“This is where the magic happens,” says Sarah Koenig, with more than a smidgen of irony, as she opens the door of the wooden shed at the bottom of her garden in Long Island’s Sag Harbor. You have to stoop slightly to enter, and once in you could almost touch the walls with outstretched arms. Against one leans an old pub sign that once belonged to Koenig’s mother, depicting a fox. At the back hangs a large map of the world drawn by her 12-year-old daughter, who is away at camp this week along with her brother, which means that Koenig has been free to work. On a small desk sits a notepad covered with scribbles; on the wall next to it hangs a small blackboard on which a series of words are spelled out: “Carol. August. Garage.”
“I should probably get rid of this,” says Koenig, rubbing out the words on the blackboard. “Maybe I’ll remove this as well,” she says, turning over the notepad, its Biro-written hieroglyphics the only clues the world has yet seen to the story Koenig has been working on for the past few months, and which will form the basis of season two of the massively popular podcast Serial, season one of which investigated the murder of a Baltimore teen. It turned the podcast from nerd curio to full-blown national obsession. If, during the autumn of 2014, you saw a friend looking a little raccoon- eyed and sleep-deprived, unable to talk about much except the likelihood that the call to Nisha from Adnan’s phone on 13 January was, in fact, a butt dial, which means that Jay was probably alone in the car, thereby exonerating Adnan of murder, then chances were they were another Serial addict.
“The kids are constantly asking me if I’m famous,” says Koenig, as we walk back up to the house, an old shingle cottage, the outside of which is scattered with assorted family debris: a clock awaiting repair, a skateboard, a pair of bikes heaped on top of each other. “They’re like, ‘Are you famous, Mommy? Are you famous? And if you are, then why does everything seem exactly the same? Why are you the same pain-in-the-ass mother that we had last month?’”
Wearing a denim skirt, white linen shirt and Birkenstocks – adjunct-professor chic – Koenig is an easy blend of self-deprecating humour and intellectual rigour, the kind of person whose high standards, combined with an overriding sense of fairness, lead her to be a little tough on herself, you suspect. By nature she is something of a pessimist. A few weeks before the first season of Serial aired, she wrote to around 20 family and friends, saying: “You know that case I’ve been talking your ear off about for the last year, I’ve been doing this podcast about it, it’s launching October whatever, I hope you guys will listen. If it sucks, we’ll just never speak of it again. We’ll pretend it never happened, delete it, goodbye.”
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Since its broadcast, the first season has been downloaded over 90 million times. It is the Citizen Kane of podcasts – Koenig aced the form on her first try, which perhaps accounts for the blend of naivety and artfulness that went into its construction.
“I thought that no one would listen. It was a little under-the-radar project. I was totally fine with that,” she says, as we sit down to lunch in the shade of overgrown ferns and hydrangeas. The house itself stands out from the clapboard perfection of its neighbours by dint of its air of messy, lived-in bohemianism; the first thing she does upon picking me up from the bus stop in town is merrily decry the Wall Street “assholes” who have invaded the area with their SUVs. Koenig has lived around here since her English, Tanzanian-born mother left her father, a famed advertising copywriter, for the novelist and Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, whose books crowd Koenig’s shelves. Pictures hang on the walls in higgledy-piggledy fashion. A tin kettle sits on the stove. A New York Times lazily spreads over the breakfast table. You would never guess that this is the nerve centre of the most eagerly awaited journalistic serial since Dickens visited Newgate Prison. Naturally, Koenig can divulge none of the new season’s secrets.
“Nothing,” she says. “Sorry, I can’t.”
“You can confirm that it’s not a crime story,” I say – something her publicist had let slip a few days earlier.
“Here’s what we can confirm, it’s a very, very different story. That’s all I can tell you.” Did the story come to her, I ask, as a result of the first show’s success? She smiles sympathetically: she understands what it is like to be a journalist facing a shut door. “I’m sorry, I hate to be coy and I feel like we’re playing a 20 Questions thing that I don’t want to do. I would say it comes out of the interest of the producers of Serial, truly. It’s something we’re all interested in. And have been for a while.” She will say, though, that her team is working on both season two and season three, due to run in quick succession, and yet she cautions, “We’ll see where that goes. I’m not convinced that’s going to hold, but we’ll see.”
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