TL;DR
Alexievich's oral-history method argues that truth comes not from a journalist's efficient editing but from letting people slowly say what they can barely face themselves.
The Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich wrote books about Chernobyl, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the fall of the Soviet Union. None of them has a protagonist. All of them were assembled from thousands of hours of recordings of ordinary people's own words: women who served in the Soviet army, people who lived through World War II as children, mothers of dead soldiers, villagers evacuated from around the reactor.
What a journalist cuts out is not the truth
In the interview she tells her questioner that if you cut straight to the part you need, the way journalists do, the result is neither interesting nor true — or at least not the whole truth. Her job is to scour away the banality and push people back to their real selves.
The truth tends to hide inside rambling. You have to ask, but mostly you have to wait.
Sometimes you have to merge two people
When a speaker might be identifiable, she combines two people's stories into one. She insists it is still nonfiction, because it reflects what people actually told her at the time.
What you remember from the book is not the year Chernobyl blew up. It is the newlywed wife saying that back then they still walked to the shop holding hands.
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