The author has remarked in an interview with the Georgia Review (summer 2019) that the two hardest books he wrote were the book about the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide entitled "Our Father Who Art in Hell: the Life and Death of the Reverend Jim Jones" (1981) and the book about his handicapped daughter, Hillary called "Fragile Innocence" (2006). About the emotional difficulties of a writer dealing with difficult material, Reston wrote an essay, also in the 2018 summer issue of the Georgia Review, entitled: "The Novelist's Event: Fact, Fiction, and a Writer's Search for a Universal Subject."