After her long career as America’s beloved morning-news anchor, katiecouric has decided to write a wild, unflinching memoir focused on the messy parts. Why? rtraister reports
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But if you know, you know. During an early-September lunch in an outdoor covered booth on the Upper East Side, I noticed two middle-aged women walking past us six or seven times, staring at Couric, who had just come from the hospital where her 25-year-old daughter, Carrie, was being treated for an infection.
Couric, Bryant Gumbel, and Joe Garagiola in 1991. Photo: Raymond Bonar/NBC/NBC NewsWire/Getty Images On the Today show in Washington, D.C. in 1991.
But Going There also subverts that gaze. Couric is fascinated by the visceral realities of female bodies. Her pages brim with descriptions of her self-induced vomiting, her daughter’s explosive diarrhea, the surgery to reduce her fibrocystic breasts . When she was breast-feeding her children, she writes, her areolae were “yarmulke-size” ; in her version of a “stupid human trick,” she would sometimes give herself “a squeeze and squirt milk across the room.
Couric and Matt Lauer in 1997. Photo: Darryl Estrine/NBC/NBC NewsWire/Getty Images Couric, Lauer, and Al Roker on the Today show in 1997. Photo: NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images Ratings surged in Couric’s 15 years at Today, and she earned praise especially for some of the moments that complicated her famously “perky” image. After Couric’s 1992 “ambush” of George H.W.
It has been a decade since she left CBS, but her frustration and self-recrimination about not landing the plane that was the evening-news broadcast remain palpable. In our conversations, we discussed how CBS could have covered the publication of her book, with Couric noting that it might have been a way for the network to convey some acknowledgment of its own role in the debacle — a way, she said, “to kind of say, ‘We recognize some of the mistakes we made, some of the cultural issues we had.
With every description of the times that Sawyer got a leg up on her, there is a shadow of resentment that the former Nixon aide had an extra tool in her kit, and it was a sexualized one. Couric says that she has always liked, admired, and been a bit jealous of Sawyer personally. The way she sees it, their rivalry was predetermined; to paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, they were just drawn that way.
The back-and-forth now happening between these former colleagues only underscores the dynamic Couric describes in her book, in which professional rivalries between women are incentivized by bosses and fetishized by the press. “Listen,” Couric said to me, “they didn’t want us to feel too secure. I wrote in the book about how they wanted to hire a woman because they loved her bee-stung lips and the way she looked in the safari jacket, and it just made me realize who was running the show.
When I asked about what I described as her mother’s self-loathing, Couric visibly tensed up, got defensive. “I hate to call it self-loathing because I’m protective of my mom,” she said. “And I think if I had to analyze it posthumously, I would say it’s more protective of my father … I think she worried that it would not be helpful to my dad professionally. Honestly, that’s the only thing I can come up with.
“It’s not as if I didn’t think about it,” she told me, recalling how, for a television segment, she had once retraced the family’s roots with her father when he was alive. “We conveniently left the uglier chapters of his family history out. I didn’t really know that much about it at the time, but I think in the back of my head somewhere, I knew.”
Couric’s attempts to make sense of her family hits a truly wild crescendo when she takes Carrie, 2 when Monahan died and with no living memories of him, on a postgraduation tour through the South in 2018 to learn more about her late father’s “passion for the Confederacy.” Carrie’s senior honors thesis at Stanford had wrestled with Monahan’s obsessive hobby as a Civil War reenactor, and 20 years after his death, she and Couric meet up with some of his buddies.
“I didn’t want to write an aren’t-I-great book,” she told me over Zoom one morning, trying to get moisturizer out of her eye. “I didn’t want to sanitize my story, which I think reflects a lot of deep-seated societal issues that I think deserve reckoning and discussion. I wanted to describe a life in full and not sugarcoat things. I don’t want my daughters to think I was perfect and always made the right decisions. I want them to know I learned and grew and evolved.
Why did she confess? “I think I put it in there because I still question myself,” she told me. “I mean, I chose to write about it. I wanted to be honest about the conundrum I faced after her team called up and said she didn’t understand the questions, that she hadn’t been following the story, that she misspoke. Yet she was on the record, and she did answer the question.”
Couric is acknowledging that many of those narratives have been distorted by power and that she had a hand in the distortion — ranging from the time early in her career when she went undercover as a homeless person , to her participation in round-the-clock coverage of missing or murdered white women, to her slanted reporting of the beating of Reginald Denny after the Rodney King trial — all determined by her own position within racial, professional, and economic hierarchies.
“We live in such a black-and-white world right now,” she told me the day before returning to Today to publicize her book, reflecting on the public estimations of her own goodness or badness in the early coverage. “I think it’s interesting that I wrote this book in part because I’d been pigeonholed. And it’s ironic that people are trying to squeeze me into a container again.”
But the relationship between Couric and her adoring audience was never direct, never real friendship, much less the kind of family NBC was always touting. It was always mediated. Couric regularly stresses that the perkiness wasn’t an act, that she was really herself on TV. But she also writes in a forward to the book, “On TV, you are larger than life but somehow smaller, too, a neatly cropped version of who you are.
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