by Kim Todd
‘Five years old,’ Otto says. ‘On acid.’”
The quiet shock and condemnation are the same.
The voice-driven first-person narration that Wolfe championed in the 1970s, though not as new as he claimed, combined with effects of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement to form another strand of this narrative-based nonfiction writing. The personal was political and, thus, worthy of notice. People who were not famous began to write about their lives. These works tended to be distinct from traditional “autobiographies” in that they skipped the parade of accomplishments in the lives of great men—college, marriage, career—and focused on telling stories. They were memoirs. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote about the ghosts of the past that haunted her Chinese American childhood. Maya Angelou wrote about navigating racism and being assaulted as an eight-year-old. Annie Dillard described a year spent looking closely, ecstatically, at Tinker Creek in rural Virginia. Many of these memoirists were women, and so memoir became another “not quite” literary form. It was too popular, too feminine. In Francine Prose’s New York Times review of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, she described the “sensibility, the tonal range, the lyrical intensity and imaginative vision—that distinguish the artist from the memoirist,” and concluded, “The Glass Castle falls short of being art, but it’s a very good memoir.”
In the 1990s, building on New Journalism and increasing interest in memoir and personal essay, MFA programs began offering, in addition to degrees in fiction and poetry, degrees in “creative nonfiction.” In his scathing article about the upstart genre, James Wolcott in Vanity Fair complained of the “slow drip of petty disclosure” and the “big, earnest blob of me-first sensibility.” He dubbed Lee Gutkind “the Godfather behind Creative Nonfiction” after Gutkind started an MFA track in creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, one of the first in the country. Once again, those credited with launching the genre were male, though many of the most successful practitioners were female. Meanwhile, muckraking had turned into investigative journalism, the most hard-hitting, respected form, generally coded as man’s work. Textbooks cited novelist Upton Sinclair and other male writers as its progenitors.
For example, in his book of interviews (and declaration of a new genre), The New New Journalism, Robert S. Boynton critiqued Wolfe for ignoring the debt of New Journalism to the reporting of the late 1890s. The introduction of The New New Journalism gave an overview of journalism history, praising nineteenth-century writers’ “artfully told narrative stories about subjects of concern to the masses,” ability to draw an “accurate, sympathetic portrait of the ‘vicissitudes’ of city life,” experiments with dialogue and perspective, and “muckraking exposés.” Who gets credit for all this? Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and Lincoln Steffens.
Despite this genesis narrative for artistic nonfiction, some did acknowledge the contributions of yellow journalism in general and stunt reporters specifically, though only in the most oblique and slighting ways. To reviewer Sol Yurick, Capote’s interviews with convicts sounded familiar. Yurick wrote that In Cold Blood, rather than representing a new field, was “in the best tradition of newspaper sob sisterism wedding to Southern Gothic prose.” Even the title, he said, is nothing more than “sensational headline imagery.” Both descriptions are meant as insults.
While “objective journalism” had been promoted by journalism programs as the answer to the intimate, subjective accounts of the stunt reporters, this, too, was being questioned by the New Journalists. Hunter S. Thompson, who roared onto the literary stage in drugfueled, formally explosive reporting on being beaten up by motorcycle gangs and infiltrating an antidrug conference in Las Vegas while on LSD, was lauded as inventor of “gonzo journalism”—another new style. He protested vehemently against the idea of objectivity, writing in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, “Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.” Thompson also commented on New Journalism, the form Wolfe claimed to have pioneered, “The only reason Wolfe seems ‘new’ is because William Randolph Hearst bent the spine of American journalism very badly when it was just getting started.”
The traditional account of the genesis of investigative journalism and creative nonfiction obscures not only contributions of 1890s reporters but also innovative works like Zora Neale Hurston’s 1935 Mules and Men. Hurston, who trained as an anthropologist at Barnard, learned the tools of objectivity. Then she turned what she termed the “spy-glass” of her discipline on her own community, the predominantly Black town of Eatonville, Florida, where she had grown up. In the introduction she wrote, “I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew that the town was full of material and that I could get it without hurt, harm or danger.” Stressing that her subjects would tell her truths they would never reveal to an outsider, she studied her hometown, starting by drinking a concoction that made the top of her head fly off and cadging an invitation to a party. The story she told was personal, revealing of town and self. No one else could have gained access or told the tale.
Maybe all claims of minting new literary genres require a certain truncation of the past. But skipping the work of female nineteenth-century reporters is a particularly dramatic oversight. So many of these supposed recent literary breakthroughs can trace their roots all the way back to seeds shoveled into the soil by Bly, Black, Nelson, Swan, Valesh, and Wells. Even at the most ragged edges of the genre, there is no more experimental personal essay than the listing of causes of lynching in Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s A Red Record: “Hanged for stealing hogs,” “Lynched because they were saucy,” “Lynched for no offense.” It goes on and on.
Undercover experimentation is ongoing, even as knowledge of the original stunt reporters has faded. For aspiring journalists in the twentieth and even the twenty-first centuries, like those in the nineteenth, it continues to be a way in. And it continues to pose challenges in terms of value and respect.
In 1963, as a freelance writer seeking to gain a foothold in the field, Gloria Steinem responded to an ad seeking “pretty and personable” women between twenty-one and twenty-four. The ad promised glamour, travel, and $200 to $300 a week for those selected to portray that iconic image of 1960s sex appeal—a Playboy Bunny.
In a shorthand, diary-like narration, she charted the development of Marie Catherine Ochs (a pseudonym taken from a family name) and her experience at the Playboy Club. Using a lighthearted tone, she picked apart the subtle humiliations that made up the Playboy universe. On her way to apply, a building guard clucked at her, “Here bunny, bunny, bunny.” At the job interview, when she offered to talk about Ochs’s past, so carefully created, the Bunny Mother told her: “We don’t like our girls to have any background.” A mandatory doctor visit included testing for venereal disease.
As earlier stunt reporters did, Steinem added up the cost to the employees of this allegedly lucrative job: $2.50 per day for costume cleaning, $5 for tights, $8.14 for false eyelashes, three quarters of an inch long. The advertised salary was impossible to reach.
When the piece came out in Show magazine, under the title “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” Steinem at first regretted it. She was striving to launch a literary career, and the image of her in long ears and a bunny tail overshadowed all her other work, including an article she was particularly proud of about the development of the contraceptive pill. In 1960s culture, like the 1890s, presenting as the wrong kind of woman carried risks. You could be sexy or significant, have a body or a brain. This story and the photos put her on the wrong side of the divide. (A divide that she had internalized. She wrote later: “Though I identified emotionally with other women, including the Bunnies I worked with, I had been educated to believe that my only chance for seriousness lay in proving my difference from them.”) Male reporters leered.
An assignment to investigate the United States Information Agency was given to someone else. Instead, editors suggested she disguise herself as a call girl and report on prostitution. A Playboy Club fan made repeated, obscene phone calls. The decision seemed like a career-ending mistake.
But, over time, Steinem’s opinion changed. “Eventually, dawning feminism made me understand that reporting about the phony glamour of exploitative employment practices of the Playboy Club was a useful thing to do. Posing as a call girl (which I didn’t do because I found the idea both insulting and frightening) would have been an assignment worthy of Nellie Bly,” she wrote in her essay collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. And she included “I Was a Playboy Bunny” in the anthology, one of the few pieces that made the cut from her early career.
In the late 1990s, long after Steinem had metamorphosed into a different kind of icon, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wondered how single mothers pushed into the labor market by welfare reform might get by on minimum wage.
“Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism—you know, go out there and try it for themselves,” she mused to her editor over lunch. He agreed, and then suggested that the “someone” should be Ehrenreich.
In the resulting book, Nickel and Dimed, on (Not) Getting By in America, the reporter spent months serving meat loaf and iced tea at a hotel restaurant, scrubbing floors with a cleaning service, sorting summer dresses at Walmart. Like Nell Nelson, she kept careful accounts, recording apartment rents, uniform costs, and the occasional fast-food lunch. Like Bly, she documented the physical toll, the back strain, the persistent rashes. And like Banks, who attempted to live on a factory-woman’s wage of $3 a week, she concluded it couldn’t be done: “Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow.”
Nellie Bly, in particular, inspired decades of female journalists. In her memoir In the Darkroom, Susan Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, among other books, wrote that as a child, journalism came to her early. “I perceived it, specifically, as something I did as a woman, an assertion of my female independence,” she wrote. Courageous reporters from history loomed large in her youthful imagination: “In my schoolgirl fantasies, the incarnation of heroic womanhood was Nellie Bly exposing the horrors of Blackwell Island’s asylum for women.”
And, if not Bly specifically, the can-do “girl reporter” character Bly created lingers in the mind of almost every female reporter I know. She lives on in comic-book heroines, like Lois Lane, who disguised herself as a rich widow to report on the Playboy Poisoner, and Brenda Starr, who went undercover to sneak into a party and interview a mysterious baron. Their long legs and flying skirts were prefigured by the illustrations of Kate Swan and Helen Dare leaping across the pages of the Sunday papers. In fact, the role of “girl reporter” became almost a superhero, smoothing out the ambiguities of the real women who did the job. It was a loss of complexity, but superheroes have their purpose.
The idea of going undercover, adopting another identity, hearing what you are not supposed to hear, retains a sinuous power. It particularly appeals to the hypocrisy-exposing instincts of the young. One friend of mine, Mara Hvistendahl, now a Pulitzer-nominated foreign policy reporter, went undercover the year after graduating from Columbia Journalism School. Nannying and waitressing to pay the bills, she also held down an unpaid magazine internship and hoped to end up as a successful freelancer. It was hard to break into the glossy magazines with only clips from a second-tier newspaper, though.
But when she heard that strip clubs were hiring in anticipation of the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden, this seemed like her chance. Inspired by the work of Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed and Ted Conover in Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes, she asked herself: Why not apply as a strip club server and see what the Republicans—selling themselves as the party of family values—were up to after hours?
For the week of the convention, aided by No Doze, she interned at the magazine during the day and took shifts at the strip club each night. Serving drinks and taking notes, she sidestepped energy company lobbyists looking for a twosome and tallied lap dances requested by those decked in flag-patterned ties. Then she rushed home at four a.m. to Google the house committees of her customers, type up her observations, and send them off to the Village Voice’s blog, only to get up a few hours later and do it all over again.
It was a cold (thermostats were set for men in suits), exhausting week, complete with a bout of food poisoning. And yet.
“As I look back on it, it was a good piece. It was a good way to try out my writing,” she told me. Her posts were picked up by high-traffic sites. Her parents proudly shared them with their friends. The pieces led to editors getting in touch and additional assignments for bigger outlets.
While she rarely goes undercover now, the skills are the same ones used elsewhere in her reporting life. “I do enjoy going deep into those other worlds,” she told me. “You slip into these roles and people forget that you’re there.”
But a century after the stunt reporters, women’s undercover work is often still not taken seriously, even if the disguise is much more fraught than a bunny costume. In 2011, journalist Suki Kim went undercover in North Korea, hiring on as an unpaid teacher at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a school run by American evangelicals with permission of the North Korean government. She had been covering the country for ten years by that point, and had come to the conclusion that disguise was the only way to get at the truth of what she described as “a world of deception.” For six months, she taught the sons of the North Korean elite and hid her notes in her lesson plan, typed then erased her reporting on her laptop, after saving it on a USB drive that she carried with her all the time. The book that resulted, Without You There Is No Us, documented the stunted lives of her students as they navigated outdated technology and propaganda and detailed the regime change as leader Kim Jong-il died and his son Kim Jong-un took over.
But when she returned, thankful to have survived, her project met a wave of criticism. Instead of “undercover reporting,” it was called “lying.” One New York Times headline infantilized her project as “Tales Told Out of School.” Reviewers scrambled to term it anything but investigative journalism: a North Korean defector’s tale (Kim wasn’t North Korean or a defector; she was born in South Korea and educated in the United States); the journey of a woman finding herself; and, in the phrasing of one foreign policy expert, a “kiss-and-tell” memoir. Over her objections, and with the goal of goosing sales, the publisher had categorized the book as a memoir, a label associated with high readership and little respect. As a memoirist, Kim was ineligible for journalism prizes and fellowships and wasn’t considered to be a North Korea expert. She had done something no one else had, infiltrated this incredibly secretive country after a decade of planning, reported from inside for six months, and no one wanted to talk about the subject matter, just critique her methods. The attacks mystified her. It took another female writer, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, to point out to her that the book’s reception might have to do with its placement in the female-inflected genre of memoir. (As well as the fact that, as Kim would come to realize, she was an Asian writer in a field dominated by white experts whose skin color was read as “objective.”)
The frustrations came to a head at the 2017 Investigative Reporters & Editors Conference in Phoenix. Kim sat on an undercover reporting panel with Shane Bauer, who had disguised himself as a guard at a private prison in Louisiana for an article in Mother Jones, and Ted Conover, whose undercover experiments included Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Both men had won multiple journalism awards; Conover had been nominated for the Pulitzer. Throughout the session, the moderator, an investigative reporter for the Toronto Star, ignored Kim and aimed his questions at
Bauer and Conover. When she mentioned that at a previous journalism conference, she had been dismissed as “that girl,” he followed up by saying, “Great insights from ‘that girl.’” Finally, when the moderator, lauding Bauer and Conover for risking their lives in the pursuit of the truth, asked the two men what would have happened if they had been caught, Kim grabbed the microphone and mentioned that, in her case, if she wasn’t executed, she would have been imprisoned for life.
“You’re a little crazy. Tell the truth. That’s crazy,” the moderator said.
“I have been described as a crazy girl,” Kim answered, composed, though she was seething, and added that if she were a man, she would be called “brave.” The applause and cheers were gratifying, as were conversations with women who came up afterward to thank her for speaking out.
But the sense of betrayal by her profession still haunts her. “I was a published author and, to be immersed, I courted that organization for three years before I jumped into North Korea,” she said of the school where she taught. “It’s not like I was some naive girl who stumbled there to teach English then came home to write about it, which is how it was viewed. No one gave credit that I actually planned it, that it was a professional pursuit.”