Anne Hull — Through the Groves: A Memoir

two years can you guys turn this up so if you want to take your seats we'll get going all right here we go culture good evening everyone and welcome to politics and Pros I'm Brad Graham I'm the co-owner of the bookstore along with my wife Alyssa Muscatine and we're very excited this evening to be hosting journalist Anne Hull who's here to talk about her her wonderful new Memoir through the Groves Anne's a Pulitzer prize-winning willing winning journalist who spent nearly uh two decades as a reporter at the Washington Post she's a she's a fifth generation Floridian who started um her newspaper career at the St Petersburg times now now the Tampa Bay times and then moved in 2000 to the uh to the post uh where she was an Enterprise reporter on the paper's National staff for her work with a couple of colleagues in in 2017 investigating the terrible conditions of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center the post one a Pulitzer for for public service which is the most coveted of the pulitzers but along with with her ability to ferret out information on a range of subjects and also has stood out even on a staff with as much talent as the posts she stood out for her for the grace and power of her writing um and that Grace and power is very much on display uh in in through the Groves she writes about growing up in rural Central Florida in the 1960s mid orange groves that her father's family had had worked on for generations and at a Time Disney World was still taking shape there down there on the horizon the Memoir is on the one hand a very Vivid and heart-rending evocation of a particular time and place that no longer exist and and on the other hand or at the same time it's a it's an engaging and poignant story with universal appeal about a childhood filled with the Tomboy Adventures imperfect parents dealing with their own struggles and a search for self after attending Florida state for a year and then going to a junior college in St Petersburg and ended up taking a job as a traveling sales rep for Revlon I I hear you all chuckling fortunately for her and and for journalism and found her way to the St Petersburg Times initially as an assistant to a sports columnist her subsequent uh very impressive career as a journalist could easily have filled several more chapters as a review in the New York Times observed but Anne in what is a very slim work demonstrates a knack for keeping the story tight and doesn't get far into her adult years she's definitely left me wanting more and and I'm sure that many others will feel the same I hope all of you will read the book reviews have used terms like Exquisite authentic and entrancing to describe the book and the Washington Post said through the Groves hits that perfect place between pain and love and Anne makes it look easy now in conversation with Anne this evening will be another uh very accomplished Washington Post journalist and author who also makes reporting and writing look easy David marinus over the years Davis distinguished himself not only for his prize-winning coverage of the Clinton presidency the September 11th attacks in the Virginia Tech shooting but also for his excellent biographies of Bill Clinton Barack Obama Roberto Clemente and Vince Lombardi and several Works about events of the of the 1960s his 13th and latest book path by lightning came out last year and tells the story of the legendary Jim Thorpe so please join me in welcoming Ann Hall and David marinus [Applause] thank you Brad and thank you all for coming tonight can you hear me yeah okay great this is a special day it's her publication day the very first day on the home court and she's been getting a lot of great uh social media today whatever that means um I've been working and writing and editing with Anne for 22 years and over that course of that period I thought I really knew her deeply but it wasn't until I read this book that I truly got it I knew that she would rather be in a hell hole Motel on the outskirts of some town in Kansas or Missouri than at a Washington dinner party or even a watching a book party but I didn't really understand the full nature of it until digging into this book it's just a phenomenal exploration of an early life whether you ever get to the later part of the life I don't know I wouldn't wait for it in any case I'm just being honest as she is yeah um you know the wonder about Anne is uh I wrote I wrote once that you know every page of this book is a jewel and it is and it's not that you know she's sitting there polishing every word or waiting for the Muse to come um it's that she just works so hard at paring it down until she gets to the very essence of what she wants to say capturing the scene the mood the character uh in a way you know there's so many ways of writing truth in ads way is inimitable and it is the truth so I wanna you know the the beauty of this book is that it's a master class and how to capture a character and scene and you know we could blab for an hour as we will but it's Anne's words that really do it so I was hoping that you could read that part that sort of introduces that scene and the character at the beginning yes the part we talked about foreign thanks for coming out um yeah so this is kind of near the the beginning of the book the book starts when I'm six and um in Central Florida my father worked in the orange growing region of Central Florida and um his family was from from oranges and I'm the fifth generation from that family and so for a reason I don't quite understand my mom puts me in the car with my father to ride to work with him this summer I'm six and it kind of slowly comes out as to why I'm asked to do this but I don't know it as the summer starts it's more just a really cool adventure and this is a time when Florida was was was really nothing back then looking out my father's windshield I was seeing things I would never see again places that weren't even on maps where the sky disappeared and the radio went dead whole towns were entombed in Spanish moss with gnarled branches of Live Oaks and blackjacks strangling each other in the tannic Darkness we rumbled past old Pioneer settlements rotting in the humidity Black Creeks wound like Tangled snakes Birds spread their skeletal wings but never flew off just when it seemed we may never see daylight again the road deposited us deposited us into blinding sunlight dad's fruit buying territory for Hood crossed over four counties where about four thousand square miles of rural land and unmarked roads he had maps in the car seven or eight of them but I'd yet to see him consult one when he came to a cattle gate with a yellow rag tied to the middle rung that's where we turned left he didn't disparage Maps but I got the feeling from him and the other Citrus men that freestyle navigating was a point of pride he also favored the back way or the old way old 98 or Old Highway 64. we were always on Old Something one day we passed a group of men clearing brush on the side of the highway they had chains attached to their ankles they moved slowly dragging their leg irons as they sighthed through the tall black tall grass in the ditches just in front of them was a truck that crept along and a guard on back holding a shotgun next to a water cooler as we passed the Shackled contingent some of the men looked up their faces were slick with sweat dad said it was impolite to stare at the prisoners I turned back around on my seat but watched them in the rearview mirror until they respect and gone my father scrounged in his shirt for Winston probably trying to think of a parable about the uneven justice of captivity instead he asked if I knew any Chain Gang songs the hobo told the bomb we got any cornbread saved me some we sang it together a few times it made me thirsty thinking of the cottony insides of the prisoner's mouths and the water truck they would never reach every Friday we had a car full of money Dad paid the labor Crews on Friday afternoons so first thing in the morning we went to the bank in Sebring it was ice cold and brand new and our teller looked like Jeannie C Riley who's saying Harper Valley PTA she counted out a thick stack of bills that she put into a Leather Pouch and slid it toward dad out on the road we were Bonnie and Clyde it was my job to hold the bank pouch would you mind keeping this safe for me dad had said he always took his gun out of a glove box and put it under a seat knowing the orange knowing the money was going to Orange Pickers the bank teller must have dug into her drawer for the most beat up money she could find the bills were greasy and thin defaced with scrawling Masonic temples Halloween bats and the Egyptian eye or devil horns on Abe Lincoln the messages people wrote were in large block letters that spelled out help me or please call Lamar at Avon Park Correctional from going through the bank pouch and studying the money I learned the word in the first two lines of John 3 16. as abused as that currency was my father said it worked fine you'll see what's this every sentence was a jewel and uh I have to ask this in the nicest way possible but when I was I can't remember anything from when I was six years old how do you do that how did you get back and dredge all that stuff off made it up that's a very dangerous question in order yeah uh so yeah so one thing is my parents were both kind of writers they were documentarians of their own life and so they had a lot of stuff they left behind and everything from old checks to diary entries to grocery lists to budgets from my mom love letters so that was a big help but you know mostly I just had to turn myself over to not having it exactly correct there's just no way I mean there's no way you can do that in a newspaper story for one thing we kid ourselves and think we can but this was really difficult because you know in in truth in a newspaper story you have a notebook to look down to and refer to and you build a story from that there wasn't anything like that here and so I had to really just try and think about being six and those feelings that I remember from that time and then I built the story or the dialogue or the what I was seeing from those feelings um it was I it was just really having to let myself kind of remember what it felt like that or what it feels to be homesick as an adult and that brought me back to the to the feelings with my parents the thing about it was I'm asking that question but when I was reading it I never wondered I always felt this is really what happened because you have such Precision to the way you remembered it you know after working with Anne for so long I know that the one thing she hates are sweeping paragraphs that sort of summarize something and so she's not going to read it but in this book she has one of the best sweeping paragraphs I've ever read so I'm going to read it and it goes in the history of Central Florida if the history of Central Florida were charted out on a graph it would start with primordial sludge and then curve toward the Paleo Indians the Colusa Indians the tokobaga Indians poza de Leon runaway slaves snuff dipping white settlers the U.S army Osceola the great Seminole Warrior malaria cattle Citrus and a dull heat that left it undesirable from much besides oranges until the early 1960s when Walt Disney took a plane ride over the vast emptiness looked down and said there I love that um how did you get to that paragraph well first I have to say he's the master we call them swirls when we write together Dana where you know this it he he has these Cosmic things where he does these swirly gigs up here and it's his Cosmic thing you're looking down and I've never been very good at that and I think with this I just sort of um people think they know Florida and we all have our own interpretation of Florida so I tried to sort of make it slightly historical with some of the markers that we don't think of my family for instance thinks of themselves as Pioneers because they came to Central Florida in 1882. they weren't Pioneers the Indians had predated them by you know centuries so I just tried to hit some of the highlights of Florida and um gave myself permission not to worry about paragraphs and commas you know because we get hung up as writers I get hung up a lot about when a sentence should end when it sometimes it's just this breathless feeling and then you just have to let yourself go and that's kind of what I gave myself permission to do I wish I would have done it more but uh no this was just right yeah yeah um this book has so many fabulous characters in it and it's a wonderful um description of intelligent frustrated women most especially your mother and sort of the capturing her and her but her friends driving up to Lakeland or somewhere in a car to go shopping and teasing you know you're in the back seat when they're talking about their bras and everything else but describe your mother for us so my mom came from Brooklyn and ended up in Florida by another sad story that's in the book she was very Larger than Life she looked like she she was half Carol Burnett and half Elizabeth Taylor Just Larger than Life and very glamorous and that was um uh intimidating for me as a kid because I wasn't glamorous and I didn't brush my hair and I you know it was so different from her and so it's kind of in awe of her but she was someone who was I think Born a generation too early she got married and you know she said it's what we did and that's what she did and that's how she ended up there and she tried to make the best of it but if she weren't from that generation I think she'd be something else entirely but she carved out a lie for herself in that small world and she was funny and kind of glamorous in this little tiny town but always trapped and always sad and I always remembered her sadness and never feeling like she'd been you know ripped off of a greater experience but just kind of sad for the life she was living yet also you know trying to trying to have fun we always had fun even in the worst of times and um you could always feel that tension though that she was misplaced or she wanted to be a writer that was that was that's what she should have done she was a beautiful writer as it was my dad but neither of them did become writers and yet you sort of evoke that sadness um with a beautiful sensibility you know what you're playing the all the Broadway musicals and are going out to um she's obsessed with Chinese food you know all these things that she's looking for something right right right she came from Brooklyn and we we moved to this we were in this tiny little place in Sebring Florida which in you know the mid 60s there were probably 7 000 people and literally seven billion oranges you know the the oranges were the main thing they're not the humans but she was from Brooklyn and so we would often get in the car on a school night and drive an hour and a half to Lakeland to get Frozen chunking egg rolls you know she had these Cravings in these yens and these these desires kind of were in her life in in many different manifestations it often came out in food but it was it was in other ways to seeing seeing the local Broadway Traveling Show I mean everybody else around me was listening to Bobby Gentry little green apples you know their moms on these tinny transistors you know my mother was blasting Fiddler on the Roof and Man of La Mancha and my dad would say please turn that down you know the neighbors so she was just always always meant for a bigger world but I'm not sure she could have um had the courage to go to that bigger world and she got to Florida and this is part of the book where you actually have the documentation of a diary she kept on how she got there so her brother she was from kind of a my grandmother was from a very wealthy family in in Rhode Island and had gone to finishing school and had driven you know a Stutz Bearcat around through the depression came out fine but she married kind of a near-do-well Irishman and that's my mom's father who I love Percival Desmond Desmond right who was by the way um didn't like to work and he was he thought he was a clairvoyant so I could see a little bit of Ayanna there yeah so he was happy to live off my grandmother's um it was a lot of money but because she didn't invest it they just lived off this check every month and it was enough to they lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn but anyway the the favorite son the older son at 16 um was in my mother's mind he had a sore throat and um they didn't tell my mother what was wrong and it it was throat cancer and he was you know big athlete and just the star of the family so my grandmother in desperation went back to Providence to get money and they basically she threw the my mom and the other brother three kids in a car and they knew this boy Percy his name was Percival Desmond was dying and so they wanted to give him one last um year of his life and so they drove to Monterey California they went to Cuba they went to um in Mexico for fishing because he loved fishing and they were traveling and traveling and he kept getting more sick and then they ended up in a place called St Petersburg Florida and he died there and my grandmother basically checked out of life just sort of listened to Harry Belafonte records all the time she was completely unavailable for my mother she kind of stopped living in some ways and that's the sadness kind of that my mother my mother came came through and had to sort of do anything she could to get my my grandmother's attention and could never do it um so there was such Dynamic powerful women I make them sound like but they were just they you know chicken today feathers tomorrow that was the saying I grew up with you know we don't have money but we're gonna do something fun tonight and uh my grandmother spoke Yiddish she was just really eccentric and um but she never really gave my mom what my mom needed and so watching those two women um was remembering them as a writer that was really something because you're looking at them as an adult you know I kind of remember of course I remember things about childhood but I don't remember the tension between them I remember kind of a vacancy and that always was really sad um but I did have my mom's diary from that year when her brother was dying and you know she was going to Catholic school and she wrote you know Sister Clarice says if you say 10 Hill rosaries today Percy will get better and so my mother prayed and prayed and prayed and then um and then the boy died the teenager died and um my mother always kind of thought she didn't pray hard enough and it was her fault but there was a period of um you know there was a month when she said Percy's sore throat is back and then three weeks later Percy died as sister Clary said it's for the best you know she just she just leaned on what the nun had said and she kind of never talked about it again I never knew about it until I was much older really about this boy Percy until I found his crutches in the garage because he lost a leg yeah you know so many childhoods are either idyllic or supposedly idyllic or dystopic yours was a little bit of both but I love I love you as a six seven and eight-year-old playing with your little brother Dwight who was a walking calamity yeah yes he wasn't walking Calamity but he was a sweet one I wasn't I was the one who caused trouble um you were a real badass I think if you're a girl and you keep getting dolls you're going to revolt in some way either you know then or later or both um and so yeah I just had to sort of find my own way and um I had all these feminine Southern ants from my dad's side are always thrusting dolls on me and little white Bibles and white shoes you know I thought I was gonna die um so you have to you have to Rebel in some way and yeah my mother my mother had to make me wear a shirt when I was six I wasn't allowed to leave the house anymore without a shirt on and I I was mad but I also knew this is the start of a lot of other losses you know I I'm gonna have to be made to do things I don't want and it was yeah it was about a shirt but it was about a lot more and he just felt at that age it's this is there's going to be a lot more of these moments where something's taken away from me that makes me feel who I am there's a scene where her one of her grandmother's Gigi comes to visit and uh Anne has all of these war horses lined up on her dresser and she goes head to head with you right so yeah Gigi comes to visit and she has she brings her little white traveling suitcase for her overnight and uh She lays out everything on my dresser I have my you know Appaloosa they're all flanked out like that on the dresser and Gigi sets up her Shalimar and her little Broach and her cameos very very 1940s Southern woman and I thought she was going to be like her daughter and reprimand me for not not having I don't know Barbie or something up there and um she didn't say anything and then we talked and she told me my dad was having some problems and then a week later she she mailed me something and I opened it and it was um a unicorn just a single unicorn so uh yeah yeah you're right at one point adults flicker around us coming in and out of our Awakening Consciousness and you had so many of them big Nanny your what a great grandmother or something Gigi and finally my by far the favorite uh dami yeah yeah tell me about Amy yeah so my grandmother um was this mother of the boy who tied who died she was The Eccentric woman from Providence she spoke in a faux British accent the Mid-Atlantic accent as they called it in the 20s you know darling and tomato and all that stuff um and uh she was a magical character to me because when our family kind of fell apart we moved in with my grandmother and she she kind of raised me which was ironic because she didn't raise my mother so she she kind of came in and took care of me but not in a grandmotherly way you know we went to Michael Jackson we saw the Jackson 5 together we went shopping um we just did all these yeah all these really strange things that weren't really grandmotherly and she never hassled me about my gender or my not conforming so that was yeah she was kind of a magical character to me and I think with grandmothers they tend to be those figures and they can be very painful figures for that our parents but it it worked with me with her well I got the sense that she wasn't like just being nice to you but she really enjoyed Michael Jackson oh she left she loved the Jackson 5. I mean we'd want oh gosh we'd listen to the rate we slept in the same room we had our own transistors we dialed them to the same wlcy in St Petersburg and listen to the songs and we'd she'd call up and request you know songs at 11 at night and um you know she really thought John Lennon was overrated I think she thought Ringo had a lot more going for him but uh you know Jermaine is a darling of the Jacksons you know things like that so she was this magical person but she did spend the money we were supposed to use for the power bill um on Jackson 5 tickets and so uh yeah that's the kind of grandmother she was yes exactly uh you know the there's sort of intimations of racial inequality that just weaved through the entire book especially with two characters ciola and Booker right yeah this is yeah I was I was I had a housekeeper seola who was kind of like a mother figure to me in a ways my mother wasn't because she was teaching and working all the time um and I was as a writer really nervous to write about this because she was super super important for me and yet you know I could fall into all the traps of being yet another white child who who had a black babysitter and that was really difficult and I felt um I felt mad that I couldn't really say how much I loved her because it wasn't cool in this time you know I had to be so careful and um that was really really a challenge um I think I got it across but it's it's really it's like with a lot of gay stuff now it's very difficult to talk about things anymore because we can't talk about anything and sometimes I think as a writer that that puts a straight jacket on us to really say how we feel or make observations um yeah it it's it I'm not quite following you I mean yeah it's very difficult to talk about race as a white woman you know and and I felt like sometimes when you're so careful as a writer it just it turns out sort of flat and I'm not saying this turned out flat but it's just you're kind of reclamped you know because you don't want to make any mistakes or come off as um you know because of the stereotype the white girl and a black man absolutely yeah yeah yeah but those were the times I mean those are the times in this really really small town in Florida and so that was that was the life um but she knew you loved her she did yes she did but three years later I'd call her and she forgot me you know so it's that's typical right she had had other kids on her mind and it's it's it's that that was a loss to me because I thought of her as everything and I was just another kid to her you know and then there was Booker who probably knew more about the oranges than anybody alive yeah Booker was a was a deacon in town and he as I say in the book he would have been the mayor of the town had he not been black he knew a lot more than my father he was 10 years older than my father but my father was in charge because he was white and I tried to capture the dynamic between them which is Booker wasn't putting up with this dumbass white guy you know he but he did it respectfully and there was this um this dance between them that they both were aware of and I just tried to capture that with with uh dialogue and I got that dialogue because the last year in my father's life I interviewed him and taped him and all this all this kind of thing and so some of that dialogue comes from those interviews which technically you could say well that's not happening in real-time childhood that's another thing I wrestled with but it it conveyed my father in a conveyed Booker in a way that was true your father when you talk about interviewing your father in the last years there was a long period where he was not there and what was that like for you you know one reason I I wrote this book is because um I didn't know my father very well and I kind of cut him out of my life for him kind of crashing out on our family and really abandoning Us and how old were you when he left I was 11. yeah 11 and I think you know I I'm the kind of person and this is why I went into journalism maybe I could I could just put that away and start I become the new me and so I pretended I didn't have a dad or I didn't have any of that when we went to a new school I said I was from Brooklyn you know um I just didn't want to be the kid who'd been abandoned by their father and my father was an alcoholic and he got sober and he tried and tried and tried to reconnect with me and I just I sometimes allowed it but then not really so it was just a punishment on my part for the rest of his life and so later I decided I need to to see him and learn how learn who he is um also because I think you know maybe I'm speaking generally about journalists but we do things to avoid our own lives and it's so much easier to go dig into someone else's lives and I think I did that for 30 years and I became interested in my own life which was really strange because I never ever thought about it wanted to think about it or was interested in it I was always someone else's story was more important I'm making it sound like this was a like an act of scrapbooking it wasn't it was just to see who who I was where did I come from who who what is my own story and that's kind of what made me want to go back and write the book and it's what me made me want to really kind of connect with my father again and going through that whole process what did you learn or how did it change you or you change your own sense of self the writing process or the connecting with my father no no the the understanding that yeah the writing not the writing itself but the research and just exploration of your own family's history God what a I was you know just like you just the things we do in youth it's just it's just terrible you know this and it's the ability to close all doors you know just boom and never look back and that's really frightening when you learn that about yourself um I learned also my father was just such a good writer he was such a great Storyteller his language was beautiful all those Wasted Years of language you know I love language and I love the way someone speaks naturally and I just heard all this music come from him and I just I hadn't heard that music because I turned the radio off for 25 years and so sort of a feeling of gosh my my loss you know but we still didn't have this beautiful reconciliation at the end we were always just it was like I would walk through the door he would try at the same time we'd bump into each other and there you go now you go completely awkward you know in our remaining days and it was mostly because we were trying so hard to recapture something that you couldn't get back so in the case of your beautiful writing it's nature more than nurture almost in a sense your father had it yes he they just wrote all the time they weren't good at expressing themselves maybe or excelling in life but they wrote their feelings down and that is a very big big tradition my brother does the same thing we write down everything much more than we can say it it's much safer to sort of write down as opposed to actually saying it yeah you know I think it was about 10 years ago or somewhere around there where you told Linda in me that that the Herb Alpert album whipped cream and other Delights was sort of you know like the rosebud sled of your sexual understanding and so we went out and bought you that album but I didn't realize until I read your book that you were like seven years old when you saw that album what can I say I don't know if you guys can know this at home but it's Herb Alpert and it's uh yeah so it's this trumpet player and she's it's like it's a typical night late 1960s woman wearing nothing but whipped cream and I remember seeing that album like you know you're just kind of speechless what is this you know but not knowing why you're so drawn to it so yes David and Linda gave me that album and it's right next to the other you know archetype in my life which is Carly Simon's no secrets where she's not wearing the bra in the album cover so um yeah my life can be summed up in album covers it's some mermaid in a drugstore right there all of it yeah in any case I brought that up because um the you're finding yourself sexually is really understated in the whole book and how you decided to do it that way and what that what why you did it that way what it meant in terms of the Memoir I'm curious about I've decided the second book is going to be nothing but sex in in the 30s and 40s yeah that will sell um it's funny I was listening to a podcast today with Wanda Sykes and she was saying they asked her about her sexuality and she just she's so funny she's so just oh the Netflix if you watch the Netflix oh it's awesome yeah but when they act when the interviewer asked about her sexuality she just became timid yes no I mean it's just something that's it's really hard I think first some people not just a generation to talk about um I get I guess I I just I always saw myself as a journalist more than a lesbian it's really weird um but I should probably take that up well most journalists see themselves as as journalists rather than human beings not just right but the whole identity thing that's so strong today no I just I just that does not don't have that really at all and so um it was challenging to write about that that uh that stuff it really was but I've had a second book in mind yeah all right yeah Enos is making faces here yeah um you know you're one of the great journalists of this era we all know you as that writer um but the story of how you came to be a journalist is so unlikely I'm not really a journalist though I I I still I'm sorry I shouldn't my father always said he hated that word you're a reporter and a writer who could never write a nut graph yes so um you know I came to writing it again in a weird way I was I was like dropped out of college I didn't have any direction I was selling shampoo for Revlon in Fort Lauderdale and failing miserably at it wearing a tight little skirt running around Fort Lauderdale trying to sell cases of flex shampoo to you know drug wholesalers I thought I was the end of my life and um a friend and I had a company car at 23 but I couldn't add I couldn't do anything it was just it was terrible as a Salesman sales woman whatever and so a friend of mine at the Saint Pete Times um mentioned there's a job there and so uh it was a clerical job so it was quite the pay cut but I turned in the company car and I moved back to Saint Pete and I started answering phones in the sports department and that's kind of how I how I fell into journalism and then I worked on the city desk but it's one of those things where if you're in a newsroom it's you just you've learned what to do and I happened to work in a fantastic Newsroom and in fact in a fantastic era and so um it was just a great place to learn yeah well first of all tell tell them the uh how they hang in story yeah okay so I was answering phones in the sports Department we had this legendary sports editor he was a columnist he was Gentile he was from Savannah Georgia a big guy he was just one of the most respected uh Sports columnists in the country and the guys used to in the sports desk they all came in at four and they would greet each other with housing hanging and I and one guy would say exclusively to the left or a straight hang today I had no idea what they were talking about so Hubert comes to work one day it's Huber myself he's walking in and it's you know and I'm like hey Hubert how's it hanging and uh says very well thank you secondly you're kind of understating it I mean okay so you're working in sports then you're answering the phone right how did you get your first story it was a record review of The Go-Go's um did you remember the girl band so the guy who did the classical music and pop music he asked me to write a record review and so I just started writing record views that way and and kind of um yeah worked worked my way up it doesn't I don't know do you think that could happen today so you worked your way up from record of use to what fashion really does that surprise you yeah but it was the days when there's so much money in newspapers St Petersburg Florida I don't know if anyone's been especially like 30 years ago I was the youngest person by decades there were no store no clothing stores there was a couple chains but money was so big then they sent me to Paris to cover the radio door shows and there are some safety times people's in here and you know exactly what I mean it's just like this is magical place but there was money for days and I went to Milan I went to to Paris um knew nothing about a skirt or my pants or whatever but it was so much fun and so I did fashion for a year or so and then what did you write it was all emulation of what like Vogue did you know it was just copying basically I didn't have any kind of voice I just tried to spell correctly and then I got I did some music um they sent me out on some concerts they sent me to cover Live Aid which was one of the first big big uh you know fundraisers bands and I had to get on a plane and go to Philadelphia with this huge Radio Shack thing which is like a suitcase to file the story I mean it was it's so heavy and um I never filed a story I'd never done any of that and I was in the basement of RFK Stadium in Philadelphia and we had five editions then so I had to run to the pay phone a half a mile away with the Radio Shack to file the story I bet you're seeing this right how bad that was gonna be yeah um RFK Stadium in Philadelphia that's where Live Aid was broadcast in in the United States and the other part was in London in Wembley um so I heard on the radio because I have a little transistor Bruce Springsteen had just arrived I'm like God I got to get this in for second edition so I run back to the pay phone with this huge suitcase and I filed that bit and well it it wasn't true okay Bruce Springsteen had not arrived um it was just on the radio and that was lesson number one and it never take it from someone else uh so yeah so there's yeah and I got back to the paper the next morning and that the managing editor says my my byline at that time was Ann V for Victoria and V Hull because you up one more time and that V will stand for visitor um I think I'd love to have some questions from the audience if you can line up over at the microphone there [Music] um don't all go at once okay uh oh this is going to be dangerous I want to know mom and how when she saw you writing so you know write about this part but when she saw that you were becoming a reporter and a great writer what was her what did she say what was her feeling it was bittersweet she was super proud you know she would I would she would take my Sunday three paragraph fashion story and go over it with a pen and a highlighter and say Bravo you know and just she was the best editor and she would never say I don't want you to succeed she wanted me to succeed but you could tell it's that Bittersweet thing she always had this little sadness about her and I felt that and I felt bad for her bad about it but it but it wasn't wasn't a wasn't tension per se just sadness between us and sadly she wasn't around with you and the questioner won the Pulitzer Prize think about not writing about you a hard thing to yeah yes I did for about six years and then it became apparent that you cannot not write about that even at six years old because it was all in the making you know so I had to had to write about it but yeah I did think about that thank you thanks congratulations Anne um you talked about your parents writing journals your brother writing journals and so I'm I assume do you write a journal do you still write a journal no I don't when I started working for working for a living writing I just don't write anything down but I did write so much until maybe I was 22 23 all the time everything and then yeah I don't do that anymore it yeah it just all goes to sort of reporting on the stories it has been does it make you want to start no no not not at all not at all I mean this is a huge it was hugely hard to disclose this much about myself because I don't really do that and I never really appreciated journalists who did that um I always thought the story was about the other person but I see I see how hard it is now and it's hard to do it do it well um but it's it's risky as a writer and then you know you say some things then what does that leave you with to do afterwards so it's not for everyone um you would you've written a memoir so you know yeah but I don't keep a journal either so nor do I want to um did you go back and look at what you wrote it when you were 21 and 22. I threw those journals out because they involved women I really threw them out like years and years ago at the time so you know I told my my agent Tina Bennett who was kind of instrumental in me doing this book and finishing it I said gosh I wish I had this journal she goes no you don't you just need to remember how it felt this journalist would just messed you up which was really really true that is good advice actually yeah hey congratulations and so I assume that a lot of the people in the book have since passed but I also assume that a lot of people in the book are still living and so when you were writing about those people did you find it difficult to strike a balance between how personal you wanted to get about them or did you worry about how much information you were exposing and then thirdly did you run anything past people who are included in the book right so I have a brother and we're very close and he he's read everything many drafts and he he has a much better memory than I did so he really helped in that aspect we disagree on a couple key scenes and I thought about putting that in the book some authors do that Tara Westover did it and educated she you know is very explicit in the back about her brother remembers it this way I remember it that way and I just didn't feel like I had to go into all that disclosure because it's it's kind of I think if you kind of understand that but my brother read every word there weren't too many people left you know um um I worried about casting my dad's family as as racist but they were some are and so not you know no and there is that thing you learned that if someone has passed away they really can't sue you which is a terribly crass way to look at it but it's important I was just wondering if your childhood influenced this the kinds of stories you were drawn to as a journalist especially at the post and doing the long form stuff that you did yeah it's a great question absolutely um yeah always yes because I love Outsiders or love is not the right word but I understand Outsiders and I um rebel against insiders sometimes so that that's very much shaped it because I was an outsider still am in some ways so um absolutely in some ways I think some of the things I've covered made my life covering it's because of that you know I choose those stories because because of people being left out of a circle of power or not not regarded with respect um hi uh I can imagine how hard it was for you to write about yourself because I remember distinctly when you left the Washington Post and there was a gathering in The Newsroom and people told stories and the one I remember was that you were reporting covering some difficult situation with a group of people who didn't want journalists around and somebody you know you somebody pointed you to you and somebody else said oh that's just Anne because you you never drew attention to yourself and it was never about you so it's a remarkable that you were able to to write this Memoir which I'm very much looking forward to thank you thank you that's super nice um that's why it took nine years yeah it's it's very very very very difficult I didn't have that language right so tell me how you yeah but thank you it really was and the other part of your comment is so true that Anne had this incredible capacity to just go into the woodwork you know and people would either accept her or not even realize she was there because she was just so much a part of it I think what you're you're speaking of I did a story on a group of black lesbians in Newark New Jersey and one of their friends had been killed it was a gay hate crime and it was a year or two after Matthew Shepard I think and Matthew Shepard you know they closed down Fifth Avenue to protest and to mourn for this girl Sakia gun they did nothing and so I spent a year almost a year with these girls in Newark and um just hanging around them and you know we got I you know I would a reporting would be just sitting on a mattress on a Saturday and watching six girls sleep like puppies together because they were they'd been out all night dancing and we go to a club one night and um some someone else says who's this who's you know basically I'm a white lady who's 35 40 years old and Felicia the girl goes oh that's Anne that's nobody you know and so as a reporter that's the best thing that can happen to you you know all right I was just curious it seems like the uh the family Dynamic is really unique here but how representative do you think sort of the family that you painted is of families in Central Florida of that time my nephew Chris yeah it's my brother's son I think every family is representative of where they're from there's no such thing as you know oh we were the stereotypical family it's each of us and this is another thing I've you know really brought home during this process it sounds really corny but we we each have our stories and our individual stories help Define that region you know regionality is super important to me it shapes everything about us um and it's it's because of all the diversity within within within a place that geography holds a lot of different people so there's really no representational person I think two I have two questions for you and they're both they're sort of similar but different so one is following up on that what do we need to know sitting here in Washington about Florida that we don't know that this book is going to tell us and I'm particularly interested in what you know and understand um that you know maybe we all don't really don't understand but even Florida today and the second though is about journalism today and um I miss having you at the post so much and I love the stories that you wrote at the post and I wonder if you think that those stories are still being written in this incredibly changed journalistic environment and um where you see them and where you don't see them I definitely think they're being written at the post especially you know um Finkles here somewhere edits Stephanie mccrum and Eli saslow um we the post does those stories like nobody's business we're spinkly is hiding okay yeah so I mean we still do those stories now that I've been away from it a little bit I think it could be a little shorter um but um um so I think we do do those stories um and I it's it's very hard to be a journalist right now and I've been out of it for five years and it's much much harder now because no one will talk to you there's such a prize to pay if you talk to someone and so whoever gets those intimate stories just hats off there killing themselves to get that story so I think they're out there um a Florida that that's a sad thing in a way because there's only two or three papers left in Florida um it's very diminished and it's diminished at a time when the governor is rewriting public records laws I mean the Florida was always known for having great public records as you know and um if I look through the legislative stuff last year he's just he's just you know killed all the stuff that's been on the books for 30 years and so that's what's really difficult is reporting on things in government in Florida because it's so locked down and you can see DeSantis locked down in every aspect of his life I mean I've never seen a candidate a presidential candidate where there's so little about him and he's I think he's gotten rid of those those records and Guantanamo and everything so that's really difficult access and trying to tell those stories um and lack of media yeah but what was that the first thing of Florida well Florida is no great place for gay people um in the 1950s there was a legislative committee called the Johns committee that was funded by the the taxpayers of Florida that started to try and like root out Communists in the NAACP in 1956 and the NWA ACP at that point had such great lawyers and positive stuff was happening in the Supreme Court that this redneck got Charlie Johns from North Florida um from Stark decided let's switch our Focus to purge homosexuals from the state universities all professors who are suspected of being gay were brought into motel rooms and interrogated and terrorized and they lost jobs and this went on for six or seven years and those records only became public in 1993 I think and and a people now who have those records are worried about what will happen to those records now because you know people in Florida DeSantis might do away with these records and it's historical you know that's that hasn't been written about all that much and then of course Dan's going to write about it yeah and then we have um yeah and then Anita Bryant so um Florida's always been a crazy place you know you can go you have restaurants called jugs melons and Hooters you have people walking in Publix in thong bikinis but yet they have this strangely weird moral you know fixation it's just so it's just such an odd place and it continues to be exactly as odd as as we remember it and it's divided into three places always has North Central and South but um it's it's a mean place now it's really mean with with the way the government is does its business and treats journalists it's very difficult to cover this Administration in Florida and the vibe is just really it's like a hellscape for gay people you know Disney is no knight in shining armor and uh but they have stepped forward on this um you know the don't say gay stuff in a way that has really made um you know queer people happy in Florida but it's War you know between DeSantis and Disney and so it just kind of gives you a flavor of the just the bitterness and the war mythology that's being spoken now it's all war mythology I'm enjoying hearing you read your book on the audio audiobook version um did you enjoy doing it was it hard it's really really hard and the most thing you notice is like God why did I write a sentence so long because you can't breathe and it does remind you of that old thing we're always taught read your read your sentences aloud before that you print them it was a very good lesson that I had forgotten but um yeah it was it was it was very interesting yeah I hope you hope it goes okay it had a dry mouth much of the time but yeah one more covered this hand forgive me if you did what precise moment did you decide to do this it's a difficult decision for somebody who's been writing about other people as you said to suddenly find yourself writing about yourself part of it gets to to Debbie's question here um Florida is it I wanted to write about extinction extinction of a place a geography or an Extinction of my family and I just I just wanted to put a time capsule into the Earth for this moment to be remembered both of a family and of a place and also selfishly to go back and see and try and remember what who I was before I ignored myself for so many years in the corollary question David if you'll forgive the additional question did you find that a lot of the things you thought about yourself before you got into this were like as you as you plunge deeper into it like many of us do things that we imagined and had been said in our minds this is the way it was this is the way I was that you then Learned was not quite the case journalism just gives you an instant kind of feeling of nobility you're doing a good thing and you must be a good person yes if you go back and look at your own life closer you're not that that Noble or that great and that's kind of we all know that it's like but you really see it up close and journalism was a way to is a way to maybe just hang out and hide in some goodness thanks congratulations so as several of the questioners said we miss you deeply at the Washington Post um Christopher Hitchens once said that everybody thinks they have a book inside them and for most people that's exactly where it should stay but we're all very lucky that yours didn't stay there thank you very much David thank you so much so copies of uh and

Channel: Politics and Prose

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Keywords: books, book, politics and prose, bookstore, author, author talk, author video, book talk, new books, book store, indie bookstore, independent bookstore, book tube, booktube, reading vlog, annotating books, book annotations, reading vlogs, journalism, journalist, Washington DC, DC, bookworms, bookworm, book worm, book worms, book chat, @politicsprose

Id: dbigLvszIJY

Length: 59min 4sec (3544 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023