From a Guernica interview with Katherine Boo, author of Behind The Beautiful Forevers, on life in a Mumbai slum:
Guernica: Was it important to you to stay in the vicinity of the community?Katherine Boo: Quite the contrary. It was important to me, in the course of my reporting in Annawadi, day after day, night after night, to leave and get a sense of the city as a whole. It is a city that until eleven years ago was unknown to me, and is changing all of time, so I really had to explore it, learn about it. I certainly did a lot reporting around the five-star hotels as well as Annawadi. I did my whole anthropology of five-star bathrooms, each one more lavish than the next. (Laughs.)
Even if I were to stay in Annawadi or something like it, it wouldn’t be the same. After Hurricane Katrina, for instance, I did stay in the shelter [when] I did reporting for The New Yorker. But me staying in a shelter is not the same as someone who’s been evacuated to that shelter. This whole thing of, “I’m walking a mile in their shoes by living this certain way.” Well, I’m not living that way. I can turn around and leave. We can do the best we can to get to the core of people’s circumstances, but it’s ludicrous to think that my being in Annawadi all of that time is walking in their shoes. It’s not.
The quote in the title of this post is from a section on the feelings of guilt that haunt Boo when she thinks about how her work exploits people, especially poor people. The interview's a great read. (Found via LongForm.org, a great source for creative nonfiction / narrative journalism.)