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Writer’s Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform.
What happens when the person you love doesn’t exist?
This week on Writer’s Voice, I talk with Carlos Barragán about The Yahoo Boys, his investigation into Nigeria’s romance scammers, which began with his own mother’s experience.
“Sometimes behind a perpetrator is another victim.” – Carlos Barragán
Then, Howard Mansfield joins us to discuss Invisible Monuments, exploring why some memorials move us, why others don’t, and how we remember the past.
“It’s a back and forth between the monument and the person who’s visiting.” – Howard Mansfield
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You might also like: Howard Mansfield, THE HABIT OF TURNING THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN & more, Howard Mansfield, CHASING EDEN
Carlos Barragán on The Yahoo Boys: Inside Nigeria’s Romance Scams
His mother thought she’d fallen in love with an American soldier. Carlos Barragán discovered that the messages were coming from Nigeria.
That experience eventually took him to Lagos and became the starting point for The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers.
I talk with Barragán about the young people he met, the false identities they created, and the hours they spent giving strangers the attention they were missing. He explains how romance fraud works and why someone can suspect a relationship is fraudulent yet struggle to let it go.
We also discuss the economic pressures surrounding the scammers, the communities that benefit from their money, and the Nigerians who reject what they’re doing. Barragán describes people whose circumstances deserve careful attention, even as their actions devastate others.
One of the most revealing parts of our conversation concerns his own reporting. After months with the scammers, he began to worry that he was adopting their view of their victims. He had to step back and listen to people on the other end of the phone.
It’s a searching conversation about online deception, loneliness, and how to understand people without excusing the harm they cause.
Howard Mansfield on Invisible Monuments: What Makes a Memorial Matter?
We put up monuments to remember. Then we walk past them.
In Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past, Howard Mansfield asks why some memorials become places of connection while others barely register.
I talk with him about the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, where the discovery of graves made the history of northern slavery visible. We discuss the struggle over how to study, honor, and rebury the people whose remains were found there.
We also explore Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Mansfield describes how its design brings visitors into a personal encounter with loss, and how the letters and objects people leave become part of its continuing life.
Our conversation turns to German memorials that challenge visitors to imagine what’s hidden beneath their feet, and to the Clock of the Long Now, designed to run for ten thousand years. What might change if reminders of that future stood in our town centers?
Mansfield asks us to consider who gets remembered, what monuments can convey, and where their limits lie. He also brings us back to the present, to the moments of attention and awareness that can make us feel most alive.