Motherhood Quote by James McBride

McBride is describing interviewing as a kind of double-entry bookkeeping: you log facts, but you also track the emotional exchange that produces them. The line’s slightly tangled syntax matters. He repeats “you have to” like a drummer keeping time, because the discipline he’s talking about is repetitive and conscious. Objectivity isn’t a personality trait; it’s an act you perform moment to moment, especially when the subject is close enough to blur your vision. “Even your mother” is the tell. It’s not a throwaway example but a warning about intimacy as a distortion field: familiarity invites shortcuts, assumptions, and the soft censorship of not wanting to hear what might complicate your story of the person.

The subtext is that interviews are negotiations, not confessions. “Objective space” sounds clinical, but McBride immediately undercuts any fantasy of detachment by pivoting to strategy: “the best way to get the information.” That phrasing admits an uncomfortable truth about reporting and storytelling: information is often coaxed out, not simply offered up, and the interviewer’s job includes reading temperament, fear, pride, and silence. There’s an ethical tension humming underneath: seeking truth without turning the conversation into extraction.

Contextually, this fits McBride’s larger project as a writer who moves between memoir, biography, and fiction with a reporter’s ear. His work often depends on people whose lives have been misheard or flattened. The quote reads like field advice, but it’s also a credo: respect the person enough to step back from your own needs, then respect the truth enough to ask in the way it can actually be spoken.