I think I benefited from a kind of I benefited from sexism. So I didn't have to actually know anything about the subject as long as it was a woman. The New York Times, I knew somebody who was an editor there, and they didn't trust California writers. They had kind of a suspicion. And so they thought of me as kind of an extension of New York. There was no reason for me to be doing that story, except that she was a women. That was one of the huge breakthroughs.
Peggy Orenstein is a journalist and author. Her latest book is Unraveling.
“The challenge is… to not want to say, I need to know what the book is about. I need to have my chapters. I need to know what exactly I'm looking for. Because it's really scary to just go out and report and have trust that there's going to be interesting things and that if you just keep going, you're going to find them. So to not foreclose possibility and options and ideas is the biggest reporting challenge for those sorts of books for me.”
Show notes:
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