I have a lot of thoughts on the idea of self and life writing. I went to grad school for English literature and at one point wrote a paper about memoirs by foreign correspondents in Africa. After they finished their stints as daily newspaper reporters, they would almost invariably write a book that was far more first-person and filled with doubt, and it would almost always have some references to Joseph Conrad either in the title or in the language.
In his reading of Conrad, Edward Said has concurrently argued that when you can’t order the world authoritatively, self-consciousness is the only tool you can express. Conrad couldn’t see beyond nineteenth-century imperialism, but he could reflect a kind of unease and doubt through the first person.
When you’re writing for a news publication like a daily newspaper or the New Yorker, you must be an authority, and you must present yourself from a place of certainty and knowledge. That’s the imperative. I think it’s common for journalists to go back and rewrite something they witnessed and reinsert their subject position into the writing: where they were, their uncertainty, their awkwardness, and all of that, which ultimately is a truer recounting of an experience.
And yet there are risks. It could be very generational, but we still live in a period where most people, when they sit down to consume the news each day, they’re not interested in the life of the person conveying the information. They’re wanting just the facts. When a journalist places themselves in the narrative, this might raise an eyebrow: Are we getting the facts, or are we getting the story of the facts?
I’m at a place now where I just want the writing to be a window, so that people can see what I’ve seen.
That leads me to the second half of your question. I think in 2020, I kind of teetered. I began losing sight of all the ethics and rules that I’d been taught as a journalist. I was teetering on the edge of them during the…
Auteur: Emily Witt
