How to Become a Writer Gay Talese | Big Think

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Gay Talese explains how a childhood spent eavesdropping on conversations in a New Jersey dress-shop and a lingering sense of being an outsider prepared him for the writing life.

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Gay Talese:

Gay Talese is an American journalist and a nonfiction writer. He wrote for The New York Times in the 1960s after working for its copy and obituary sections. In the 1950s, he was one of the first writers to add minute details, use literary flairs, and begin articles in medias res.

His groundbreaking article "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" was named the "best story Esquire ever published," and he was credited by Tom Wolfe with the creation of an inventive form of nonfiction writing called "The New Journalism."

He has written many non-fiction books, beginning with 1964’s The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. His 2006 autobiography A Writer’s Life focuses on his trials and failures as a writer, such as having a profile piece rejected by The New Yorker, which ironically reviewed the book positively and said it had a “distinctly moving” quality.

Gay Talese was named the winner of a George Polk Award for career achievement. The awards, presented by Long Island University, are considered among the top prizes in U.S. journalism. His latest book is High Notes: Selected Writings of Gay Talese.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?

Gay Talese: I wasn’t given any advice. I wasn’t even aware of writers during most of my life until I came to New York at the age of twenty-one after college. What made me a writer is what made me curious, and what made me curious was being an American that wasn’t sure how American I was. I think this is true of a lot of people who have foreign parents, and my mother and father ran a store in the southern part of New Jersey where I was born. The town was called Ocean City. I was born in 1932. When I was ten years old, the war, WW II, was very much being enacted through the European theatre, and the part of Italy that my parents come from, which is the southern part, was being attacked by allied forces, Americans, Canadians and British, moving up through areas that were the centers of my ancestry. Though I was born in New Jersey as I said before, I was ten years, eleven years old, twelve years old during that 1942, ’43, ’44 period, and the only thing I remember that made me a writer, and the curiosity that is necessary I think for being the kind of writer I am, a nonfiction writer, was that as a boy in the store I would see my parents react during the daytime in one manner as they dealt with customers.

My mother spoke English very well. My father spoke English with an accent, and he worked in the back of the store. My mother worked in the front of the store selling dresses, and what started me thinking about other people was when I overheard conversations between my mother and her customers, and I became very curious about the women and their stories.

The value of listening

Gay Talese: And so it was my listening to the stories as women on one end of the counter, who would talk across the counter to my mother on those leisurely afternoons while browsing through the clothing racks picking fabric or picking dresses to try on. They would be talking about things, and the thing that would be talking about weren’t necessarily of any significance in a social or historical sense, but they were revealing of personal moods, personal feelings, and during the war, there was references to the war, to the rationing of food, to the lack of gasoline during that period, to the fear of their sons or maybe daughters in the military service, or their uncles or fathers working in defense plants late at night in far away Philadelphia which is fifty miles away. And so as a boy, I was hearing references to the war while being remote from the war, and at the same time, I was intimately involved with the enemy in the war—the Italians—who of course were allied with the Germans because my father’s three brothers were in the Italian army.

Now you say what does that have to do with being a writer? What this has to do with being a writer is this; at a young age, I would eavesdrop in the store and hear stories of American women talking about their lives – the kind of material that might make for fiction writers; the essence of fiction, private life. At night I would hear in our apartment above the store –

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