Reporting Always by Lillian Ross
A Review of Lillian Ross’ Reporting Always: Writings from The New Yorker
“Well, I really don’t like that view of what a writer is. I’ve always been grateful, grateful to this day, for what I learned from Hemingway as a young writer just trying to find my way. Coming across these beautiful short, clear, moving sentences was really a big light for me. And I would hope that young people would find that kind of excitement, if they’re interested in writing, by reading those sentences today. It’s been sort of obscured in a way by all the talk, some of which might have been engendered by Hemingway himself because he didn’t pander to the gossip columns. And he didn’t pander to a lot of the kind of people we all see writers pandering to today. They may have resented that. I’m not sure. It’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me because my mind and my interest has always been in the writing.”
Reporting Always: Writings from The New Yorker by Lillian Ross (2015). Published by Scribner.
My friend added this on Goodreads, she’s a journalist in India, and I was intrigued immediately by the second part of the title: Essays from The New Yorker. I am an avid fan of both The New Yorker and The New York Times for their arts criticism (I stay far away from their politics section, not my cup of tea), although, at times, they come across as a bit pretentious and culturally centered. Besides the few current staff writers at the magazine that I could name, I don’t really know much about the people who’ve built this magazine up.
Lillian Ross is one of those people. At twenty-seven years old she began writing for The New Yorker in 1945, as World War II was slowly dwindling down, and she would remain with the publication for up to seventy years. Seventy years is insane, especially considering the editorial industry. Nowadays they don’t pay you enough to scrape a basic level of income and to survive in New York City. One thing curious about Ross was her relationship to J.D. Salinger; she was a year older than him but was very good friends with him and his parents.
And so when my friend marked that they were reading this and after I googled who exactly Lillian Ross was, I was interested. I requested a copy to be shipped to my local library and the day I received it I started plugging and chugging. There’s a lot of thoughts I have about this, so let’s just dive straight into it.
Content / Writing
Now, if it wasn’t obvious by the title of this book already, this book is a compilation of the work that Ross published for The New Yorker from 1947 to 2003. She started working there in 1945 and didn’t retire until seventy years later (again, this is insane and a testament to the era she lived in). The book is split into sections by the topic of the essays, such as celebrities, writers, and New Yorkers on the streets. Personally, as a writer myself, I was most interested in the way she wrote about the writers, especially because she profiled big writers at the time and spent time with the likes of Hemingway—thankfully, that essay was included in this collection.
Ross likes to write about young people, as seen in her 2007 essay about Lin Manuel-Miranda, years before he would reach peak fame for his work with Hamilton. Unfortunately, that essay is not in here, but she has many other essays of varying lengths. I honestly found this book difficult to read at times because I wasn’t interested in the subject of the essay, and so I found myself shamefully skipping through pages to find topics and sentences that I was interested in. Even the Hemingway essay I found myself losing steam about halfway through, and I thus struggled to finish it. There’s this one essay in the collection that’s fifty pages long, and that really shot my attention span off of the roof.
She’s best known for her particular writing style, one that inspired generations of writers after her. She takes a novel-approach to setting up the scene, who she’s writing about, the setting and props all around us in the moment. And for me, as someone interested in editorial writing and am trying to crack into it, this was the most valuable part of the book. While I wasn’t very interested in the actual things she was writing about and the people, her breaking down and studying her writing techniques made it worth it to keep chugging through.
You also really get to see her writing style improve over the years, since her work included ranges from across many, many decades and eras. I’d say also if you’re into seeing firsthand accounts and interactions with people who would be stars (e.g. the first essay is about meeting the young Julie Andrews as she stars in her first Broadway production), then this is your kind of book.
Overall Thoughts
I think I summed this book up very well: if you’re into journalistic writing, it’s a good text to break down and read through again and again to comb through for technique. If you’re not into it though this might be a bit of a toucher read, since it’s basically a bunch of newspaper articles that you can’t skip through and press the red “x” once you’re bored of it. If it sounds vaguely appealing to you, I recommend checking the book out of the library and reading it that way. Unless you’re a diehard Lillian Ross or The New Yorker fan, skip the physical copy for your personal library.
