The woman who had to become a journalist Review
In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin, by Lindsey Hilsum, Chatto & Windus, $55. Reviewed by Jill Dougherty.
In the autumn of 2011, I caught a glimpse of foreign correspondent Marie Colvin at the Radisson hotel in Tripoli, Libya. I noticed the black patch on her left eye first. But there was something more that made me pause. The previous month, rebels seized the capital from the forces of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and journalists had turned the hotel into a kind of media centre. Anvil cases of broadcasting equipment clogged the corridors; correspondents and crews hustled from room to room writing dispatches and doing TV live shots. In that adrenalinecharged atmosphere, Colvin seemed like her own force field, radiating energy but centred, as if she just belonged there.
In this magnificent and moving biography, In Extremis, Lindsey Hilsum, international editor for Channel 4 News in Britain, captures the clashing extremes of Colvin’s life: a disciplined journalist who often missed deadlines; a woman of extraordinary courage tortured by personal insecurity; a role model for aspiring journalists who, when the assignment was over, often drank herself into a stupor.
As a young girl, Colvin was ‘‘on the hunt for causes,’’ Hilsum writes. She was born in New York City, one of five children in a ‘‘lace curtain’’ Irish American family. Her father, Bill, was a high school English teacher with an unfulfilled dream of becoming a journalist. He died of cancer at age 50. Colvin, then 21, was grief-stricken, but she had learned a lesson. She wrote in her journal: ‘‘LIFE IS TOO SHORT.’’
Hilsum calls his death a turning point for Colvin: ‘‘She realised that she didn’t just want to become a journalist; she had to.’’
A course in non-fiction writing at Yale taught by John Hersey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, changed her life. Years later, after serving as UPI Paris bureau chief and then star correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, Colvin reflected: ‘‘It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars.’’
Colvin’s personal life was a war zone as well. She was married twice, was deceived by both husbands, had several long-term affairs, felt no compunctions about one-night stands. She suffered miscarriages and was never able to have a child. Her mother once told one of Colvin’s suitors, ‘‘My daughter is unmarriageable.’’
In Extremis painfully chronicles Colvin’s spiral into depression. She was eventually diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and some treatment helped, but she was never treated for alcoholism. As Hilsum vividly explains, ‘‘She could not unsee what she had seen, and he [a colleague] feared she was losing her ability to distance herself from horror.’’
The sad irony was that Colvin’s editors believed it was precisely her passionate, on-the-edge reporting, for which she sacrificed personal peace and risked her life, that sold more papers. Eight years before she was killed, the executive editor at the Sunday Times suggested she stop reporting from war zones, return to London and become a columnist. She began seeing a psychiatrist and seemed on a path to recovery, yet she was consumed with anxiety and self-doubt. She went back to drinking and to war zones – Afghanistan, Libya, Syria.
Colvin, Hilsum says, ‘‘was easy to love and hard to help.’’ She was wounded in Sri Lanka, covering the war of secession by the Tamil Tigers. The rebels opened fire with a rocket-propelled grenade. A chest wound almost killed Colvin, and shrapnel hit her eye. The rebels rushed her to a local hospital where doctors saved her life, but they could not save her eye.
Reading this book is painful. I thought about her and about other war correspondents with whom I’ve worked. At the end of my brief assignments, I always went home. For them, something in that chaos, and pain, and horror, kept pulling them back.