The story seemed like a natural—poor Midwestern gal marries much-older man who gets rich launching one of the most iconic brands in the world, then gives all her husband’s fast food loot away in wild acts of radical philanthropy. Especially since one of the places that received that loot was NPR—three letters that make publishers go ga-ga because of the high literacy rate of listeners.

Turns out: prejudice against fast food trumps adulation of public radio. (Unless you’re trashing the former.)

Fast food had nothing to do with my attraction to the story of Joan Kroc. What sparked my interest was Chain Reaction, this 26-foot tall sculpture of a nuclear mushroom cloud that sits beside Santa Monica’s City Hall—a work created by the Pulitzer-prize winning editorial cartoonist, Paul Conrad, who, in his spare time, made statuary.

As a self-appointed arts reporter at the public radio station KCRW, I’d heard this artwork was in a precarious state. I arranged to meet local peace activist Jerry Rubin to learn more.

At one point in our interview, I asked why the city of Santa Monica didn’t just return to the original funder of the piece to ask for help in restoring it.

“Turn off your mic,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

The work had been gifted anonymously years before by someone whose name he was sure I’d know. Joan Kroc, he said carefully, as if someone nearby might hear the words. She’d been a big no-nukes activist, silently funding various efforts to call attention to the hazards of nuclear arms.)

In an instant, I found myself bit by the bug I would soon learn afflicts all biographers. I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman I’d never met, her motives, and wanting to know her backstory. But for some superficial obituaries in various newspapers which repeated much of the same data points, there wasn’t much.

It would take years of digging through archives, sleuthing out players in her orbit, to stitch together her full story. Surely every editor in publishing would share my fascination at the backstory of the woman whose name they heard each day on public radio.

I was wrong. A fleet of crushing rejections ensued.

Months later, licking my wounds and wondering what to do with all this research, I learned a movie was being made about the creation of McDonald’s. A dear friend slipped me the screenplay, which featured….Joan (albeit with many factual errors.)

After recasting my proposal with the bit about the upcoming film in the very first line, and tweaking the 90 page proposal to include more detail about the history of fast food, we had several offers.

Dutton, it was.

There’s so much more to say about the amazing doors that writing this book, publishing this book, talking about this book publicly, have opened for me. Behind every book is another book, and the facts associated with this one were in many ways, life-changing—particularly in terms of the cherished, lasting relationships it led to.

But the reality was, McDonald’s fans don’t necessarily equal book-buyers, and my ode to Joan petered out. Meaning: It didn’t lead to fame, fortune, bestsellerdom, or anyone interested in turning Joan’s story into a movie or documentary or some such. (I did, however, achieve lasting infamy by talking about Mickey D’s on some TV show that runs in the middle of the night, which I have never seen, which others feel the need to screen grab, and send my way.)

In fact, I wound up publishing the paperback version of my book on my own, which smarted.

Then, last week, I salvaged this email out of my spam. Proof that books do have a long life, even if publishers only treat the big bestsellers that way—and evidence that readers are out there paying attention.

Or, at least this one.

Someone who reads the acknowledgments is my kind of nerd!

More on what happened at the library in another post, another time.

As she walks through the building’s eerily vacant halls, she proclaims, “We’re driving down the cost of rents and mortgages by turning vacant offices into new homes…Now the old World Trade Center that’s been sitting vacant for years is becoming 512 homes, 100% affordable, right in the heart of downtown.”

What the impending conversion has to do with driving down rent and mortgage costs, Bass doesn’t explain.

Since even before it opened in 1975, the World Trade Center has, like the neighborhood around it, been a political football.

LAT/January 13, 1972

As hundreds of old homes, rooming houses and businesses on Bunker Hill were seized under eminent domain in 1961 and mowed down for the creation of a new city center, a concrete impresario and engineering professor named Edward K. Rice jockeyed to fashion tons of the material into a shopping mall on newly available land.

LAT/1962

The parcel at Figueroa and Flower Streets, bound by 3^rdstreet on the north, 4^th on the south, and bisected by an alley called Sack, had been home to rooming houses, apartment buildings, a few restaurants, a hotel and a gas station. It was valued at the time at $2.4 million.

Six months in, as construction was underway, Rice announced a switch: His massive concrete block atop six levels of parking was to be not a shopping center but a “World Trade Center.” He slapped up signs that said so.

“Dramatic growth over the last five years has established Los Angeles as the largest center of world trade and the largest financial center in the western United States,” he explained to a reporter in 1973.

The city of Los Angeles and the Chamber of Commerce were broadsided by the news. They’d been angling to build their own World Trade Center–initially at the Port of Angeles. When that got mired in a conflict of interest and bribery scandal, they set their sites on a 3.5 acre parcel on Figueroa Street between Pico and 11^th–an extra stretch deemed not necessary for the convention center then under construction.

Mayor Sam Yorty announced that a 1200 room hotel, office tower, small exhibit center and parking garage dedicated to international commerce would be built on the site. NYC was erecting its own World Trade Center, so why not LA?

A tug of war ensued. “It’s outrageous, unconscionable that the developers went ahead—without letting us know,” said Neil Petree, President of the LA Convention and Exhibition Center Authority Commission. But since no one owned the words “World Trade Center” no one group could lay claim to them.

Eventually, Rice relented and changed re-dubbed his development the “LA International Financial Center.”

After the city realized it couldn’t fulfill the idea, after all, Rice re-installed his original signs and kept on building.

Was it retribution in 1975 when he was sentenced to 30 days imprisonment for adding an unpermitted $232,000 overhang on the top floor of his building? For about a thousand dollars in fines, he skirted jail time.

By then the building, replete with lavish landscaping in interior courtyards and a thousand square foot bas relief “history of commerce” by artist Tony Sheets, had opened for business. Guy Tozzoli, the head of the World Trade Center in NYC, flew in for the opening ceremonies and decreed that Los Angeles had become the most important center for world trade on the West Coast.

Tenants included:

a currency exchange, passport processing, a travel gadget store, Pepperdine’s World Business Institute (which offered classes, including an International MBA,) customs offices, shipping agencies, the Brazilian Consulate, the British-American Chamber of Commerce, a publicly accessible business library, eight tennis courts, a sauna, a whirlpool, an “international dentist” and the American Salonji bookstore, which purportedly showcased the largest collection of Japanese pornography available in the United States.

Another key feature: Rice’s glitzy 21,000 square foot International Club featuring private dining areas, a cocktail lounge and a “cosmopolitan reading room” boasting racks of worldwide periodicals. Staff at this private club were said to speak a combined 14 languages. The restaurant offered so expansive a menu that the manager said a person could dine there 115 times and not repeat a dish.

The World Trade Center also was to offer a permanent home for the all-volunteer Les Dames de Champagne, a “group of women who love Los Angeles and want to do it proud.” That translated into arranging last-minute luncheons or entertaining the wife of a visiting ambassador. (The Dames previous headquarters was Statham House in Holmby Hills, famously known later, after Hugh Hefner purchased it, as the Playboy Mansion.)

LAT/May 1, 1975

While the concrete Center a block east of the Harbor Freeway now lit up with activity, the “tunnel to nowhere” controversy emerged. Rice and other Bunker Hill developers had received abatements in exchange for the use of space for the construction of a tunnel in which a Disney-esque “people mover” would allow for easy travel downtown. Ultimately, it failed, but a series of 10 elevated walkways called pedways connected the buildings instead—including the Bonaventure to the south and the Sheraton Grande across the street to the west--creating a trash and maintenance issue that lingers to this day.

LAT/March 2, 1986

In 1979, Rice tired of the experiment and sold the building to Equitec Properties for $24 million—far less than the $30 million it took to construct it.

In 1987, Haseko of Tokyo became the third owner, vowing to fix up the air-conditioning system as tenants had begun to leave.

The Koreatown-based Jamison took the faltering building off that company’s hands in 2004 for a reported $51.7 million.

Then, in 2018, the city approved the building’s reincarnation as luxury housing as a 41 story tower apartment building with 570 apartments and amenity decks was announced—impressive, but half the size of a new tower approved around the same time for across the street at the site of the former Sheraton.

Then, of course, came the pandemic—and the fall and subsequent imprisonment of City Council Member Jose Huizar on racketeering charges involving various downtown developers.

Jamison had already begun clearing out tenants from the building—lapsing the lease on the tennis courts that had long been operated by the nearby YMCA and more recent tenants like the charter schools whose students filled the building with life.

It almost feels like the World Trade Center was destined for its recently announced reincarnation as low-income housing. For that, the city could have left what was there over 60 years ago.

-

After disposing of the contents of his beloved house on Hickswood Road in High Point, North Carolina, and then, the house itself, I began to comb through his papers. Some were tucked away in a filing cabinet in our mother’s home, remnants of our childhood in 1970s Flatbush, Brooklyn. Some were files, in various formats, that I found on his computer.

Screenplays, teleplays, some complete, others, fragments. Scratchy notes filled with ideas and character development in his distinctive handwriting conjured up our long-ago pre-digital correspondence.

All of it brought him vividly alive.

It was no secret to me, big sister to James, that my brother was a frustrated creative. Turns out one secret he had kept was just how much he’d been writing over the course of his life—over a thousand pages.

As a child, when he wasn’t watching movies at the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue, perusing comic book stores in Bay Ridge, or chomping a slice of pizza from one of the thousand joints anywhere in the borough, he’d channeled his painful shyness and frustration with school into a novel and short stories.

Long before word processors, much less computers, our mother helped him type the pages. As his foxhole buddy and only sibling, I’d been asked to read and review his wild, meandering opus, Mr. Paul. He even went to the trouble of copyrighting the work, but never—that I knew—had he shared it with anyone else.

Decades later, as I dissected the pages in my grief, my own unmistakable handwriting leapt out—my attempt at offering edits and suggestions on James’s romp through the Flatbush streets that provided the backlot of our youth.

When I’d read Mr. Paul long ago, I had no idea about the Beats and I doubt James as a teenager did either. But reading it today, the wry, alienated, acid trippy stream of consciousness smacked of Bukowski.

My sixteen-year-old brother wrote disaffected characters like a malcontent middle-aged pro with a lifetime of disappointment under his belt.

“And when you’re old enough, you’ll go and get a job where you’ll stay your whole life, and you’ll get a wife, and have a family. And when you’re thirty or forty you’ll look at your miserable little life and say, “Hey was it worth it? Was it worth it?” And you’ll look around you, you want to inflict some pain this time, and you’ll look down at your little son. who’s greatest worries lay in not hitting a home run when he’s up at bat, and, “Jesus Christ, Daddy, this new math is impossible!” and it’s your turn to fuck up someone’s life and you’ll do it to your very own son, you say no now, but you will, trust me, you will. And maybe you’ll spend the rest of your life looking at the world from a bottle, or just come home, kiss the little woman, and blow your fuckin’ brains out, that will get him, Mike, that will mess him up pretty bad. Yeah.”

Content aside, that a restless teenager focused so hard and long on such a tedious endeavor as writing a novel takes my breath away—especially knowing how few would-be writers of any age ever manage to elevate an idea from concept to fruition.

As an adult, James had—in his time off from his day job as an audio-visual technician—produced two short horror films from scripts he’d written. After the thrilling rush of production, he’d encountered the frustration so many artists face: It is one sort of trial to make a movie. It is entirely another to get it out into the world, to find an audience.

Even a voracious consumer of films and television programs such as James—the kind of person who effortlessly rattled off the names of directors and cinematographers while eloquently dissecting the nuances of season four of a streaming series versus season five—didn’t quite grok the enormous, foreboding complexity of the Hollywood myth-making machine. Likely, it’s why he never ventured into the business himself.

Because he adored and admired me, who he saw as fearless and invincible in the way only a baby brother could, James assumed I could crack those worlds on his behalf with a snap of a finger.

Would that I could be so powerful.

That’s why this collection is so important to me, in addition to being a bittersweet remnant of the monumental and untimely loss of my only sibling, who suffered so tremendously.

The writing contained in this volume, and on the associated website we’ve created to carry what couldn’t quite fit in print, amounts to James’ life’s work. It offers insight into his mind and worldview better than any diary or biography ever could.

In “3:25 on the M Train,” he shares the tortured fears and disappointments of a child encountering a being less fortunate than himself.

His “Dirty Laundry” captures and lampoons the madness of the local television station, WGHP, where we both worked long ago in High Point.

(Watch for the depiction of a ball-busting TV news producer—yours truly—and note that mockery of the news business specifically, and media in general, appear frequently as themes in his work.)

With “In Greensboro,” he begins to sketch out a seminal, dire moment in the history of the city we both lived at one point and revered.

(That’s one I dearly wish he’d finished.)

The descent of the titular character in “Candie” into the dark side is palpable and wrenching.

The crusty, bombastic, sarcastic, and politically incorrect exterior vividly expressed on many of these pages was his shield against the world. His disease further aggravated his point of view and his embrace of the violent and macabre. Not only did he love consuming horror films and thrillers, he loved dreaming them up.

To wit, one plot line, never developed, in his files: A dangerous sexual predator targets a number of women on a cross country late night flight.

(Amusing, since James was terrified of flying.)

Innately, my brother was a sweet and giving soul who commanded us, at life’s end, to “help other people.”

Even if you find the darkness and debauchery here challenging to wade through, just by having this book on your shelf, sharing it somehow with someone, or taking a look at the works on the website, you’re helping me and our mother, Jane, to honor another of my brother’s last wishes:

To tell his story. To keep his memory alive.

And that, of course, is the essence of life-writing.

My life as an Angeleno began at the sprawling Downtown Marriott Hotel on the southwest corner of S. Figueroa and Third Streets. This was where my soon-to-be-employer put me up for my job interview and subsequent training.

In that winter of 2003, the hotel (built as a Sheraton Grande in 1983) was bustling with life. Maybe you went to some event there, or the bar, or the arty Laemmle Grande 4-Plex in the base of it. Or maybe you just knew it from this music video, which over 90 million people have viewed:

(VIDEO)

The studios of my employer, the public radio show Marketplace, were nestled on the second floor of a campus-style office complex then called Figueroa Courtyard, built in 1979 on the northwest corner.

Our neighbors included the Associated Press and Agence France Presse—along with the California Community Foundation, One Legacy, the LA County Bar Association, UCLA Extension, and an early outpost of StubHub.

Having been downsized from a job two years earlier, I was happy to have this new one—even though it meant moving across the country and working wildly erratic hours.

Since I was on my own and certain I’d be transferring back east after a year, I rented an apartment across the street at the northeast corner in the complex then known as Bunker Hill Tower Apartments, built in 1968. Whether I was expected at work at 1am or 4am or 7am, this meant I could wake up a half hour before and scamper across S. Figueroa Street or over it on the elevated pedway.

It also meant easy access to a spectacular swimming pool—a major plus, as lap swimming had become as necessary to me as air.

Another pool as well as plentiful exercise classes and community could be found a few blocks away at the Ketchum YMCA, which I sometimes visited twice a day. (Since I wasn’t wasting time commuting, I had plenty of time to exercise.) A tiny bit further south, down the Bunker Hill Steps, was easy access to another essential ingredient in my life: the Central branch of the LA Public Library, which I used most every day.

To get there, I crossed other elevated pedways through the World Trade Center on the southeast corner, passing the magnificent Tony Sheets mural, waved to the security guard at the desk, and connected thru the brutalist Bonaventure Hotel over to the gym.

Thanks to proactive networking and a public-facing job, I made friends in my new city pretty quickly—aided by the fact that every Friday evening, I opened the door to my one-bedroom apartment for an open house.

Even people who knew nothing about downtown—or who studiously avoided it— showed up. They’d marvel at the view:

Early on, a partygoer clued me in to the troubled and fascinating backstory of this slice of downtown.

1963 v 1985: 3rd Street looking east from S. Figueroa (William Reagh)

Bunker Hill, it seemed, was the Los Angeles version of Sim City. Decades before my arrival,133 acres of old Victorian houses and apartment buildings had been mowed down in the name of “urban renewal.”

The swimming pool, the apartment buildings, the hotel, the World Trade Center, the office park: All had been part of a master plan.

Surely, this person said, there are ghosts all around you. Perhaps. Devouring the history became my holy spirit.

And yet I also rooted in the present, as the landscape around me continued to evolve:

A federal courthouse rose and blocked my view of the deco façade of the LA Times building. A Colburn school addition. Grand Park. A team of German construction workers became our neighbors and by day affixed the cladding on the new museum, the Broad. A new subway stop tangled out the foreground of my otherwise spectacular view.

A gerrymandered city council district meant a new representative, a man who gladhanded his way around the neighborhood—and who, it turned out, I correctly deduced was suspicious.

A billionaire from China bought the Marriott, renovated it, turned the movie theater into a pricey private school for international students, and announced grand plans for a soaring tower.

A charter school moved into the World Trade Center, whose owners announced a similar, grandiose expansion plan.

And my own personal expansion: “I” became a “we.” When I met my love at (of all places) the library, he made this neighborhood his own.

One day, a notice came from the landlord, an offer I soon learned was nicknamed “cash for keys.” You move out of your rent-stabilized apartment; we’ll give you a pile of (taxable) loot.

With every refusal came an increase in the sum. Neighbors bit and began to disappear. We stayed put in the unrenovated apartment as everything around us was fancied up.

All this activity brought new life to the neighborhood. Streets activated, becoming vital and full of promise.

And then:

The ugly scandal of our city council member, Jose Huizar, began to unfurl.

And a deadly pandemic shuttered the entire world around us.

That former Marriott became a homeless shelter. Now, with its owner a convicted criminal on the lam back in China, it’s an empty shell—a totem to the past.

Marketplace and all those other tenants left that office park, where you could now rent an office suite for a song.

The charter school’s gone from the World Trade Center, whose owners have just announced they’re converting at least part of the building into low-income housing.

Despite the cosmetic improvements, the apartment complex slipped into seedy.

And so, four years ago, we moved—around the corner.

I still get to swim in the same swimming pool.

-

What do you see that makes you say that?

What more can we find?

I’m sitting in the board room at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Downtown Los Angeles, a few blocks from where I live, with 20 grade school teachers who are taking time out of their summer vacations to attend a four-day workshop.

We’re learning about Visual Thinking Strategies, a decades-old technique for looking at art.

The idea is that by asking students those three questions—rather than drowning them with a list of data points about an artist and their work—you’re encouraging critical thinking, listening skills, social skills, emotional awareness.

Not just in art, but in all types of learning.

So what am I doing in this group of educators?

My friend Jeanne Hoel, associate director of education at the museum, likely issued me this invitation in response to one I’d issued her a few weeks earlier.

In a funk about the dire state of Los Angeles generally and more specifically, my corner of it, I found myself this summer creating a walking tour of the amazing public art I have passed by every day for decades now.

Rauschenberg, Calder, Graham—six of them!A—diSuvero, Nevelson—and more.

These works, if displayed in a museum, would be worthy of the ticket price. But here in just a few blocks surrounding where I live, they’re available, outdoors, for 24/7 viewing….free.

The buildings around them are storied, too: Three Gehrys in a row, three by AC Martin, a massive courthouse by Paul R. Williams, the Music Center by Welton Becket. Oh, and MOCA itself was designed by Pritzker prize-winner Arata Isosaki.

As I’ve been researching these individual histories lately, I’ve also realized that, strung together, they tell the story of this corner of downtown, Bunker Hill, too. How, around the time was born, the acreage on which I live and on which this artwork and these buildings sit were mowed down in order to make a new, modern Los Angeles.

Sitting in the galleries of MOCA with these teachers, learning the good gospel of VTS, I realize something else.

My little art tour isn’t just a bit of PR for an embattled neighborhood—my way to see the goodness and also to fill the time.

It’s also a memoir.

Hear me out.

I’m not necessarily saying I could write a memoir about my life in Los Angeles, a place I’ve reluctantly called home for some time now, and tell it through the artworks and the streets I trundle through each day. But, maybe I could.

Perhaps less literally, does looking closely at the art all around me, hidden in plain sight, create a new structure for organizing my ideas about storytelling, about my self, about my place here in downtown?

What’s going on in this picture? What am I seeing that makes me say this?

VTS got me thinking. That’s what I’ve learned on my summer vacation.

“I’m looking for a place to put all this,” she says, meaning all the varied layers of her long, eventful, pioneering life.

She starts by asking me a logical question: “How do you work with people?”

First, I say, she has to answer a question for me: What your intent is with this project?

As she begins to form her thoughts, I realize she hasn’t quite thought that part through. All she knows is she wants to write a book, tell her story.

Does she wish to find a traditional publisher? (If the answer was yes, I’d get ready for my auto-speech: This is gonna be a hard sell. Because in 99% of all cases, it is.) But, she doesn’t quite think that’s the direction she’s headed.

Is the idea to collect experiences for the family? (Yes, she says, and for unspecified others who might learn from her experiences. This is often unacknowledged code for a completely understandable impulse: I do want people out there in the universe to know about me, and to remember me, so maybe I do want a book out there that’s traditionally published, after all.)

Some people who find their way to me, I tell her, have already written something that needs focus, editing, or some kind of input. (One man actually arrived with a biography-in-progress that I deduced was masquerading as a memoir—although he ultimately didn’t agree.)

Others have no idea where to start, and no interest in writing a word themselves. All they know is that friends have told them for years that they should “write a book.” It’s funny how people who don’t even read books see someone with an interesting story as needing to write one!

Then there are people like the potential client who wanted to memorialize his mother, who was still living, and her estimable career as a witness/participant to 1960s pop culture history. The mother wasn’t so sure she wanted to do that, but her son was desperate for his children to know more about her life.

“The thing is,” he said, “They’re in their twenties. They don’t read.”

Why not take the vast repository of photographs and art he mentions she has, and do an Instagram biography, I suggested? Or record the matriarch in a series of video or audio interviews, to capture her voice and her stories, for the family to watch when they do, some day, show an interest?

That’s me, memoir whisperer, putting myself out of business.

Why do we write memoir? We are called, at a certain stage of life, to commemorate the life we’ve lived—in the hopes someone, somewhere, at some point, will want to know more about it.

“Perhaps what’s I’ve experienced is useful for someone?” said this most recent would-be client, hopefully.

But just as not all memoirs will find traditional publishers (nor widespread audiences) I’m increasingly convinced that not all memoirs necessarily need to be in the form of a book.

Maybe all those news stories about how no one likes to read entire books any more are seeping in to my psyche.

Another conversation I had lately, with a friend of a friend who hoped to write a memoir, re-enforced this. The way this person was telling stories had me thinking: She’s got great timing and presence. These stories would make a terrific one-woman show! This person also showed me arresting photos she’d taken outside a business she and her wife had run for quite some time, which was the centerpiece of the prospective memoir.

She seemed disappointed when I suggesting telling the tale on stage or visually on social media rather than in text.

The irony is that if one takes to social media and creates a splash and amasses some kind of following, it’s far easier to sell a book (you already have an audience of prospective buyers!) than if you’re just another person with a life well-lived.

More and more these days, I’m loving living as much as I’m loving writing. (And, brainstorming with people about how to tell their stories—though, at less than a nickel a pop, that’s not paying any bills.)

*Has anyone else noticed that people seek input, and then roundly reject it? A former professor asked me for “honest feedback” on her memoir, whether she should re-structure it or “just put it into a drawer and forget about it.” After I gave what I thought was a constructive (and tamped-down) review, she told me I’d offended her!

In this case, in addition to fielding condolences from friends and readers as if a relative had died, the next two days turned into a post book-promotion book promotion.

.
Back in 2020, Abrams published my book Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN & the Birth of 24-Hour News. I happened to have started my career at CNN many moons ago and later worked on the air at MSNBC with many former CNNers. I, like many others, encountered Ted in the break room in the middle of the night; he lived at headquarters when he was in between wives. But I never knew him personally.

My book was not at all a memoir of the early days of CNN (there was little earthshattering about a working-class girl from Flatbush going into the TV news business!) but because the story of how CNN began was wild, untold, and seemed a critically important one to recount in the age of polarization, fake news, and a proliferation of news sources that was unimaginable back in 1980 when the network launched.

(It took a while to find a publisher because what most editors wanted was a duke-it-out story about CNN and the other cable networks that arrived long after its creation. And then, when I did, we published into the pandemic...but that's a whole other story.)

When I began receiving media queries the other day, I knew had died. From the CNN Alumni page, I was aware that he was gravely ill; people already had begun sharing fond reminiscences, so the sad news didn’t come as a surprise. But now, in dripped requests from news outlets eager for a quote or to fill airtime. (Ironically, that always-on universe, where 'experts’ blather forth on all subjects, was unleashed by Ted himself.)

Most of the obituaries and public eulogies extolled Ted the liberal, swashbuckling-journalist-on-a-crusade-to-unite-the-world, when I knew that Ted, long before his Jane Fonda days, was actually someone who hated news and thought news was a waste of time. CNN was a business opportunity brought to him by people frustrated by the dominance of the then three broadcast networks, and he seized the moment because he wanted to plant his flag in the emerging business of cable TV programming. Not because he wanted to revolutionize and democratize news, and certainly not to weaponize news as a political tool.

Here I was now in a position to speak publicly about a just-deceased man whose early life and career and antics I knew better than most (simply because I'd exhaustively researched and studied it.)

Now, most of the live TV & radio interviews I did (even one on CNN itself) were brief and superficial, as is the nature of those beasts. While I was speaking, I was balancing my respect for the fact that a human had died, a human who, in addition to being a father and grandfather and environmental steward/philanthropist, happened to be a billionaire who essentially changed the media landscape—with the true backstory. The diplomacy of facts leavened with what was a personal, somber moment.

Then, of course, were Ted's words himself. Various people quoted from his various memoirs, which didn’t always explain the whole story. Naturally, journalists would turn to these, the next best thing to quotes from the source. What so many journalists don't realize is how massaged memoir is, particularly celebrity memoirs done in collaboration with ghostwriters, and how biography is rooted in deep archival research by people who unearth material even our subjects might have forgotten.

They also don't realize that you aren't terribly likely to get a measurable bump in book sales by talking about your expertise on TV or radio for free. (The economics of books, especially years after they're published, is another of those other conversations for another time.)

All the while in this unintentional book tour book tour was something I learned when I first started writing books (my first was a memoir, about helping to start a radio station in the Kingdom of Bhutan at the dawn of democratic rule, and there’d been hackles raised by my depiction of some of the people I’d encountered.) That something is what I have heard biographers talk about frequently in interviews and at conferences since, and that is:

WRITE ABOUT PEOPLE WHO ARE ALREADY DEAD. ;)

Of course, you hope when the book first gets published that everyone and anyone will want to talk with you—preferably on the widest platform possible—about your work.

Your first mistake would be thinking that will lead to book sales.

I began to notice this while tooling around with my first book in 2011. (I don’t use the word “touring” because that suggests perhaps all the stops I made, and as a rookie I planned out many, were arranged for and paid for by the publisher. Unlike with famous writers, they were not.)

For many people—and this was long before the AI-addled, gnat-like attention span that’s cobwebbed even the greatest of brains—simply hearing an author discuss a book….is as good as reading the actual book! (Just like reading the headline is like reading the news.)*

On book two, published in 2016, this was even starker, particularly since an unaffiliated movie launched around the same time as the book which meant I spent a lot of time debunking the factual errors in the movie. Apparently, people pay attention to movie details better than they do in books or newspaper articles.)

And who knew, nearly ten years later, with that book out of print, my having purchased back the rights and republished to keep it out there, I’d still be doing that?

Though I never intended to become expert in the French fry or fast food, I had to to write that book, and actually have lots to say about the devolution of fast food from its humble beginnings.

In our podcast-crazy world, and in this world where “articles” in “news publications” can be cut-and-paste jobs of 200 words, there’s a hunger for “free content.” Which is somewhat okay, because I, like most any author, have a hunger for keeping people interested in my work.

This explains why twice in the past two weeks I’ve agreed to interviews on two different podcasts I’ve never heard of. (Note: I haven’t heard of most podcasts, because I don’t listen to any.) Of course, there’s no compensation offered (although for the one that insisted I schlep into a studio, I did ask for and receive transportation. And a cuppa coffee once I got to the studio—though I had to request it.)

“I’m going to do this story anyway, we’re not licensing your book the way we would in a movie,” explained that producer, “but I’d love it if you talked to us.”

The implicit part of this equation which these podcast folk don’t understand is that appearing on a podcast doesn’t yield book sales and even if it did, you’d have to sell a LOT of books to make it really add up. (I’m not going to even attempt to explain book advances and publishing metrics here, because it’s an adjacent point.)

All of this was okay compared to the documentary producer who recently assigned an “archival researcher” to ask if she could “pick my brain” (code for: share what you learned, for free!) about navigating the archive that was crucial in the writing of my fourth book.

This was after said documentary producer “soft-optioned” my book (meaning no money, because he had none) and then somehow once he managed to scrub together a bit of loot….hired an archival researcher who knew nothing about the subject instead of engaging *me. (No, I did not consent to have my brain picked in this case.)

What’s the point of writing a book in 2026? First you hope you find a publisher—a big if these days—and then, maybe a few readers, and then you’re really lucky (say, if you write about French fries) maybe you’ll graduate to “free content.”

*To be fair, when I was a broadcast journalist, I engaged in this practice myself. We filled time by interviewing authors about their latest work, or, after pub date, by interviewing them about their area of expertise to punctuate some story or other. A treatise about broadcasting’s reductive if all-powerful nature…another time. Perhaps.

At a book talk a few months earlier, I’d heard the estimable author Amanda Vaill discussing her latest, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. As the only person on earth who has not seen the megawatt Broadway musical, and as someone who dwells too much on more contemporary history, the story of these sisters of Alexander Hamilton’s wife was new to me.

At some point, Amanda mentioned their hairdresser, a formerly enslaved man named Pierre Toussaint, who’d been brought to New York in 1787 and freed in 1807. A few additional compelling biographical details followed: He became a philanthropist, continuing to work so he had more money to give away, directly to individuals but also by establishing the Catholic Charities of New York. He helped other formerly enslaved people buy their freedom. He is the only layperson whose remains are buried in St. Patrick’s. A movement began decades ago to canonize him, one of the few Black Catholics in this country to be so recognized. The idea that this man coiffed the hair of rich white ladies was in itself compelling. The things he must have seen and heard!

Kernels of ideas present themselves when you least expect it; here I was listening to a biographer discuss her latest compelling work, and I zeroed in on this fascinating supporting character.

Afterwards I asked: Why hasn’t someone written a book about him? They should, she said. He deserves a contemporary biography.

It felt almost like a dare. And so, a lost biographer in search of an elusive subject (after four books on subjects that came so easily to me), I dug in, jumping into Step Number One of the process:

What books had been written in the past? And when? The first was in 1854. Then, in 1981. Another in 2003. In other words, there wasn’t a lot out there about Pierre, which was good news and bad news. I started by reading the first.

His papers rested in the New York Public Library, just blocks south from the resting place of his remains and as much a church to me as any sanctuary.

And so, I went through the motions to request to see them. If nothing else, I told myself, I’d have gained access to the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room. Some people run marathons around the world; others visit every possible National Park; some feel the need to enjoy the world’s best restaurants. For me, it’s always a thrill to enter a new library, particularly a research library, which, for the uninitiated, is nothing like what you probably think of when you think of “library,” where you saunter in and grab a book off the shelf. There’s a particular theatrical protocol to a visit that involves registering, requesting materials, making a specific date, checking your belongings in a cubby but for a laptop and a phone with which you can (usually) take pictures. Then there’s the decorum and silent camaraderie of the room, where you are surrounded by other researchers who are consumed by whatever documents they’ve come to review.

The papers of Pierre, and his wife, and his adopted daughter, are so old and fragile they’re presented to researchers on microfilm, which the librarian handed to me in the Astor room before sending me back out into the main reading room where I would find a microfilm reader. Another librarian kindly helped me spool the first reel. And as soon as I spun through the first few pages, I realized exactly why I won’t be Pierre Toussaint’s next biographer.

Many of the papers, mostly letters, are in Pierre’s native tongue: French.*

As I did at the Cathedral—when a sweet guard explained to me that Pierre’s actual grave was in a part of the building that was now off-limits unless you pay a pricey admission fee for a tour that was often booked—I only felt momentarily deflated. For the investment of a few hours of my life, I’d learned about an incredible person and a bit about his life and work, plus, I got to spend some time in a purposeful visit (rather than a random touristy drive-by) of two storied altars.

Though my affair with Pierre was short-lived, I’m glad I got to know about him.

*Years ago, when I’d learned about the friendship of MLK, Jr. and the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, I thought: Now, that would be an amazing book. It was another one I felt ill-equipped to write, given that I don’t read Vietnamese. Sure, as with Pierre, I could hire someone to translate. But I think I need to stick to my “wheelhouse,” as some people say, the mid-twentieth century, with a vein of the media’s influence.

Back before that dark turn in my reading life, I found myself transfixed by Boyle’s wild story-telling (although at this point, so many years later, another thing I can’t tell you why or what besides the arts colony did the transfixing, but for the idea that people gathered in a place to create alongside one another sounded diametrically opposed to the zoom, zoom, zoom life I was living at the time in and around the news business as a freelancer enthralled me.)**

A few months ago, much to my surprise, I was invited to apply to an arts colony, albeit one with which I was not familiar. Could I really be considered a“literary artist?” I’ve never been part of any of the literary circles here in LA (heck, the local paper has never even reviewed one of my books!) What am I at this point, anyway, with my newly minted M.A. degree, my once-exciting career as a journalist and my overly practical nature? Over the years, as I’ve watched fancy writers receive fancy fellowships and awards and residencies, it’s never occurred to me to toss my name into that world, just because I never felt the need to sequester myself somewhere to get stuff done. (Though I had visited glorious Banff to check in on my friend, the Dutch artist Ine Poppe*** and in the process met a fellow resident, the composer Diego Vega, who immediately became and remains a dear friend.)

Since I’m pretty off the radar (ie. non-existent) from my once relatively highly-visible (and audible) perch, I was honored that anyone cared what I might be up to or might contribute to this place, which happens to be the glorious Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California.

So, I bit the invitation, and was delighted to learn I made the cut as one of the Literary Artists chose for the Lucas Arts Residency there.

What I proposed was the idea of a Life-writing Lab to be conducted at the Arts Center for visitors, aware that I am that people who frequent such places are (not to generalize) typically older and accomplished and thus the types of people who wish to leave legacies in the form of their stories for the next generations. What better Petri dish in which to play around with the few memoir-writing workshops I’ve taught so far? and also to hob-nob with artists in other media who might inspire me to think outside the Text Box in which I find myself so self-contained.

Of course, the best part is that no one’s holding me to what I proposed, so maybe I’ll keep working on my graphic novel about a certain cat and a dog who are part of my life (no! I can’t draw! I’d have to hire someone for that part) or the arts tour of my weird sliver of Downtown Los Angeles where I’ve lived far too long, or who knows what. Something, anything: Please, muse, are you out there?

Hooray for me. I’ve needed some good news to kickstart me beyond the wild threads of ideas I’ve been pursuing. Now, let’s see what comes out of it. Knowing me, I’ll become arts colony den mother and wind up cooking for and counseling/cheerleading my cohort more than making anything of my own. Which wouldn’t be so awful. And wait, maybe that was somehow a sub-plot of that T.C. Boyle novel I read long ago…

*At this stage, I can see the similarities of comradeship at a workplace with parallel artistic expression at an arts colony more than I could then, but that’s another story.

**It was around then I also learned about and became transfixed by the idea of a kibbutz. I guess as a young person in the pre-digital universe, there was something supremely compelling about people coming together in community.

*** Ine and I met in a field in Almere, the Netherlands in 1997 at Hacking in Progress, what was then the world’s largest outdoor non-military Ethernet installation, more vernacularly described as a hacker’s conference. I’d love it if you read some of the stories I wrote for The New York Times about this most wondrous experience (at a most wondrous time at the Grey Lady, long before the exceptional work that’s being done online there today. Above is a picture outside of my tent, which I carried with me from NYC—evidence of the only time I’ve ever camped. Well, maybe there was one or two other instances, but I think I blocked that out of memory.)

I was on some flight to FL or NY or back to LA, as I too often am, and I was plowing through David Halberstam’s 1979 masterpiece, The Powers That Be, interwoven histories of CBS, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and Time magazine.

In my post graduate school haze, I was desperately seeking a mammoth read, meaty and delicious, to rev me up. Perhaps I was also subconsciously hoping to contextualize the slow march toward death of the traditional media that we are witnessing (and where I made my living for so many years, and which I subsequently chronicled in several books.)

As I snarfed down another package of Biscoff cookies, right there in chapter eight words leapt out that provided the Spark I’d been hoping for:

It had to do with Dorothy Buffum Chandler, that daughter of a dry goods store owner from Long Beach, California who snagged a Stanford classmate—a classmate whose family happened to have built modern LA while wielding a powerful weapon: their ownership of the local paper.

Dorothy Chandler—whose majestic concert hall I’d been staring at, as a resident of Downtown Los Angeles, for over twenty years. On whose plaza I’ve danced and partied with friends countless times; where I walk in search of inspiration and respite from the screen most every day.

I knew that raising the money for this site, built way back in the 1960s, had been Dorothy Chandler’s crowning achievement, an early salvo of the dastardly "Bunker Hill “Redevelopment Project” that decimated the neighborhood and left these dozens of DTLA acres haunted with ghosts.

And I knew her family’s subsequent detachment from the paper had had devastating effects on the city (which we are all dealing with each day.)

But, despite my otherwise exhaustive historical knowledge of the neighborhood, the extent of my Chandler knowledge stopped there.

.

After having two children, Halberstam writes, dear Dorothy had lapsed into a deep depression, ultimately seeking help from a psychiatrist named Dr. Josephine Jackson. (At this moment, please remove the lens of presentism and consider that “depression” was not a commonly discussed phenomenon then as it is now nor was “psychiatric treatment” in everyday vernacular.)

As Halberstam explains,

“Dr. Jackson did not visit patients, nor did they visit her. They left their own homes and lived with her and about eight other patients in an old rambling house. The doctor only accepted people who interested her, those she thought might be worth saving. It was like an early commune in a sense…”

These words inspired my yearning to know more about this long-deceased empress of healing, which naturally, meant hitting the books.

Alas, could it be, Dorothy was neither the subject of a biography nor had she left behind a memoir. There were a few archives in which details could be found—including a 1980 Master’s thesis for which Dorothy agreed to be interviewed. And wait, wow, the author of that thesis was still alive….

Off to the races.

I’d been down this road four times before, transfixed by a subject that crawled into my brain and took up residence, nagging me day and night to dig and keep digging and to stitch the stories I discovered together. That feeling is the one you get when you’re falling in love: Will this be THE ONE, the subject that grips me and lures me in to a years-long quest that ultimately yields a book?

This fixation wasn’t limited to Dorothy—from my experience with Joan Kroc, a dynamic rich woman who gets into the business of philanthropy is a hard sell to publishers— but, rather, the mysterious psychiatrist who treated her. This Dr. Josephine Jackson, it seemed, was the first woman to graduate from Rush Medical School in Chicago.

In addition to running a sanitarium in Pasadena, California, Dr. Jackson was also the author of a newspaper column as well as a best-selling book:

Dorothy alone might not be enough to carry 300 pages; but Dorothy and the shrink who restored her to health….well, that might have potential.

And so now I was adding this to the short list of book ideas that are gnawing at me, though none has completely overwhelmed me—yet. I know too much about the process: I see the roadblocks not just in the research but in the reaction by publishers, who are of course the first readers of our work.

Whether a book can find an audience is not the question at this early stage of an idea; a publisher has to agree to publish it first. And, if you haven’t done this dance before, an idea alone isn’t enough. The proof is in the execution. To execute requires research. And writing. And rewriting. And more research. In other words, time. Lots of it.

Will I continue to follow the string I’ve started to unravel on this one, and commit to writing a full-on proposal (which, you may know, means about a third of a prospective book and hoping to find a taker?) Or will some other idea on my short list make that cut?

Stay tuned. I’ll let you know.

That’s what the great novelist John Irving told a NY Times reporter this week about his Olympian grandkids and their dedication to Alpine skiing.

The “blocking out the distractions” thing is something with which any writer is acutely familiar. I myself honed that skill while writing my first book proposal, which I honed after work each night (or during the day when I worked the overnight shift) at the public radio show, Marketplace.

“Sorry I can’t join you for dinner/lunch/the party/a walk.”

“But,” was the inevitable response. “You have to eat. It’ll just be a few hours.”

Those few hours were, in fact, 120 essential minutes I needed in the zone to get the work done, and re-done, and re-done again. The reading and sculpting part of writing.

Typically, when I hit a wall with the work, or knew I needed a mental break, I’d go for a walk or a swim. A date to do anything on someone else’s clock was too intrusive. At least not for this particular human.

Now (you probably are aware that) I’m no Olympian, nor am I a blockbuster author, but, I knew instinctively when I started writing that focus was—is—the only way to get the work done.

There’s always been extraneous temptation in our universe in the form of fun, frivolity, distraction.

Today, it’s in the palm of our hand, all day, every day.

After playing around in this sandbox for a couple of weeks, I’m adding the care and feeding of Substack (necessary to “feed the beast” or “grow an audience”) to the column of distracting noise that should be shelved.

There’s something odd about this forum—it’s a diary, of sorts, except one that you expect (hope?) others will devour and hope for more.

Before I signed on, I hardly ever lurked here; I’ve subscribed to a few Substacks that friends have started as a show of support, or to a few others by people I don’t know who seem to be ruminating on ideas that appear compelling.

That said, I rarely consume them. Just like I never listen to the podcasts I subscribed to back when podcasts first began invading the zeitgeist. Broadcast news in any medium? Never.

My finicky media diet is as deliberate as a gluten-free vegan’s bag of groceries.

Like many people, the screen has been slowly, over the last forty years, addling my brain in ways that I find worrisome. I’m reading books now on my iPad and phone (never mind that reading non-fiction apparently puts me in a dwindling category of readers) and I worry that it’s eroding my capacity to read text on a page.

Years ago, before the age of the Internet, when my job involved reading the firehose of news wire services for work, I saw glimmers of this early-stage distraction. The newsroom at CNN was propelled by the BASYS NewsFury, one of (if not the) first computerized feeds of AP & Reuters—a transfixing black & white screen that offered a continuous updating stream of what used to scroll out on long loops of paper. You could split it; on the top sat the story you were rewriting; on the bottom, your “script.” There was also a skinny line for an early form of texting called “top-lining,” presumably to interact with your editor but mostly used to make running commentary to your compadres.

The news business inevitably gets old for most of us who inhabit it because ingesting so much, so quickly, and perpetually feeding some beast addles even the mightiest among us. (I’m neither a Maddow nor a Jon Stewart fan, but even these superstars dialed back their daily commitment for a reason. Wait, did I just categorize Jon Stewart as a journalist? That’s a whole other story.)

Back when I wrote Hyperwocky for the New York Times Cybertimes and, later, Online Diary for the Circuits section, or even when I was with MSNBC and MSNBC.com and wrote the unfortunately titled column Napoli on the Net, I never had the malaise I had working in the news business more generally—like, say, in local news or writing copy at CNN (which was mostly re-writing the aforementioned wire stories.)

Back then, the Internet was shiny, new, exciting and wondrous — not so popular nor polluted. The early online audience loved interaction; I had to fight to include my email address on my NY Times stories, which led me to tips and connections and even friendships. (A reader comment by a curious kid in Maryland named Brian Stelter who watched my reports about the Internet on MSNBC turned into a mentorship. He went on to become one of the most famous media voices of today.)

With ready-made platforms, I didn’t have to worry about finding an audience except by writing well about something interesting. If I offered something of value, people would see, hear or read me. Same when I transitioned into radio.

Today, those of us without a platform or brand name are simply pissing into the wind—the wind being a platform like this. (Thanks to anyone who has made it this far, by the way.)

In some exhibition I saw long ago about the subject of Fame Before Photography, the point was made that a modern human comes into contact with more people, more messages, more images in a day than previous humans experienced in a lifetime. Once upon a time one feared being invited for dinner at a friend’s house only to be subjected to vacation photos. Now we are all daily subjected to pictures of what our friends ate for dinner, on vacation and elsewhere. Your friends mugging with their other dear loved ones at some hilariously fun outing. Just about everyone’s ultrasound or CAT scan or fill-in-the-blank medical test.

I get that some people have achieved great fame by sharing their opinions and observations on this platform; perhaps they achieve a critical mass of subscribers to stoke their bank accounts or attract a book deal. Perhaps they simply get the pleasure of knowing their words are out in the world whether anyone stumbles upon them or not. Hooray!

But for me, playing around here on Substack has underscored that, while I know I have strong opinions to share with you over lunch or drinks, and great stories and observations to tell, spending time articulating them here is distracting me from what I really want to do right now.

Which is to write another book. Even if no one is reading books any more.

Kay died a few weeks before at age 87, and my mother is frantically trying to find the title to that condo in order to complete the death duties with which she’s been entrusted. (Kay never married or had children.)

My mother is hoping this valuable paper is in the safe deposit box. Except there’s apparently no key to the safe deposit box to be found.

Given how organized my mother is about all matters financial, and how much my father is in denial about the death of his only sibling, the tension is thick.

Luckily, my father’s name is on Kay’s bank account, so the bank gives permission for us to have the box blasted open. Dad is chattering away about something unrelated when the clerk takes him back to supervise the duty. He’s 84, and the death of his only sibling has unsettled him—but he doesn’t have the language to express this.

Since my mother and I are not on the account, we’re not allowed to enter this vault, so he has to accompany the clerk alone.

In a few minutes, he returns clutching a few large manila envelopes that we instantly open.

Amid the slim file of papers, there’s no title. But for me, the only person in my nuclear family who seems at all concerned about family history, there’s a different treasure trove of goods.

A sparkling gold charm bracelet, from which I learn more about my aunt’s history than I’d ever heard her reveal:

One charm features an insignia from Bay Ridge HS. I didn’t know that’s where she’d gone to school. (She graduated on the secretarial track, and made a career for over 50 years as an executive secretary at Met Life. What a haul it must have been to get from Red Hook out to school—different than the haul into the city she made to work for years.)

Another is a tiny golden calendar of the month February 1961. There’s a jewel on the 4^th, her birthdate. Why 1961? She would have turned 31 that year. Who gave her this present? Neither my father nor my mother have any idea.

A shamrock—but why? That side of the family was Sicilian, and it scandalized my aunt and my grandparents when my father ran off with an Irishwoman. Over the years they came to love and appreciate her. Likely the charm was simply for good luck, and not an embrace of her sister-in-law.

Then there’s the charm from her visit to the Vatican on February 9, 1968. Kay was a devout Catholic, so that pilgrimage would clearly have been a big deal. We’d found some slides of her journey the year before, so her having ventured so far away at a time when people didn’t regularly do that wasn’t too much of a surprise.

The envelope my dad has retrieved also contains photographs of people I don’t recognize on some stoop I’d never seen—taken at a time when photographs were gems as rare as gold.

That’s your dad’s uncle’s stoop in Bay Ridge, says my mother. Who lived in Bay Ridge in my family? I never knew that.

“That’s cousin Kathy,” my dad says. I’ve never seen Kathy as a young person; here she’s a girl of maybe 8. “And that’s Kay,” his sister, “and me.” Unmistakably.

There are other photos, like one of Kay at her graduation, smiling radiantly in a way I never remember having seen her smile in my lifetime.

My grandfather’s naturalization papers are in this tranche of family documents. (He’d been brought over from Siciliy as an infant in arms and became an American before he turned 25—bye bye any claim I might have to citizenship.) My grandparents’ marriage certificate is here, too; they married in a church in Hell’s Kitchen.

Why had I never seen any of this? Or heard any of these stories? The fact that it’s all tucked away in a safe place imbues them with special value.

My father isn’t particularly happy about this nostalgia. He doesn’t want to trip down memory lane. We don’t know at the moment, of course, that he’ll be dead in a few months himself. But over the next few days, I take out my microphone and recorder and press him for details about his long-ago service in the Army, where he performed with Special Services.

And I lay out the gems from the deposit box, continuing to look for clues.

They had all had the good sense not to leave Park Slope, the neighborhood in which they’d been born, B. G. (before gentrification)—and where Bobby, at age 84, had recently died.

My mother, Jane, had fled Brooklyn with my father in 1988, cashing out of their house in West Midwood right before the hipster incursion drove prices even more stratospheric. She was delighted to hear about this arboreal tribute in her native burg, awash in fond memories of traipsing down Garfield Place to the park, to which she pushed several of her younger siblings in a four-seat stroller.

Any of us who visited the “Bobby tree,” conveniently situated at the end of 4th streetA—where he’d lived for decades—took a snap and sent it to her, which she always enjoyed.

And then, about a year ago, she said she wanted to plant one, too.

By then, the Prospect Park conservancy had halted memorial tree planting, their web site explained, in order to focus care on existing ones. They would, however, happily accept money from anyone who wanted to name a tribute bench.

After a few months of deliberation, Jane asked me (her self-anointed “communications director”) to please place an order. When I showed her the map of available benches and explained it was possible to sponsor one in the “Garfield Place Tot Lot,” she leapt at that.

“That’s where I used to take the kids to play,” she said—a few blocks from the tenement apartment where my grandparents had raised their nine children.

“What do you want it to say?” I asked.

Without hesitation, she announced this simple caption: “ALL THE FITZROYS PLAYED HERE.”

A few weeks ago, notification arrived that the bench was ready. I happened to be a subway ride away. Cousin George happened to be getting off work. Soon, we were both planting ourselves, on this cold winter day, on the Fitzroy bench.

Turns out, he (and his older brother) had their own stories of the Garfield Tot Lot from their youth—quite different from my mother’s. Still, further affirmation that her caption was correct. Two generations of Fitzroys had played there.

Jane happily circulated a picture of her new bench to various family members and friends. And with this unusual bit of prideful sharing, she learned that another Brooklyn-Floridian in our midst (or, at least, her kids back up in our native borough) had placed their own bench, as a tribute to their recently deceased mother

.

“Wait, where is it?” I asked our friend, Lynn.

“The Garfield Tot Lot,” she responded, as if that was, of course, the obvious location.

George and I had been too busy yakking to even notice another named bench at the Tot Lot.

The Conservancy wasn’t as surprised as I was when I notified them of this lovely coincidence: That two families of old friends had placed tribute benches in the same area at about the same time, unbeknownst to the other. I thought it might be fodder for their PR department, a great feel-good tale. No such luck.

Maybe all sorts of Brooklynites, past and present, order adjacent tribute benches all the time—the way families routinely clustered on the same block.

I share this lovely coincidence with you here because it got me thinking:

Tribute benches are the world’s most concise form of memoir.

Like poetry or short stories or children’s books, economy of language is the hallmark of a great bench or memorial plaque. I learned this as I pondered just what to say on the plaque for my brother, James, in High Point, North Carolina, where I’d asked the parks department to plant a tree as close as possible to his long-time home:

Here’s what I arrived at: “James Napoli lived on Hickswood Road for close to thirty years. He loved this neighborhood with all his heart and even produced several films here.”

I hoped that might pique some interest in my dear brother to passersby at the Piedmont Environmental Center—as well as give me an anchor to the place when I visit again.

As a consumer of memorial plaques, I know I can’t help but think or wonder about the people who are mentioned. I’ve walked in glorious Ft. Tryon Park many days over the last few years, and the stories leap out:

And how’s this for a love story? I sit down most every time I pass this one and wish I could find out more. (A novelist wouldn’t wish, but create her own backstory, but alas, I am no novelist. I can’t even read most of them!)

When I see these little stories that encapsulate much bigger lives, I do my best to resist the urge to put my biographer’s hat on—that is, resist that urge to hit the Internet and sleuth out more. Obituaries, addresses, backstories.

Sometimes, a tiny tribute speaks for itself.

To do this, I’ve been dipping into the Talks archive (conveniently located on his YouTube channel) in order to pull out bits of conversations that will accompany the artwork.

Live Talks Los Angeles posters on display at the 2025 holiday pop-up book sale

Aside from the fact that this leaves me with a serious sense of deja vu from my days in radio and television—where a reporter has to scroll through interviews in search of the most delectable sound—it’s been instructive in other ways, like listening to the cadence of language and conversation. And, for our purposes here, extricating wisdom from famous people about their approach to memoir.

Now, of course, it’s a well-known fact (at least I think it is) that most famous people hire people like me (meaning, hard-working writers who are not, in the caste system of fame that dominates our universe, marquee-level) to write their books for them.

Even when one offloads the task of the actual writing to a hard-working “collaborator” aka “ghost,” one still has to sit and impart the actual memories and accompanying feelings. (Although, apparently that’s not quite what happened for the ghostwriter who wrote a book for a certain president.)

Headline news: Having help doesn’t make it any easier to dig into your psyche. To come face to face with your life’s trajectory, even if it yielded you acclaim, wealth or awards.

Famous people are, of course, the same as you and me, except that they have bigger bank accounts, whiter teeth and entourages (paid or otherwise.) What various celebrities revealed in these Live Talks about the difficulty of writing memoir was exactly what students in graduate school, or in my beginning memoir classes, said, too.

In short, it’s not easy.

I’ll start with the late Hal Holbrook, who appeared at Live Talks in 2011 on the publication of his book, Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain.

“Writing,” he explained to the interviewer, actor Robert Patrick, “is a wild experience. You’re trying to evaluate who you are, be fair to everybody, not make yourself look great, tell things about yourself you’re not proud of.”

His writing journey began with a photo of a boy that his wife, Dixie Carter, had perched on their living room table. Holbrook said he’d look at it each night and wonder, “Why is that boy smiling? Because I knew what he’d gone through. I knew he didn’t have any parents really because his mother and father just disappeared into the wild blue yonder when he was two years old.”

The boy in the picture, of course, was young Hal. And after staring at it for some time, he found himself flooded with memorie, taking out a legal pad and getting to work on his memoir.

Photographs are incredible prompts, the most incredible memory triggers, especially when they’re extricated from boxes you haven’t looked at in years. Unopened boxes of memorabilia are frequently the impetus for memoir. The actress Sally Field had been carting around plastic bins from various relatives for decades and never even peeked inside.

In 2018, she told interviewer Karen Grigsby Bates on the Live Talks Los Angeles stage, “I kept everything. My father sent me a letter that I never read in my early 40s because at the time I got it, I felt I couldn’t take it.” Ditto with journals she’d kept.

It was only as she began to write In Pieces that she read everything, a process which unfolded over seven years.

“My heart would be beating fast because of what I was learning,” she said, “something that was sent to me when I was in my late 30s and at the time I was in my early 70s, or late 60s at least.” The book itself became a journey.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s husband, Richard, would never allow her to peer into the 300 boxes he’d amassed over his storied lifetime as a presidential speechwriter and advisor until the year he turned 80. One day, she told interviewer Terrence McNally, “he came down the stairs singing, ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning,’” and announced that he was ready to dig in.

“If I have any wisdom to dispense, I better start dispensing now,” he declared.

That launched many weekends of mining through his personal archive, which offered “a time capsule of the ‘60s,” not just of Goodwin’s work but of the pivotal decade.

.

As they sifted, she said, “We would try to suspend judgment of what happened later so that we wouldn't be overlaid by the sadness of knowing that JFK was going to die or Bobby (Kennedy) was going to die or Martin Luther King was going to die. So we could imagine what it was like to actually be there at that time.”

Which is what historians do, explained the Pulitzer Prize-winner: root in the moment of the action as it unfolds (even though you obviously know what comes next.) .

Writing helped actor Tom Selleck articulate some of his influences better than he ever could have in the past, he told interviewer George Pennacchio in 2024. Though he found he couldn’t write in New York as he worked on his show, “Blue Bloods,” he could when he was back home in Los Angeles. He’d come downstairs to his wife and daughter, and as he read what he’d written that day aloud to his family, he was overcome with emotion—even if what he was writing about wasn’t explicitly so.

Articulating in words what’s been buried inside us can overwhelm the senses—and also help us process the past. Not everyone’s youth is as torturous as that of comedian Darrell Hammond’s, who told Fred Willard on the Live Talks stage in 2011 that he waited till his mother died to publish the book he’d been wanting to write for a long time, God If You’re Not Up There, I’m F*cked. Still, what Cher explained about writing her memoir sums up the complexity of writing our personal histories well:

“It was a bitch…I didn’t really want to write it. I really wanted to just skim it and tell the good stuff. I don’t want to get into the, like the deep shit and then I figured, well, then you better give him back the money. And so then I just decided to go for it, you know, and it turned out to be a much better book because …I t

old as much as I could remember that was legal.”

Let’s hope she puts the illegal stuff in part two—said to be coming sometime this year.

There hadn’t been time for chit-chat on the boat, so, over lunch, I, as the newcomer in the bunch, got quizzed. I explained that I’d just finished my Master’s degree in biography & memoir.

The lone man at the table, who’d been a bit icy, suddenly melted a bit.

“I’m signed up to take an 6-week memoir class next month,” he said. “And I already have my first line figured out.”

He proceeded to recite his carefully crafted first line, which involved something about a meal he ate at a key moment in his personal history. Then, he explained the more detailed nature of his memoir. It was dark, and involved tracking down an elusive figure in a foreign land, who assisted him and others.

(Yes, I’m being purposely vague here, since it’s not my story to tell.)

“That sounds like the beginning of your memoir to me,” I said.

His wife, at the other end of the table, swallowed the last bite of the croquette she was munching on and said, “She’s right,” deflating her poor husband’s carefully planned first line.

“See what the teacher says,” I backpedaled. “See what she has you do in class.’

The third of the strangers piped in.

“I took a memoir writing class once,” she said, blasé, digging into her ensalada mixta. “It got it out of my system. Who wants to read my memoir? Once I was done with the class, I didn’t even care about reading it anymore.”

Well, I said. For one thing, good for you. Writing can be as cathartic as making visual art. You’ve likely heard how music therapy helps Alzheimer’s patients. Writing, simply the act of writing, can help many of those who do it process deep emotions, past trauma, events that have never quite made sense.

I know this from recent personal experience, I told my new friends. I spent the past six months writing about my only sibling, James, who died at age 57 on May 18, 2024, crushing me with the worst grief I’d experienced. This writing was intended as my thesis for graduate school, and not meant to be ready by anyone but my advisor, and the head of my department.

Somehow, at the end of it, even though every minute of every day of the work was wrenching, I felt lighter for the first time since James first got sick.

It was only weeks after I was done that I understood the connection between finishing the project—and why I was no longer in a constant state of grief.

But Mr. First Line seemed a bit disappointed to hear this, that I’d worked on something with no goal other than to complete it.

Like many people I’ve met who embark on writing anything, I could see he had, in the back of his brain, this notion that as soon as he wrote down his story, which surely he would complete over the course of this workshop…he’d have in his hands a New York Times bestseller.

“This is what’s tricky about memoir classes,” I said to the table. “Some people enroll just because they’re flirting with the idea of writing. Other people come to the class because they’ve been working on their writing and are stuck. Others have visions of the book, the title, the cover…before they’ve even written a word.”

I tried not to look at the man seated across from me as I finished my homily.

“Whatever their intentions and their stories, everyone can learn from everyone else who’s in the room. If you pay attention.”

Even if what others are struggling with in their writing isn’t precisely your challenge, it behooves you to listen. (By the way, you may have noticed this is true in life more generally, too.) Just as you can learn from art (or music or film, or anything) you don’t care for as much as from work you do admire.

At the very least, the others present have signed up for the class for the same reason as you. They’re compelled to get their stories on the page and are hopeful the order of the class will assist them.

In a previous post, I mentioned my one-day odyssey to Tulum, where I’d been hired to help a local entrepreneur craft her (very compelling) story into a book proposal. Even before we had to leave the premises suddenly due to some threat from a drug cartel, I could tell she wasn’t into it. She was too busy living her (very exciting, busy) life to bother. She herself wasn’t waiting to tell her story; a hopeful agent had convinced her that she should. Even sitting down with a willing ghostwriter for long enough to convey the details of her life was a distraction, one to which she grudgingly agreed.

Broad brushstrokes that would make for a few episodes of a TV series were about all she could muster.

Anyone who sits down to write finds out pretty quickly that such scenarios do not a memoir make.

The key to memoir is simple and very hard, all at once. It starts with wanting to write it down. Then comes the hard part. Rewriting it and rewriting it. And then, once you make it, the equally difficult getting-it-out-there part. Selling a book to a publisher, or even producing it for self-publication, is a whole different magilla than writing one.

But few people want to hear that when they’ve decided they’re ready to write. Which is probably a good thing, at least for all the memoir-writing teachers out there.

If you answered “biographer,” you’d be correct.

What is wrong with those of us who become so obsessed by a person that we table everything and obsessively research on our own time and dime?

That obsession is what it takes to get to the point where said biographer can even attempt to find a publisher who might front them a little bit of cash (in publishing parlance, an “advance”) to continue their quest.

During COVID, Stephen B. Shepard found himself among this lunatic fringe of writers. This is not at all to say Steve’s a lunatic. A long-standing editor of BusinessWeek magazine, among others, he was the founding dean of the CUNY Journalism School. He also happens to be my friend. And he also happens to have assigned himself the task of plunging into the life of one of the most elusive figures in 20th century American history, J. D. Salinger.

Why? How? A gently edited transcript of our conversation is below. Read it for insights that will apply to anyone out there who becomes so obsessed with a person or an idea that they can’t stop until they’ve produced a manuscript.

Steve Shepard:

In 2018, I wrote a book about the Jewish American writers in the post-war era, you know, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Bernard Mahler and I thought of including J. D. Salinger, but his Jewishness was a kind of complicated saga, so we can get to that in a minute. In March 2020, when COVID isolated all of us and we were left to stay at home and do whatever we did, I decided to pull out all the J.D. Salinger materials, see what was there. And I decided that there really was enough to write a book about J. D. Salinger.

And so I did. I started in March 2020. In a way, it was a COVID book, a COVID project. And I finished it in two, three years. I sometimes wonder if COVID hadn’t happened, would I have written a biography of J . D. Salinger? And the answer is, “I’m not sure.”

But that was the circumstance of it. So I started plowing in and doing the research and the writing.

Lisa:

But you decided, instead of doing a straight biography, you had this very focused perspective. Why that?

Steve Shepard:

The title of the book is called Salinger’s Soul, and the subtitle is His Personal and Religious Odyssey. And the religious odyssey interested me a lot because he was raised Jewish. His father was Jewish. His mother was not, but she pretended that she was.

She changed her name when she married Saul Salinger. Marie became Miriam, which was the name of Moses’s sister, and Jillian became Salinger. As Miriam Salinger, she passed as Jewish, which is incredibly ironic in 1920s America. So, Jerry Salinger, as he was called, was raised Jewish and he had a bar mitzvah at 13.

And he and his 19-year-old sister, after his bar mitzvah, then found out that their mother was not the Jew that she pretended to be. And after that, he had nothing to do with Judaism. There was no Judaism in his life and basically none in any of his fiction. And Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye, was not exactly a Jewish boychik, but he was a prep school dropout. So it interested me.

And then it interested me why, if you’re going to give up Judaism, why do you embrace a mystical form of Hinduism called Vedanta, which I had never heard of at that point.

So that, to me, was a fertile subject. The other part of it was the personal odyssey, which turned out to be his interest in post-adolescent women, as one of his fictional characters put it, those “women in the last minutes of their girlhood.” And so he had numerous affairs with very young women, Joyce Maynard being the most famous example. She was 18 and a student at Yale when she went to live with Jerry Salinger in Cornish, New Hampshire. when he was 53 years old.

His second wife, Claire Douglas, who was the mother of his two children, was a teenager when he met her. And they were friends and corresponded and their parents were friends and so on. And then, and then they ended up having a relationship and she dropped out of Radcliffe four months short of graduation at age 22 to go live with him in Cornish, New Hampshire, and they got married. And so he was 14 years older than she, but he met her when she was quite young.

Lisa:

So you had, you said, a sort of tranche of stuff, for lack of a better word, because you had not included him in this previous book. But what was that stuff? And how did you find it? And then how did you amplify it once you made this commitment to write?

Steve Shepard:

Well, you know, I wasn’t the first person to write about J. D. Salinger, so the first thing I did was read all the existing biographies. There are four or five worth reading. Really none of them dealt with Vedanta in any great detail.

Then I went through a whole bunch of the letters. Salinger was not a prolific publisher of stories. He only published four books. He stopped publishing anything he wrote after 1965. There’s a lot of unpublished material, which his son has been working on to release.

The letters are mostly available. The published letters you can quote from the unpublished letters you’re not allowed to quote from without his permission so I didn’t do any of that. But there was a lot of material. He was a very prolific letter writer. He wrote letters to everybody, including his friends, his mentors, all kinds of people.

So there just was a lot of material. I did some research on Vedanta, because I didn’t know much about it either. And then there were things that he had said about it and why he believed in it and what it meant. And it was developing a personal relationship with God. And the reason that he got so interested in it was that he was trying to find relief from the depression that he suffered starting after the World War II. He was really depressed off and on for much of his life.

And this stemmed from his experience in World War II. He was drafted a few months after Pearl Harbor. His unit was the second wave landing in Normandy on D -Day. And then he was in continuous combat for the next 10 months, the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge, the march into Germany. And at the end of the war, a key moment in his life, his unit liberated a concentration camp near Munich. And a couple of months later, he had what he himself called a nervous breakdown. and he was hospitalized for two weeks in Germany. Today, we would probably call it PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And he was kind of depressed after that for the rest of his life. He never got over this experience. And it’s so interesting because, you know, like liberating a concentration camp, he saw all these dead bodies of Jews who were there and dying Jews. And he once told his wife, years later that you never get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose no matter how long you live. So it really had a big effect on him.

The Vedanta was his way of trying to get some relief from that depression with kind of mixed results. He wasn’t always depressed, but he was depressed off and on pretty much for the rest of his life.

Lisa:

That would certainly inform the rest of your life. You are not a literary critic, but you’ve assigned yourself this task of looking at that history, his personal history, which I think very few of his readers probably know, and how it’s informed all of his writing, or what writing we’ve seen, right?

Steve Shepard:

Yes, I’m not a literary critic, I’m a journalist, but, you know, having written a lot about writers, written a book about them, and, you know, reading quite extensively, you come to be, if not a literary critic, knowledgeable about literature and what’s important and how to react to it and so forth.

Sometimes I’m asked who were my role models for writing these kinds of books about? And essentially, what I’ve decided is that my role models were people who did reported journalism.

I consider this book on Salinger an example of reported journalism. I’m thinking of writers who influenced me, New Yorker writers for the most part. John McPhee. John Updike, who wrote a number of wonderful reported pieces of journalism and essays and criticism and so on. His story in the New Yorker about the baseball player, Ted Williams and his last game at Fenway Park in Boston when he hit a home run.

Lisa:

I always like to ask journalists who write biographies. There are very many similarities, obviously, the digging and the synthesizing, and the analysis, but there are many differences. If we could go back to the letters you said that were unpublished, how did you go about digging, was it, you know, was it similar to what you would have done as a journalist?

Steve Shepard:

I think of it, first of all, as a profile. And in journalism, we’ve all written profiles. And this is just a profile writ large into a biography. So that’s the way I think of biographies. I just think of them as longer profiles. And as journalists, we’ve all done profiles. The letters, a lot of them were quoted in various places. And that’s what I did. I didn’t go to libraries. You don’t have to do that anymore to look at these letters.

A lot of them went to Princeton University Library and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. And so you can go and look at them, but you don’t have to do that anymore because a lot of them are available online. Just the published letters, the unpublished letters.

You know, I should tell you about a very famous case. There was a writer named Ian Hamilton who was writing a biography. He was a British literary person, and he had amassed 80 to 100 unpublished letters that Salinger had written to various people. There were all these letters that Ian Hamilton wanted to quote from within the limits of fair use. You can’t reproduce the whole letter, but you can quote from it in a limited way. Salinger objected because these were unpublished letters that he had got, and he didn’t want his unpublished letters to be quoted. Salinger came out of hiding to launch this suit against Ian Hamilton to stop him from publishing his letters.

Ian Hamilton won the case in the court in New York, but then the Salinger side appealed and got the verdict overturned and ruled that Hamilton had no right to quote from unpublished letters without Salinger’s permission. And that’s the law of the land now. A lot of authors don’t much like that, which is why a lot of people want to write about people who are already dead, because they’re not going to sue you.

Lisa:

Of course, Salinger died in 2010, but were you concerned about embarking on the project, given what the son is trying to do?

Steve Shepard:

No, quite the opposite. In 2019, which was the centenary of Salinger’s birth, there was a big exhibit at New York Public Library of manuscripts and artifacts and so forth. And Matt Salinger said at the time that he was working on releasing all the material that Salinger wrote, all the stories he wrote, since 1965.

So I thought, well, this is great because it’ll create interest in the book and in Salinger.

I reached out to him, and I got no response. I told him who I was, what I was working on, what the book was about, more or less. And I would love to talk to him. No response. So that’s all I can tell you about Matt Salinger.

Lisa:

Someone will inevitably use your book to build on the next biography, right?

Steve Shepard:

That’s how it works. That’s the hope, yes. Yeah, no question. And that when these books come out, stories about his new stories or new books or whatever they are, might reference the most recent biography of Salinger, which is mine. I would have sure loved to have had Matt Salinger commenting about his father.

Lisa:

The truth is, as we learn in biography, sometimes the people closest to the person we’re writing about or the person we’re writing about, if they are still alive, are the worst people to comment on who they were and what they did, because they’re too close, right?

Steve Shepard:

Well, it’s interesting, because there have been two books that have been written about Salinger who were close to him, and one was by his daughter Peggy, who had a tremendous falling out with her father. The other one was by Joyce Maynard, who had this affair with Salinger when she was very young, didn’t say anything or write anything about her relationship with Salinger for 25 years. In 1998, she published a book that was entirely about her relationship with Salinger with great detail, details about their sex life, all kinds of details about his writing habits, everything.

And so I got some information from people who were very close to him.

The one person who never said anything was Claire Douglas, his second wife, who was the mother of his two children.

Lisa:

The nuance of someone who takes it upon themselves to write a memoir about their prominent figure in their family versus an interview that you might have with that person, what they reveal or divulge to a biographer is different than what they might write in a book.

Steve Shepard:

The other thing that I should mention is that there were a lot of journalists who went to Cornish, New Hampshire, to try to find Salinger and talk to him. And a lot of them, while he didn’t talk to any of them, a lot of them wrote magazine articles. You’ve got a lot of description from these people who went up to Cornish, New Hampshire and talked to people who knew him, and they found out a fair amount. They added a lot of local color about what his life was like in Cornish, New Hampshire, and how he had this writing bunker near his house that he went to every day and stayed in the bunker and wrote, you know, the whole day, sometimes slept there.

One woman from the Baton Rouge newspaper, he agreed to meet her in town and he did. And it was sort of an uneventful interview, but what he didn’t know was that she had a tape recorder up her sleeve. And she’s the only one who ever did a tape recording of Salinger’s voice. And then she came to regret it. She felt she’d really deceived him by not disclosing she was taping the conversation. And she’s vowed never to make the tape public. But it does exist. And one of these days, it may come out.

I don’t think there’s any great revelations on the tape based on what she has said. But you would hear his voice. Nobody had heard his voice. you know, since he went into seclusion. He did come to New York to go to the New Yorker magazine and he drove to, this is really an amazing story, he drove from Cornish, New Hampshire to Washington, D.C. to meet at the National Gallery of Art in a public cafeteria with a man who was proposing to make a book out of Salinger’s last published story, called Hapworth. They had this meal in a public restaurant, in a public museum, essentially, So he came out of seclusion when it suited his purposes, you know, but by and large, he really led a life of self exile.

Lisa:

How many copies of Catcher in the Rye are out there?

Steve Shepard:

Since 1951, it’s 65 or 70 million copies, which makes it one of the best-selling novels of all time. And it is still selling 200,000 copies a year, every year. It took a few years before it became such a cult favorite book. It was published in 1951 and got mixed reviews, which is really quite amazing and but did sell well enough to end up number four in the New York Times bestseller list, but it didn’t become the real big hit. until the late 50s, early 1960s, when the counterculture started and people could identify a little more with Holden Caulfield, you know, and then it really, the sales really took off.

So he made a lot of money.

Lisa:

He sure did, and his enduring legacy, and the mystery of him and what you’ve written here is so great and so important.You spent your entire life in journalism, and launched a journalism school. You’re a voracious reader of fiction. What is it about the biographical form to you?

Steve Shepard:

People like to read about people, you know. Biography is a profile. So biography is very popular literary form for the obvious reason that people want to know about other people.

And they look for people who they are interested in for some reason, the writers, the physicists, the medical doctors, the soldiers, whatever that they want to know about.

It’s a great form.

(Note: The books pictured above are stand-ins for the actual books I discuss below.)

As an inveterate reader of non-fiction who spends too much time alone (I have an endless capacity to amuse myself), it thrilled me to be reading a book simultaneously with other like-minded souls. (This clearly explains the success of book clubs, although I understand many of them are also centered around wine, whereas the beverage of choice in graduate school appeared to be whatever was in those gigantic thermoses everyone now lugs around.)

The difference with school wasn’t just that we were all working toward a degree, but that we were led by a scholar in dissecting the reading. (Apparently, some very fancy book clubs hire facilitators to keep conversations from straying, just like professors are supposed to do. There’s someone who needs a mute button in every bunch.)

Often before convening, we were challenged to write about what we read, both in order to collect our thoughts and to share them so we knew in advance our various reactions to the assignment.

An important note: The program I just finished at CUNY is relatively new, and finding its sea legs. It’s an MA, not an MFA, not as writing-intensive the way an MFA would be. For people who enrolled with the intention of completing a book, this was a problem. For people like me with a lifetime of experience writing on deadline as well as long-form, this intensive study of other works was the particular joy I was seeking when I decided to return to school.

I’d be hard pressed to name a favorite class of the 10 I was required to take (four core classes and six electives) more than I would be able to name my favorite book.

(That said, Dr. Julia Miele Rodas’ Disability and Life-writing was singularly transformational because of the constellation of individuals in the class and because it came just months after my mother and I helped my brother as he died an untimely, tragic death. And it yielded a mini-conference the next spring in which a number of us participated.)

Even in the two New York City history classes I completed, elements of biography and memoir appeared. Categorizing Samuel Delaney’s spectacular ode to the lost pornographic era of 42nd Street in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is as difficult as describing the content of this dynamite work. The NYC poems of Frank O’Hara are laced with memoir, as is David Wojnorawicz’s Waterfront Journals, which are must-reading for newbies to New York who don’t remember what the perimeter of Manhattan island, particularly its west side, looked like pre-park. And though it wasn’t on his reading list, and it’s difficult to find, eminent NYC historian Thomas Kessner’s 1989 biography of mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was worth every page. (Take that, Robert Caro!)

There were scattered novels on the reading lists (and I’m typically loathe to read fiction, so I was grateful to be step out of my dislike for that form and thus be introduced to the work of, among others, Julie Otsuka, Chang-Rae Lee and that old stalwart, Henry James. A group of us enrolled in Dr. Christopher Schmidt’s Narratives of NYC class got together on Zoom to read O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape out loud, since we found simply reading the dialect in text to be a challenge.)

Immersing ourselves in how a particular work was constructed, what was omitted, what was included, how various points of view braided together—how other people reacted to works I liked or disliked—made each class, each conversation and each book enriching. This is particularly true since a major element of writing is reading.

Some people keep lists of places they’ve visited, shows they’ve seen, people they’ve made love to, an affliction known as “memory hoarding.” I’ve never made a list other than a to-do before, but for some reason this platform inspired me to lasso together the reading lists from various classes I’ve taken the last five years for your perusal. (Though I’ve read much more than this during this time, I have no centralized record of any extra-curricular reading. Also not included here: some scholarly writing we were assigned.)

Perhaps you’ll be inspired by this pure, disorganized reading list, presented in no particular order (admittedly, this rag-tag “bibliography” which would get me fired from any PhD program, which is one of many reasons I’m not moving on to a PhD.)

I’ve starred the stand-outs. And one day I’ll write a post about what I’d assign in class—should I ever get the opportunity to lead one.

Note: Since I first published this, I’ve alphabetized my reading list. It was the least I could do!

Andre Aciman, Out of Egypt

Rachel Adams, Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery

Suad Amiry, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law

Radwa Ashour, The Journey

James Atlas, The Shadow in the Garden

Augustine’s Confessions

Nick August-Perna, Tell Them You Love Me

Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture

Asha Bandele, The Prisoner’s Wife

Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama

*Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes

Mohamed Choukri, For Bread Alone

*G. Thomas Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing

*Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Calvalcade

Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde
Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir

Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

*Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Peter Catapano, About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times

Roxane Gay, Hunger

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals

Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

*Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story

Dick Gregory, “Not Poor, Just Broke”
Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer

Marilyn Johnson, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries

Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior

Georgina Kleege, Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller

*Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir

Audre Lorde, Zami

Riva Lehrer, “Where All Bodies Are Exquisite”

*Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

Joseph Carey Merrick, “The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick”

Tiya Miles: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould’s Secret

Joseph Mitchell, “Professor Seagull”

Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More

Cherrie Morgana, Native Country of the Heart

*Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic

Marc Pachter (ed.), Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art

Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem

*David S. Reynolds, Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America

*David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography

*David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

Julia Miele Rodas, “Limited Visibility, or, Confessions of a Satellite”
Chanel Miller, Know My Name

Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives

Oliver Sacks, selected shorts from The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey, My Own Life

Tom Shakespeare, “The Man Who Mistook His Patients for a Writing Career”
Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

Tracy Smith, Ordinary Light

Nigel Starck, Life After Death: The Art of the Obituary

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

Frederick Treves, “The Elephant Man”

John Turturro, “Stumbling in the Dark”

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Jerry Stahl, “Pipe to the Head”

Anna Malaika Tubbs, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of MLK Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation

Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

Vanna Vinci, Frida Kahlo: The Story of Her Life

Hida Viloria, Born Both

Natasha Walter, Before the Light Fades: A Memoir of Grief and Resistance

Jesmyn Ward, The Men We Reaped

Alden Whitman, The Obituary Book

Clair Wills, Missing Persons: or My Grandmother’s Secrets

*Javier Zamora, Solito

One book I read that wasn’t assigned (because it wasn’t yet available) was by MacArthur Genius Grant award-winner Dr. Josh Miele, the brother of the aforementioned professor, Dr. Julia Miele Rodas. She invited him and his collaborator, Wendell Jamison, to our class in advance of their book’s release. Since I love to conduct live conversations with authors, and since each student was responsible for leading one class during the semester, I volunteered to interview them in front of our small group to fulfill my requirement. Then, I craftily managed to get my hands on an advance copy.

If you’re in the market for a compelling memoir that reflects one man’s fascinating capacity to overcome a tragic childhood event for the greater good of humanity, pick up Connecting Dots.

There were two problems:

He claimed he couldn’t remember anything—that his wife was the repository of information about his achievements, since she’d been with him practically every step of the way. Alas, she had died a few years before.

The other issue:

He could not find the appropriate collaborator. (He knew himself well enough that he wasn’t going to write it himself.)

The several pedigreed NYC writers he’d auditioned weren’t the right fit.

A few felt he didn’t feel right to them—he was a bit too brusque, old-school.

That’s when I was enlisted for a meeting.

I needed the work; I’d done some editing for hire; but my only forays into ghostwriting until this point had misfired. (This included a Buddhist monk who, in essence, fired me from a non-paying job in favor of a more devoted acolyte; a Beverly Hills hairdresser with a butler and a Rolls-Royce who fired me because all he really wanted was a book filled with pictures of him with his celebrity clients; and an impresaria in Mexico who was pressured into writing a memoir when what she really wanted was a TV show based on her exploits. (On our one attempt to work together, we were evacuated due to a drug cartel threat against her life two hours after I arrived at her boutique hotel to interview her.)

But those are all stories for another time.

I was reluctant about the whole idea of what’s politely called “book collaboration.” Years before, I’d even turned down the chance to work with the venerable Seth Godin, then a supremely successful book packager, after he invited me to escape the corporate world. But it was getting harder than ever to sell my own books. I needed the work. It was worth a try.

Since this prospective client’s story centered around the history of my native borough of Brooklyn, though, I tabled my concerns that sashaying into this ghost world might mean I’d never sell one of my own books again.

As we sat over breakfast at a lovely hotel he owned in Brooklyn, the man (unwittingly) conjured up memories of Vince, my father—except for one crucial difference: My father had not achieved great wealth or enormous success. Not even close.

The fact that I sprouted from a non-fancy family was a plus here. Despite the generational difference, we shared similar, modest roots. I understood where this man was coming from and how dizzying it is to step into a different universe than the one in which you were raised. (Albeit not quite at the same level as this person.)

Even for someone who inhabited the “one percent,” there were stratifications. He kidded that compared to others with tremendous wealth, he was “just” a “baby billionaire.” To which he added, “I’ve got more than enough. And you do, too.”

(Though he had no idea of my finances, of course he was correct. Wealth isn’t just about the numbers in your accounts, and that’s a whole other, other conversation.)

At my request, we spent that audition day trundling around to various properties he’d bought and rehabbed early in his career.

From Harlem to the south Bronx to Kew Gardens and down near Carnegie Hall, he shared stories as he navigated the streets about each acquisition, the travails of ownership, and the cast of characters he met along the way. The challenges of making his way in New York with no family backing to bolster him.

At each stop he said, “I haven’t thought of this in years.”

That’s sweet music to someone working to trigger memories—a sign you’ve got them flowing.

After about eight hours, I knew I had the job.

Over the next two years, we spent dozens of hours together, piecing together his life story.

Hearing about my new assignment, a well-read friend suggested I pick up Hernan Diaz’ Pulitzer prize-winning book, Trust. “It’s the story you’re living right now,” he said.

Though I’m not a big reader of novels, I picked up a copy. It’s about a long-ago scion of Wall Street who enlists an ambitious Italian-American gal from poverty in Brooklyn to write his memoir in response to a biographer’s take on his life.

The difference in point of view between biography and memoir had been exactly what I’d been thinking about virtually non-stop for several years now.

Add to that the third permutation, what I was doing now: Ghost-writing a commissioned memoir.

What’s frightening is that in our media illiterate culture, most people don’t get the difference. (Then again, it’s shocking how many people don’t understand the difference between a novel and non-fiction. A book is a book is a book.)

“No, neither Ray Kroc nor Ted Turner commissioned me to write the books I wrote about them,” I had to explain to the client. (Kroc was dead when I wrote his story, as was his wife, the true star of Ray & Joan, and what family there was left were not quite interested in talking to me. That’s another, other, other story.)

As we sat in the client’s grand pied-a-terre, he pointed to scrapbooks his wife had meticulously and artfully catalogued over their lifetime together. I meandered over to the table on which they sat and retrieved what appeared to showcase the oldest photographs.

We flipped through the pages, and each photo or clipping served as a prompt, leading to stories and reminiscences he didn’t know were buried inside him.

Like: A picture of his mother, dead for over twenty years, on a horse.

“My mother was so beautiful,” he reminisced as he stared at the picture for the first time in ages.

“Don’t you remember her that way?”

“The mental picture I have of her is when she was old. I’d forgotten. I also never knew she rode a horse!”

News stories of his business conquests (and fights surrounding them) helped me flesh out the linchpin of his empire—the neighborhood’s original use as a bustling area of commerce, the twisting saga of ownership of this land in more recent years.

From the transcripts of our long, meandering conversations, I eventually stitched together a narrative, which I honed and honed over time.

This required explaining to him what most people don’t get about writing: It isn’t just a matter of sitting at a keyboard and tapping away (one of my classmates in the Biography & Memoir program asked me in a panic once while working on a writing assignment. She thought if she just sat down and blocked out a few hours, the words would emerge fully-crafted.)

Then there was the matter of family dynamics.

His son, now keeper of the empire his father had created, wasn’t sure he wanted the patriarch to bare all. He didn’t see the upside of such revelations.

Managing his concerns became part of the job. The fact that the mogul didn’t want to publish via the traditional route assuaged him. This book would be for him and whomever he chose to give it to, only—not for mass consumption or distribution.

Ultimately, we got the story down—and it was time for the client to find artists/designers to make it look like a beautiful book, worthy of a baby billionaire. I was thrilled to receive the final product and see that it does.

There’s only one problem, but problems inevitably happen when you’re writing a book that’s not your own. I’m not a fan of the title he chose. (At least his is slightly less awful than the Beverly Hills’ hairdresser’s, may he rest in peace.) But if he’s happy, I’m happy—which is of course the nature not of art but of commerce, aka work-for-hire.

As opposed to biography, of course. In that case, if the subject is happy, assuming the subject you choose to write your biography about is alive (and many biographers will tell you that’s an unwise idea) your goal isn’t to please them. And that’s yet another story, one I will surely plunge into another time.

“You should be teaching,” is what people said, which was flattering, but clearly missing the point.

Yes, I have written four books published by traditional publishers, and enjoyed a long career at national and local outlets of radio, television and online journalism. (In other words, I’ve had a lot of jobs.)

But I had no interest in teaching journalism any more than I wanted to practice it any longer. (In case you haven’t been paying attention, that the industry has been upended by speed, superficiality and fakery is just one reason I was happy to be out—and is actually the underlying premise for two of my books, one about the creation of 24-hour news and another on the founding of NPR.)

The fact was: I’d fallen in love with an adjacent subject matter, and I wanted to study it as closely as possible.

.This “adjacent subject matter” is actually two: Biography and memoir. Some people shorthand the idea of telling a personal story—one’s own or someone else’s—as “life-writing.”

I loved reading biographies and memoirs, dissecting the craft, and talking with people about how to research and write them.

And for the first time at a university in the United States, these subjects would be taught at the graduate level, in a unique degree.

That the school where this was possible happened to be in my hometown of New York City gave it even greater appeal. Foolishly, I’d not attended a CUNY school, Brooklyn College, when I had the chance to after graduating from high school just across the street. Why not try it now?

How often do we do things in life with no clear reason or expected outcome? Having “graduated” from decades of daily news, often involving quick, clipped bits of broadcasting, into book-writing, I’d fallen in love with the work it took to research and sculpt non-fiction—the depth, the obstacles presented in the chase for information, the challenge of how to present the story as artfully as possible by remaining utterly faithful to the facts.

When I dug into the work for my second book, about the great philanthropist Joan Kroc, I’d sought out wisdom about writing biography and discovered a then new-ish group called Biographers International Organization, at whose annual conference I’d learned some helpful best practices.

Over time, I’d even become involved in the group—leading a few sessions at the annual conference about publicity and social media. Helping to launch a podcast in which biographers are interviewed about their craft. Volunteering as a mentor to others just diving in.

But I longed for more.

And so, five years ago, about a year or so after it launched, I enrolled in the City University of New York Graduate Center in the Biography and Memoir program. Through the pandemic and including a semester-long leave to care for my only sibling during his terminal illness, I chipped away at the degree, bit by bit, first online and then fully in-person.

I reveled in the coursework and the fact that I wasn’t the oldest person in the classroom—far from it, in fact. (One woman, a poet, is 84 and felt called to write a biography of a famous musician; another man, a decade younger, returned to school after the death of his wife and his retirement from his work as a First Amendment scholar, simply because he, too, voraciously devoured biography.)

I took classes outside my program (in the history of my beloved hometown) and met even more interesting people who had their own compelling reasons for going back to school as adults.

Along the way, I dabbled in what I call life-writing for hire, aka “ghost-writing.”

Now, after dragging out this most wonderful experience for as long as the administrators will allow, I’m happy to say I’ve completed my Master’s degree. (Though the ceremony isn’t till June, which makes the whole thing awfully anti-climactic.)

What’s next? Now that I won’t have the cozy comfort of a classroom in which to discuss biography and memoir with similarly-wired classmates, I suppose I’ll use this space instead.

In upcoming posts, I’ll share my “master reading list” from school, talk a bit about the aforementioned ghost-writing and workshops I’ve lead, take a look at why some people write their life stories as fiction instead of non, and more.