You’ve probably never heard of Jada Yuan, but you’ve heard of the people she’s interviewed: Steven Spielberg, Taylor Swift, Mindy Kaling, Stevie Nicks.

I first read her work a year ago while doing research about Taylor Swift for an article I was writing. I’d read dozens of articles about Taylor by the time I got to Jada’s profile of Taylor Swift in Vogue, but hers was different. It was the first article that made me feel like I was actually in the room with Taylor Swift. Like for a moment I too got to sit with her a “burnt-orange velvet sofa” in a “sprawling two-story penthouse” surrounded by “jewel tones” and a “rosewood Steinway grand piano.”

Joan Didion says “writing nonfiction is…like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.” Jada is a sculptress who paints her clay once it’s been fired. (And what Wes Anderson was to Chloe, Jada Yuan is to me.)

In the Taylor Swift piece, Jada could have simply listed what Taylor was wearing.  Instead, she writes a scene and the reader decide what it means:

“…when I ask Swift who made her black knit tank dress, she has no idea…Swift turns to me for help. ‘I don’t know—do I have a tag in there?’ she asks, lifting up her fluffy fair hair and leaning her back toward me. rvn, the tag reads. ‘My stylist put it in my closet,’ she says, burying her face in her hands.”

The more I read of Jada’s work (from pop culture reviews to travel pieces to mini profiles of exonerated prisoners), the more I see that this is what she does. She doesn’t assume something is interesting because it’s well known or sounds dramatic.  It feels like she doesn’t want to waste your time, like she doesn’t write for a paycheck alone, like she wants to make sure she says something of value, like she wants to show you something.

I call Jada for an interview a few months after falling in love with her writing. She answers the phone and I tell her how much I appreciate her as an artist; she responds with an incredulous, “Really?” I don’t get the impression that her genuine surprise that someone appreciates her artistry is false modesty or a reflection of someone who doesn’t know her worth. It sounds more like someone who doesn’t always think of herself as an artist. I answer her “Really?” with an emphatic, “Yes,” and she explains her surprise a little more. “It’s weird being a journalistic non-fiction writer,” she says. “I’m in it, but I’m not really in it. It’s not like being a novelist and it’s just you on a page.” The “it” she’s referring to is her work.  And I know immediately what she means.

“It’s weird,” she continues,” I’ve never really thought of myself as a creative person, someone in the arts. I’m sort of on the periphery. I think that’s also what journalists are: we’re always on the outside looking in.”

But it’s what Jada sees when she’s looking that makes her an artist to me.

I tell her how I feel about her piece on the exonerated prisoners, a piece you could argue she wasn’t “in” at all, since she chose to let the prisoners tell their own stories. But I feel her artistry in the choices she makes, like to have them tell their stories in their own voice, and in the details she doesn’t edit out, like in Jeffrey Deskovic’s retelling of his experience on the day he was released from prison, after 16 years, for a crime he didn’t commit. See if you can spot my favorite detail, or better yet, choose your own:

“In the morning, when they opened my cell, they told me they were transferring me. I knew that that meant I was going to court…the guards wanted to put the handcuffs and the chains and all the manacles on me. And I asked them, ‘What are you doing all that for?’ That’s when they told me, ‘Well, the judge might change his mind.’ They brought me to the holding area in the courthouse in White Plains. Doubts start coming into my mind. They gave me this brown-bag lunch, which had like an apple and terrible sandwiches in it. One of them was just a dry cheese sandwich and the other was like a bologna sandwich and you could tell that things had been made early that morning so the bread was soggy. I initially put the thing aside. But as more time is going by, I start thinking, Well, damn, I might need this, actually. I might be going back to the prison afterwards, and by the time I get there, lunch is long since over. So I ate the damn sandwiches.”

I tell Jada how many writers might cut the description of the sandwich, how it could seem like an irrelevant or boring detail. To me, the sandwich is everything. It’s the artists in the world who help us see the sandwiches.

It also takes a special kind of interviewer to extract a well-told story like this, and most of all, to make someone feel relaxed enough to remember the sandwich, and to feel valued enough to repeat it.

To me, Jada is an artist because she sees the literary in the mundane. Because she doesn’t cut the soggy sandwich.

Jada wrote her first book in middle school. It was 40 pages, featured many vivid scenes in a haunted house, and took place in Nantucket. Sixth-grade Jada had never been to Nantucket. “I was an indoor kid in New Mexico,” she says, “all I did was read.” So she probably read about Nantucket once.

Jada didn’t plan on a writing career, though. Reading and writing were simply forms of play—ways to stay cool in the desert.

Jada won creative writing contests and wrote poems but writing was not the career path she envisioned. After high school, she majored in History at Yale University where she was assigned a writing tutor, Fred, the person she was supposed to see anytime she was struggling with a paper. By her own admission, that happened to her a lot. “I’d have five hours until deadline and I hadn’t written anything,” she says. “I would go in to see Fred and he’d be like, ‘Wow I’m really worried for you.’”

And yet, Fred saw something in Jada’s procrastinated writing. “At some point,” she says, “he said he thought I should take this non-fiction writing course.” Jada took two non-fiction writing classes and joined the magazine at Yale called The New Journal, where she was immersed in an intensive writing environment.“Everything went through 18 rounds of edits,” she says.

Jada enjoyed her time at the college magazine, but she didn’t feel any grand calling towards a journalistic non-fiction career. She graduated college and returned home to New Mexico without any idea what she wanted to do for a job. Her mom spoke up: “Well, you’re not living here for the rest of your life, so we’re getting you on a plane.  You can stay with your grandparents for a couple weeks in New York, and then you have to find an apartment and figure out your life.”

Following a vague interest in film, Jada started off doing a series of unpaid script development internships in New York. She found it fun, but as she put it, “I couldn’t live without any money.”

She started applying for any job she thought would pay the rent, walking her resume around New York. She decided to bring her resume to New York Magazine because of one of those innocuous moments that sometimes start entire career trajectories. “I’d never read New York Magazine,” she says, “I just went because my mom’s friend had it in her apartment and had said, ‘Why don’t you apply for New York Magazine?’”

So she added it to her list of places to drop off her resume. It turned out that around that same time an assistant at New York Magazine was leaving and they offered her the job on the spot.

Jada got a higher paying offer that same day from another job she’d applied for at American Lawyer. She’d done a law internship as part of her History major and was considering law school. She says applying for the American Lawyer job was her way of “ trying to be the ‘good girl’ I thought that I needed to be.”

But when she walked into the offices at American Lawyer she thought, “I don’t want this to be my life.”

Jada chose the New York Magazine job even though it paid a lot less than American Lawyer (and neither paid very much).

Jada spent the next four years “answering phones, filling out healthcare forms, writing contracts, and paying writers.”

There were many boring days with mundane work, but Jada was energized by the creative atmosphere. The assistants sat right outside the editors offices, and sometimes the editors would give them what Jada refers to as “tiny” writing assignments.

Jada took any tiny assignments she could. Then, a full-time writing job opened up.

But it went to an outside hire.

This happened again and again. Jada and her fellow assistants were crushed every time. Wondering when it would be their turn.

Then, finally an assistant was hired for a full-time writing job for the sports section.

But it wasn’t Jada.

“I was so mad!” She laughs as she remembers. “I was happy for her, but she got the jail break, and I didn’t.”

Jada was friends with the editor who made the hire, and was comfortable enough (and frustrated enough) to walk into his office and express her disappointment. His response: “I hate to tell you this but you’re never going to get that job. I’ve seen your sports listings. They’re great, but they’re twice as long as they need to be. We have to keep cutting them down. But you’re really good at interviewing people. You should just do that.”

Jada’s long profiles are what drew me to her. I love that her writing isn’t pithy. I love that she doesn’t take shortcuts to assuage our fractured attention spans.

But initially when the editor gave her this feedback she was not encouraged.  “I was so pissed off,” she says. “I spent another year doing the editorial assistant thing.”

The editor’s words stayed with her, though.“I took it to heart,” she says.

Then another full-time writing position opened up in the magazine’s party reporting section. It was still a short-form section, but it centered on interviewing people at various New York parties. Jada got the job.

She spent the next few years asking celebrities questions at parties. She eventually built a team of freelancers and interns. She worked until 4am most nights. Despite having a job that revolved around parties, her social life disappeared.

She started to feel like she was losing herself.  After a few years she thought “This cannot be my life anymore. I can’t do this.”

In addition to the constant late nights, she also grew weary from managing others. She realized: “I do not want to be the person who is telling people what to do.  I want to be the person who is seeing things and writing about it.”

Jada started looking for assignments outside the parties, freelancing outside of her main gig. “It was exhausting,” she says.

But over time, she started writing mini profiles and then that eventually turned into her getting assigned full-length features. “It was sort of gradual,” she says. “You start voting with your feet. You do the things you want to do and eventually those become the things you do.”

Three years ago, profiled Stevie Nicks. At the time, she wasn’t that familiar with Stevie’s music. So before the interview, she did a ton of research and emerged with a question that would guide her piece: Why does Stevie Nicks mean so much to so many women?

Jada spent the next four months trying to answer that question (she had to fight to keep extending the deadline because she was so dedicated to getting it right).

Jada rarely hears back from the people she writes about, especially celebrities.

After the article publishes Stevie Nicks plays a show nearby and Jada attends. Somewhere along the way she became one of those women Stevie means something to.

Jada knew from her reporting that Stevie dedicates “Landslide” to someone every night. “I would like to dedicate this song,” Stevie begins, “to a girl, a lady…Jada. She wrote the most beautiful article about me. She followed me around for three days. I thought, ‘She’s 35 years old, she doesn’t even…’ [but] come to find out that she got it. She got something that no one who has ever written about me has ever gotten. I’ll never, ever forget it. It lives in my journal.”

Jada cried. Jada’s friend who attended the show with her grabbed her phone and took pictures of Jada crying and then the people around them started asking,  “Wait, what? Is she talking about you?”

After the show Stevie invited Jada backstage. “Stevie Nicks is a beautiful writer,” Jada ays. “That’s why people connect with her songs.  She’s a poet.  So for her to see something in that piece was really special. I put so much effort into it. I really wanted to do a good job, and I had.”

Jada lived off that high for weeks.

Then there was a crash.

“This huge wave of self-doubt came through,” she says, “where I was just like, ‘That’s the highest it’s ever going to get.  Where do I go from there? I can’t top that piece.’ And I haven’t.”

She talked to her therapist about that, who gave her a baseball metaphor that Jada says helped her a lot. “It’s about batting averages,” she says. “The best baseball players in the world, they strike out. Every once in a while they hit a home run and that’s a great moment. But if you’re going to choose this to be your life, if you’re going to keep putting yourself out there, you can’t expect greatness every time. But you can expect some really satisfying moments, and you just have to keep working toward that.”

Plus, she says, “writing is a compulsion. It’s  just the way I am. I can’t stop it, so I might as well go with it. And the great thing about writing is you can always go over a sentence again and find a word you can cut or find a different way to say something. I do think there’s a time when you should let it go and just be happy that it’s out in the world, but the process of learning how to be a good writer, you can go the grave working on that.”