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The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

There's No Such Thing As A Howard Beal Moment: Michael Wolff on Power, Access, Hubris, and Writing Great Sentences

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7855 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2022

⏱️ 78 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Journalist Michael Wolff is best known for his juicy and deeply reported dispatches from various corridors of power. His many books include the 2008 Rupert Murdoch biography, The Man Who Owns The News, and the 2018 sensation Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House, which was easily the most talked about political book of the Trump era. His two other books about the Trump years are Siege: Trump Under Fire and Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency. Michael's most recent book, Too Famous: The Powerful, The Wishful, The Damned, The Notorious, collects selected works of biographical journalism over the last two decades, including lengthy treatises on Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Jared Kushner. The word perhaps most often associated with Michael is "access." He has a way of achieving astonishingly close constant with sources who seem willing to carry on as if he's not there at all, knowing full well he's writing everything down. This has made him famous in his own right, and prone to his own controversies. But Meghan invited him onto the podcast mostly to talk about writing itself: the craft of it, the business of it, the psychological toll it can take on author and subject alike. They cover a lot of ground in this conversation, including how Michael's first big break came from a tip form his mother, how his second published piece was for Ms. Magazine, and why he thinks "controversy" isn't so controversial anymore. They also get into one of Meghan's (irrationally?) favorite subjects, the improbable lionization of Ronan Farrow, which Michael covers in Too Famous but that no magazine would give him an assignment to write about.
 
 
Guest Bio:

Michael Wolff is the author of ten books including, most recently, Too Famous, a collection of essays, and three best-selling books about the Trump presidency. Over the past twenty years he has been a regular columnist for New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, British GQThe Guardian, and The Hollywood Reporter. He has won numerous awards in the U.S. and U.K., including two National Magazine Awards. He lives in New York City and has five children. 

Transcript

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0:00.0

I took the money and could not write this book for quite a long time.

0:10.9

You know, really, probably it was six years, maybe even seven years of full time waking up

0:19.1

every day and starting on page one.

0:23.4

I guess the worst time in my life, it was nearly broke me.

0:27.7

Horrific.

0:28.7

And I just didn't know what to do.

0:30.4

And I felt the promising career that I had had just drifted away.

0:39.2

You know, suddenly I had no agents.

0:41.3

The publishers wanted the money back.

0:43.7

I was a defeated and forgotten person in my own mind in a way.

0:49.4

And I had a close friend, a college friend who had gone to Wall Street, you know, and made a ton of money

0:58.6

already. So, you know, this is sort of mid-80s, a ton of money. You know, and he had started his own,

1:05.3

you know, made this money and started his own firm and, you know, it was like, you know, amazing. And I remember he,

1:13.6

year six or seven, he kind of sat me down and said, you've become an embarrassment to everyone

1:21.9

who knows you have got to stop. And then he said, so just come downtown.

1:29.3

I'll give you an office and we'll do deals.

1:33.1

First, I had no idea what deals were.

1:36.2

And I didn't even quite know how to get downtown, a place I had never been.

1:40.6

But I said, okay, I am on board.

1:43.0

I will be there.

1:49.0

And, you know, and I hurried to get a, buy a suit and a briefcase. And suddenly I was on Wall Street. And it was the best time.

1:59.1

Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. And this is the first episode of

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