When my hubby and I planned a visit to New Orleans a few years ago, a few people we knew asked if we’d be doing the ‘Katrina’ tour through the worst-hit parts of the city, i.e. the 9th ward.

We don’t do “disaster tourism”. And by that I mean touring places just to see the residue of suffering. It can be a fine distinction, to be sure. In Belfast, Ireland, we embarked on a Black Cab tour to some of the sites of The Troubles, so that we could gain a better perspective of them beyond our impressions from the news coverage over 3,000 miles away. The tour was very sensitively conducted, by a fellow who’d lived through them and helped us understand the conflict and what drove each side of it. We came away with a new appreciation of how we’d react in the same circumstances, perhaps just as violently.

But to tour the 9th ward, where people were just trying to rebuild their lives, as if they were a theme park attraction? Hell no. We saw the fringes of it from a brunch cruise on the Mississippi, and given how far below the water level those homes are (behind reconstructed barriers), the impact of the levees breaking must have been horrendous.

Other people’s misfortune shouldn’t become the subject of an art exhibit. Or a companion book!

When I recently came across an article that reviewed another article about an art exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of photographs immediately post-Katrina, of soaked homes about to be condemned, filled with the moldy remnants of the inhabitants’ lives, I was blown away. Both by the writing and the subject.

Aspiring writers often ask on social media how to become good writers. I steer them towards exactly this kind of writing. Great books aren’t the only source of inspiration – there’s some fantastic journalism out there. I haven’t read John Updike’s original article, but I’d agree with writer Leblanc’s assessment of it as such. Her own family home was destroyed in the hurricane, along with a lot of memory-filled possessions. And I’d go even further to say that the photographer and the museum turned the Katrina disaster into a kind of spectator sport.

This subject is personal to me too. Many years ago an arsonist torched my parents’ house. They survived, thankfully, but the house was gutted. Although the police never caught the perpetrator, we had our suspicions.

My parents’ property backed onto a small street in behind that was possibly a service street when the turn-of-the-century house was built. And one day, while I was sorting through blackened possessions in the back yard, two women were walking by and stopped to gawk at the house. Either they didn’t see me standing there or they didn’t care. I yelled at them, and they left. When you’re going through something that deeply personal and painful, gawkers just make it worse.

So today, just a few days past the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I offer you a sample of masterful writing, free to read, on the perils of reviewing a disaster exhibit from the distance of unfamiliarity and privilege. What John Updike Got Wrong About Katrina