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eason for me to be in the piece because he was there. He could be me.
Which is why it is all the more startling when you describe yourself, in the third person, at the
end of Thy Neighbor’s Wife (“Talese began to see the masseuse as a kind of unlicensed therapist”).
I did that because I didn’t think I could use the first person in that book. I wanted to maintain the
feeling of detachment, because so much of the sex I was writing about was detached sex. I considered
not bringing myself into it, but I wanted to end up at the nudist camp near my home in Ocean City. A
lot of people thought it was a bit showy.
You have a signature technique you use to connect the characters in your books. For instance,
you trace the knife Lorena Bobbit used to cut her husband’s penis off to Ikea, where she bought it.
Then you find the woman who sold it to her. Thy Neighbor’s Wife opens with a boy looking at a
naked model in a magazine. You then trace both their lives. Why do you do this?
I want to convey the wonderment of reality. I believe that if you go deep enough into characters
they become so real that their stories feel like make-believe. They feel like fiction. I want to evoke
the fictional current that flows beneath the stream of reality.
Do you think journalism can lead to truth?
No, I believe that the editorial choices about what appears in newspapers and magazines are so
subjective that you almost never get the whole truth. The editor’s fingerprints are on what he chooses
to publish. The cast of characters in The Kingdom and the Power, if nothing else, shows you that
there ain’t no such thing as “objective journalism.” There is no such thing as absolute truth. Reporters
can find anything they want to find. Every reporter brings the totality of his battle scars to the event. A
reporter never gets it. He gets what he is capable of getting, what he wants to get.
But what about truth in your own writing?
I have a Calabrian point of view that comes from being a descendent of a historically invaded
people. We suffer from seeing too many sides at once. I see many, many different points of view. So
my point of view is a point of view that sees many sides! So where is the truth in that?
BY GAY TALESE:
The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits & Encounters, Walker & Company, 2003
Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality (with Barbara Lounsberry), HarperCollins,
1996
Unto the Sons, Knopf, 1992
Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Doubleday, 1980