By Lillian Brown, The Boston Globe
After a decade of reporting on air at Channel 7 and Fox 25 in Boston, where she covered everything from the 2004 World Series to Whitey Bulger’s capture, Sorboni Banerjee made the shift to Tampa, Fla. She still works as a reporter and anchor but has recently added novelist to her impressive list of credentials. “Hide With Me,’’ her debut novel about two teenagers on the Texas border, is out now. The Globe caught up with Banerjee, a Rhode Island native, ahead of her brief return to Massachusetts, and discussed the merits of fiction writing, in-depth research, and the young-adult genre.
Q. What was it like shifting from straight-up reporting, especially on air, to writing a novel?
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A. It was what I always wanted to do, and I actually got into news because it was a way to write stories every single day that were unfolding in front of my eyes. So I would bring the way that I wanted to tell a story to an actual real life event. And I love words so much and finding a unique way of putting them together to really, really capture a feeling. That was always the challenge that I would give myself reporting in Boston even. That’s the place that defined me as a reporter. I was a little kid still, to myself, when I think about starting at Channel 7. I was running around reporting for the night team, cutting my teeth on all these huge big crazy stories.
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Q. How long has this story been in the works for you? What was the process?
A. This story was actually really quick. I’ve written several different manuscripts before, and I had never really shopped them before. [For “Hide With Me’’], I layered in interviews with some border agents that I talked to. I also spoke to a couple different groups, some different social work groups in Boston ... who are helping rehabilitate girls who had been trafficked. And so that found a home in the story as well.
Q. Why did you decide to make the book YA fiction?
A. You know, I think it’s because it was such an important part of my formative years, because I was such a huge reader as a kid. The books that I love the most in my life, and had such a lasting impact, I read as a young adult. So I sort of go back to that as an author because I want to provide that same sort of introspection and thought process that I had to a teenager today. Especially in a day and age where you have teenagers coming together, more active than I think we’ve seen in lot of generations, fighting back against school shootings, fighting back against systemic racism, fighting back against [those] not thinking about the environment. They’re demanding greener products and sustainable practices, and they want to shop at businesses that are ethical. I feel like we have such smart teenagers.
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Q. Do you have the fiction bug now?
A. I do, I do, because I just believe in the beauty of a good story. It’s funny because my book would be described as commercial literary, being that it’s written to entertain you. So I wrote it in a sense that, we’re all so quick to shift our attention these days, and so I wrote it in a way that I hope kind of has the pacing of TV. I wanted it to be that same feeling, to binge a book, where you can’t put it down and read the whole thing in two days. And that’s what I love hearing from the people who have read it so far.
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