Catch and Kill

"Sure. There’s an open question that comes up with a book like Ronan Farrow’s, because it is not a full-dress autobiography in any conventional sense. He doesn’t talk much about his personal life. He does talk a little bit about growing up with Woody Allen as a stepfather, and his relationship with his family, but not in a sustained or especially deep way. It’s also not the sort of self-interrogative storytelling that you’d expect from a current-generation memoir. But I think what value it has as an autobiography is that it brings some transparency to a story that is really important and emotionally fraught. I think there’s a lot of value in that. If you told this story as a straight nonfiction piece of reporting, it could have been harder to parse, harder to enjoy, I think, in some ways. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s also important that he talks in the first person, because it reveals just how much hesitancy there was in the media to touch a story like this—about somebody like Harvey Weinstein, who had a hand in so many different organizations, had so much leverage in so many places. So I think it’s important for Ronan Farrow to tell this story in the first person, to give the reader a sense of just how high of a mountain he had to climb in order to get the story heard. So I valued it, certainly as—and I’m not the first person to say it reads like—an espionage thriller . It reads quickly and it’s very engaging. The chapters are punchy. But beyond that, he’s doing a public service by being so candid about his experience and without coming off, by any means, as a braggart. He’s just trying to explain that this is the sort of experience that you have when you are trying to tell a story that is very difficult to tell. It is. I don’t think anybody was thinking about pitting these two books against each other. I think, if anything, having two books that address this case from different angles is only additive to the conversation. Look, we talk about being in an era of fake news, where President Trump rains contempt on the media on a regular basis. But it’s not a new thing; if you go back to Pew Research studies, Americans tend to have an inherent distrust of media outlets. Cable news, print news, you name it—there’s always been a substantive portion of the American populace that does not want to hear something that they’re not used to hearing. “Cable news, print news, you name it—there’s always been a substantive portion of the American populace that does not want to hear something that they’re not used to hearing” So having Ronan Farrow’s book as well as Jodi Kantor’s and Megan Twohey’s book in the landscape at the same time, I appreciate that. It’s a doubling down. I’m being a bit coy here, because I haven’t read She Said , so I can’t do a formal compare-and-contrast between the two. I know that it’s great to have both in the world, but I have seen personally how Ronan Farrow’s book seems to have captured the imaginations of readers on a very intense level. Any acclaim that he has gotten for this book gets an immediate response from Farrow, thanking his fact-checkers. I respect him for doing that. Obviously, accuracy is important in a book like this. This is one of these difficult things in judging memoir. Does the author really recall the exact conversation that they had with their mother when they were eight years old? On the autobiography committee, we have to take these things into account. And there are different ways of getting that ‘right.’ But for a hard news story, like Ronan Farrow was writing, celebrating the virtues of fact checkers is a wonderful thing to have in the landscape."