In Down Around Midnight, Robert Sabbag revisits the plane crash—and the aftermath—he survived 30 years ago.

Why write this book 30 years after the crash?

With one or two minor exceptions, I've learned about things while writing about them. I guess it was a creative decision as much as anything to write about something that only I know. Somewhere after I finished reporting the story, I realized that I'd spent the past 25 years not writing about it.

Was this the hardest thing you've ever written?

Without question. But at the same time, it was very rewarding because it was challenging. I haven't enjoyed writing a book as much as I enjoyed writing this one since my first book [Snowblind, 1976], when I was just starting out. And probably for the same reasons—in many ways, it was a brand-new experience for me.

Sometimes you don't press your interview subjects, including survivors, for answers. Would your approach have changed if you were an outsider?

Yes, I think it may have. I felt what I owed everybody who was in that crash was their privacy if they wanted it. These people don't owe me anything. This is their book as much as it is mine. Maybe that's the spirit in which it was written. I felt a tremendous responsibility to these people in writing this story. They didn't go out looking for attention; they didn't volunteer to have their experience publicly scrutinized. To the degree they were willing to help me, I felt possibly this was everything they were going to say about that night to anyone. My responsibility was to make sure that their story was told in the way that they wanted it to be known.

Are you still in contact with the survivors you interviewed?

Since I established contact with them, I've been talking to them, up until a few weeks ago, to do rewrites and research. I don't know if that will become a long-term friendship—none of them live close to me. Once the book is released, it'll be interesting to see what it does to their lives and how they respond to it and whether it brings us together in other ways.

Now that the book is done, has anything else been settled with the past?

That's a wonderful question, one that I think I'll be asking myself for quite a while to come. Things have changed as a result of my having written this book, though I'm not quite sure I can put my finger on it yet.