people say, “So now that you did this, what’s next?” But I’m still working on this one. I still feel like it’s part of my job to keep it alive and get it out to more readers.  I’m moving the day after tomorrow, and I’ll take a few weeks to settle down. And then I’m going to be on the road once the academic school year starts, basically September through December, talking about the book at schools and doing events.

Henrietta Lacks’ story has been a part of your life since you were a teenager, and you’ve researched her life and its aftermath for more than a decade. Were there ever crisis points at which you doubted your story, or wondered if you would actually be able to tell it?