Irish journalist Sally Hayden has covered war and humanitarian crises across the globe, seeing the grimmest of the grim: political violence, uprooted families.
But that’s not all she’s seen.
“This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter’s Search for Goodness in a Cruel World” book coverCourtesy of Sally Hayden
The title of her latest book says it best. It’s called “This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter’s Search for Goodness in a Cruel World.” In Ukraine, Rwanda, Sudan and beyond, Hayden has witnessed how love compels people to persevere under the most horrific circumstances.
Hayden recently spoke to The World’s Host Marco Werman from Beirut, where she’s covering yet another war, and shared that she’s been thinking about this book for a long time.
“I guess I was struggling just with what I had seen even in my first few years doing this job, just violence and atrocities and cruelness,” she said. “And I wanted to remember that there was goodness in the world and that humans have the capacity for goodness. So, in part, I was just trying to remember that it exists, but also it wasn’t that hard to find stories.”
Marco Werman: So, your first chapter sets us in Ukraine, with couples trying to sustain their relationships amid war and separation. Tell us about Irina and Sergei and what their relationship revealed to you about love under extreme pressure.
Sally Hayden:Yeah, so, I went to Ukraine in 2023. I was actually there for Christmas. And I had reached out to people whose partners were on the front lines. So, not every chapter is about romantic love, but in Ukraine I specifically wanted to look at romantic love and after the full-scale invasion what that had done to relationships. And so, I wanted to meet the partners of people who were fighting, and Irina was one woman who basically just volunteered to spend hours with me talking about her relationship and about her love for her husband Sergei. He had volunteered very early and had been fighting pretty much ever since. She was first drawn to him because he was so handsome with a mustache like Salvador Dalí. And yeah, they fell in love very deeply and then were kind of torn apart by this full-scale invasion. And she wanted to speak about what that had meant for them, but also issues around, for example, trauma, like him facing trauma when he comes back. It’s difficult to be around crowds. She never knows when he’s going to get leave. Her loneliness, as well. And how she’s coping with that.
A couple comforts each other while looking at the fire in a residential building after the attack of Russian drones in Kyiv, Ukraine, Oct. 26, 2024.Alex Babenko/AP/File
Sally, you write about how difficult it is when soldiers return home from the front line and have to readjust to civilian life before leaving again pretty soon. What struck you most about how these couples express love, both together and when they’re apart?
It’s not just in Ukraine, but I’ve seen it elsewhere. Now, we obviously have more technology for people to stay in touch with each other. It makes it easier in some ways, but I guess more difficult in others, because it means you might worry more when you’re not hearing from them. And yeah, I think that they find different ways. Like, Irina was talking about the codes they have between themselves, jokes, sending photos and things like that.
So, codes like Sergei and Irina use red lipstick to put on a brave face.
Yeah, Irina basically talked about how much she had struggled after the full-scale invasion and how difficult that period was for her. She said that she had talked to Sergei and he had said, “Well, if you can’t find some happiness, then what are we fighting for? What’s the point of resisting this?” And he basically said to her, “Put on your red lipstick, go out, dress up, have a good time, send me photos.” And they ended up with this code, “red lipstick,” about finding a way to live amid this and enjoy yourself. And she actually told me she had a photo album of her wearing red lipstick, so if he asked for a photo, she could just send it because she would be feeling sad and depressed, but she just didn’t want to say that.
The idea for your book came in 2018. But do you remember the first instance in your career as a journalist where these narratives of love in the background of a crisis weren’t just apparent, but kind of struck you as being perhaps the more important story of that conflict?
And then on that same trip, I met what are called artificial families. So, it was groups of young people who had lost their family members in the genocide. They had a father and a mother appointed and children, but they’re all the same age. It was basically a support network. They’d meet up like once or twice a week, and the father and the mother would be like, “Are you studying? Do you have any problems?” And I was pretty much the same age as them.
Ten years later, while working on the book, I tracked some of them down and found out what had happened, which people can read about. But I think that, again, coming across those two stories very early in my career was probably quite influential and something that made me think it’s important to look for these details in terms of goodness and kindness, because a lot of these people are facing choices that many of us could never imagine.
I’m glad you mentioned the Rwanda chapter in your book because it shows how you see the definition of love as being expansive. It goes beyond romance.
Yeah, certainly. And I mean, I think that my personal definition of love isn’t necessarily expressed. I see love as an action. I think everywhere in the world we’re bad at talking about love. Some people are good at it, but many of us, including myself, are bad at it. And you don’t necessarily tell people you love that you love them all the time; you show it through actions. And I think that I also define love as just being good, even towards strangers, you know, love towards humanity. That’s how I see it, and I see it every day in my work.
Another really wonderful example of non-romantic love you describe is your story about Bassam [al-Sheikh Hussein], a Lebanese man who robbed his own bank during the country’s economic collapse a few years ago to access his savings and care for his family. Why did that feel essential to this book’s larger theme of love?
Bassam is basically a Lebanese man who raided a bank in 2022 after the Lebanese economic crisis. People’s savings were seized by the banks and people who had worked for their entire lives, everything was pretty much gone.
An armed man Bassam al-Sheikh Hussein, 42, background, speaks with a security officer after he took hostages inside a bank, in Beirut, Lebanon, Aug. 11, 2022. A hostage standoff in which a gunman demanded a Beirut bank let him withdraw his trapped savings so that he could pay his father’s medical bills ended seven hours later with the man’s surrender.Hussein Malla/AP/File
Yeah, he had about $200,000 in US dollars in the bank and could only take out $400 a month.
Yeah, I mean, they had a very limited amount they could withdraw, but it was pretty much gone. And his father needed medical care, and he decided that he was going to raid a bank and try to get out his own money. And the unexpected impact of that was that he became a national hero. So people were like, “He’s not the thief, the bankers are the thieves, the politicians are the thieves.” And so, I think that story was quite well known at the time, but there were some factors I started noticing: There were more bank raids after that, and many of the people carrying them out were looking for money to help family members, particularly with medical care.
Does his family see him as a hero? How are they doing today?
His father has passed away. And as you know, there’s war here in Lebanon, and they’re definitely affected. But yes, his family definitely sees him as a hero.
Protesters with frozen bank deposits holds placards outside a court building during a protest calling for the release from detention of Bassam al-Sheikh Hussein, who held hostages in a bank last week, in Beirut, Lebanon, Aug. 16, 2022. Hussein, a food-delivery driver surrendered last Thursday after a seven-hour standoff in return for getting $35,000 of his money and promises that he would only be questioned then set free.Hussein Malla/AP/File
So, as you said, you’re back in Lebanon reporting on another war now. Your first time there was in 2016, and anyone who visited around that time might remember it as you describe: a playground for the rich, rooftop parties until dawn. Today, Beirut is in the crosshairs of Israel. Many have fled the city. I mean, even before this latest round of violence, the city was still traumatized and in disrepair from that massive port blast in 2020. How has love changed in Beirut?
In the book, at the end, I reference finding a photograph of a couple at an airstrike site, which had them kind of posing, and underneath were the words, “Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it a meaning.” Like, already I’ve had some feedback on the book from people in Lebanon, and they’ve said they’re grateful, at least the people who’ve talked to me so far, because they feel like a lot of the time these stories and this human cost, it gets stripped from, again, from the international understanding.
You’re the perfect person to ask, Sally. What is it about our business of journalism that treats stories about love and care often as secondary to stories about violence, politics or conflict?
Hopefully, it’s not too much about me at all, but it is also a bit of a reckoning, given that I’ve been in the journalism industry for more than a decade, particularly as an international reporter. Yeah, questioning “have I contributed to dehumanization,” and “how does the media quote statistics, for example, or press releases more than human experience and human stories.” I think a lot of that does come down to time, space and capacity. Obviously, journalism has been in crisis for quite a long time, but I do question, in the book, whether the world could be a different place if more stories were told through the prism of love. I do think that’s a conversation I would want to start.
Yeah, so whether it’s this book that triggers it or just generally, how often do you manage to convince your editors that on any particular day, it’s a story of love as a form of resilience that you want to file?
It’s a tricky question because there are also so many things that we have to cover, you know, in terms of just new developments. And if there’s an atrocity that takes place, you don’t want to not cover it. We need to cover it because people need to know. So, it’s also about time and capacity, isn’t it? But yeah, I like to think that editors do support this type of reporting and will support it in the future.
You’ve said you wrote this book to remind yourself that, amid the heartache and bloodletting of war, there is still goodness in the world. So, let me ask you: Did it work? Did it help you see the world differently?
It’s not to say none of the other things exist. There is cruelty, and there’s goodness and there’s beauty, and there’s terror, you know, and all of these things can coexist. It’s just that sometimes we lose sight of the good parts and only see the bad. And yeah, I think that I certainly reminded myself of that.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.