The Press Box - Trashy Tabloids and True Crime With Clare Malone and the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Bryan is joined by The New Yorker’s Clare Malone to break down The Ringer’s new podcast, ‘Just Like Us: The Tabloids That Changed America.’ They talk through the era of Bennifer, the evolution of celebrity, and discuss the values of America seen through celebrity media (0:33). Then, Bryan is joined by musician and novelist John Darnielle to dive into the genre of true crime, touch on writing songs vs. novels, and discuss his new book ‘Devil House’ (31:52).  Host: Bryan Curtis Guests: Clare Malone and John Darnielle Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Benefer is back. Brad and Jen are friends again, and Paris Hilton is somehow still making headlines. 20 years later, we're living in the world that the 2000s tabloids created. On this series, I'm going to tell you the story of a decade of American life through the trash we love to consume. From Spotify and the Ringer podcast network, I'm Claire Malone, and this is just like us, the tabloids that changed America. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Friday. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here,

along with producer Erica Servantes. We have got a very cool show today. It's devoted to the kind of things we love to read, but that leave us feeling kind of bad inside for having read them. We'll bring on the novelist and musician John Darniel to talk about true crime journalism in just one second. But first, there is a very cool podcast that just started up here at The Ringer. The podcast is called Just Like Us.

the tabloids that changed America. It is written and reported and generally masterminded by the New Yorkers, Claire Malone. Claire got interested in a period of tabloid history that starts in the early 2000s. That's a time of such mega stories

as Benefer, Britney Spears, Spencer Pratt, who makes an appearance on the podcast. It's a time when Us Weekly magazine was going up against people for scoops and photos of the stars. Claire says, and this is not totally tongue in cheek, that what the tabloids did during this period

changed the course of American history. How so? Here's Claire Malone. All right, Claire, I love hearing people talk about reading things at a certain point in their lives. And you say in the podcast that in 2002, you were reading about the Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez romance in the tabloids. Are you able to describe what it felt like to read those stories in that moment?

I was an impressionistic teenage lifeguard. And so I would say in some ways, like all of my tabloid reading, I can see myself sitting at Thornton Park on my, you know, off break. And I think I was just, I really, you know, I didn't, I had a teenage brain. And I also didn't have the perspective that the internet now provides us of like, this is all kind of fake or they're a publicist behind that. I didn't know what a publicist was. And so I think I really had this earnest reading of, wow, this is like up and down. And I knew it was trashy, obviously, but just loved the kind of like, you know, juicy couture sweatpants with like a $1 million pink Harry Winston diamond ring of it all. Like I liked, I think I, I think the overall impression I had was like, this has nothing to do with my life.

And isn't it great? Like, isn't this exactly what I want? And I think I still, you know, I think for Amanda Dobbins, my editor on this, and, you know, we're about the same age. And there's a certain, like, I think magic we were chasing of, like, before we were spoiled by the internet and spoiled by the cynicism, when we just, like, really enjoyed the fluff of it all, which I kind of wanted to capture, like, how glossy tabloid mags like us weekly. which was like kind of high brow but kind of low brow too.

Just like really knew how to make some delicious ass candy and like we loved eating it. And it just is not it's not the same anymore. You know, like I scroll the Daily Mail homepage every day, which makes me feel like a little bad, you know, like a little bit dirty. And I just never felt that way with with my Us Weekly or Tabloid reading back in the day. So for people who are sadly too young to have experienced, this in its 1.0 form. Why was Benefer, the story you start the pod with such a juicy story for the tabloids back then?

It was, so a couple reasons. So it was the beginning of the decade, which is one of the reasons why we conveniently, you know, we're telling the story of the 2000s. It was kind of like the first really big, supersized, crazy celebrity couple story. But the kind of media story behind it is that Bonnie Fuller has. had come over, Bonnie Fuller sort of famed magazine editor with like, she later went on and edited a bunch of the sort of trashier grocery store tabloids and made a lot of money. But Bonnie Fuller was seen as this genius who had, you know, been at Glamour magazine and kind

of came over to Us Weekly and turned it in around 2001, I believe, and turned us weekly from this kind of cooperative, like more like People Magazine, you know, here's a nice, you know, photo that the publicist we agreed on and this, you know, the star looks beautiful in this. Bonnie Fuller turned us weekly into paparazzi shots on the cover, reported stories, like actual reporting inside, like getting the gossip in the dirt on people. And Benefer kind of happened at that same time as like Bonnie Fuller's Us Weekly, people were like, this is great, you know, because who doesn't like gossipy reporting, right? And so Benifer was also, so that was sort of the media structure going on.

And then I think Benifer was just, you know, she's in all these rom-coms. Their opposites attract. I mean, we kind of talk about the race and class of the opposites attractive at all. Like Ben Affleck is prestige white actor. He had just been dating Kenneth Paltrow. J.Lo had just been dating Puffy. Is associated more with hip-hop. But people were really into, but she was also in all these.

rom-coms where what's the premise of rom-coms, right? Opposits attract and it kind of felt like that in person. And I think those two things plus the the real rise of and hunger for paparazzi photos, kind of egged on by like a bidding war between People magazine and Us Weekly, which we get into in the series, really just all swirled together and made this kind of crazy atmosphere for, for Benefer. So take us back to the journalism nitty-gritty of the early two, thousands, them getting together and then breaking up. Those are two big stories. But between those,

there's all these kinds of mini scoops or scoops with big air quotes around them. What kinds of news are they competing for here? I mean, they're competing for things like, um, was Ben at a strip club in Canada and how did J-Lo feel about it? Or I mean, you know, what is, J-Lo also cooperated a lot with tablets, which we talk about. Like she was very into, she was kind of, she was selling an album. She was promoting all these movies. She was less famous or less prestigious than Ben Affleck. And she was kind of cooperating with them. So some of the scoops were like, JLo does an interview to tell you like what she cooks for her man and how she like has a bang and body. Like in my living room in the next room, I have all these old, you know, issues of Us Weekly where it's,

it's like those little things. So they're not even, it's kind of like the, I mean, it's, if you're a page six reader, it's like page six stuff, right? It's here's, here's a relationship. Here's the ups and downs of the relationship because everyone is talking to fill in the blank reporter and kind of giving you the micro updates every week. And, you know, ladies in New York are reading it while they get a pedicure on Friday or something. And those were kind of the scoops they were going after. Sometimes they were bigger, though.

I mean, when they eventually, in the lead up to the wedding that never was, there were a lot of actual, like, where are they having it? And, you know, someone told me that there was a sort of, well-placed girlfriend of a of a Hollywood power player who was just, you know, leaking wedding details to, um, to us weekly. So it was kind of like these, you know, frippery stuff, but stuff that really, really moved magazines and, and really moved sales for, for these places. And you say in the pod, this is kind of the end of the old movie star remove where they have a little bit of distance from us. How is this different? Because they reported on celebrity relationships before, right, magazines?

How did this feel different? It was kind of kicking people off their pedestal a little bit. You know, I think that was sort of the magic of the Bonnie Fuller. And then later Janice Min took over the magazine and people would say grew it sort of in her very, you know, she later took over as editorial director of the Hollywood reporter. So very kind of, like a lot of very smart people, Ivy educated people were running very trashy magazine. But I think the magic of these things is that they, magic of these magazines is they both. gave us the Hollywood glamour of it, but then we're also like, but they're really kind of skeezy, too. You know, that would, they were, they were sort of, they were more impish. The tone was more impish.

And I think before, and, you know, still, People magazine or an entertainment weekly took a different tone to, to, to celebrities. It was more, I think, more akin to, you know, our, you know, the fanboying or stand culture, right? Like those magazines were a little more flattering to celebrities, whereas us really was like, kind of trying to have it both ways, saying, like, they're beautiful and glamorous, but also here's their, you know, here's their seedy side. And obviously that's been, that's been done before in Hollywood media. Like, you know, when I first started doing this, I, um, I ordered and read Hollywood Babylon, which is like the, like, the, you know, the trashiest of the trash, probably mostly untrue, um, story, like stories of like, 1920s and 30s and 40s, Hollywood.

where just like a lot of really bad stuff happened. And I think this was like the version but with fact checkers, you know, like there were some lawyers. There were guardrails on it. But it was definitely like looking to in some ways do a classic thing that journalism does, which is like check people in power or hold people in power to like shine a brighter light on them. Because, you know, people in Hollywood are selling you something, which I think is a thing we kind of tried to keep coming back to in the podcast. Like that's the tricky thing with the ethics, basically of celebrity tabloid journalism is like how you should think about the people behind this. Us Weekly, which is such a big subject for your pod.

And first of all, when I was a kid, I bought the pre-Bonnie Fuller edition. I remember one time at the airport because it had like a nice posed picture of Harrison Ford on the Covenant. I remember going to my mom go, hey, look, I picked up U.S. Weekly. I mean, it was sort of there, but not there. And she comes in and she says, people is the old respectable celebrity magazine. You have the supermarket tabloids below it. And she's just kind of slotting it right in the middle of those two things. Yes, which was genius.

I mean, yeah, she wasn't like I remember, you know, my grandmother bought the National Inquirer, which was printed on grubby newsprint, grainy photographs, like really just kind of like you should, you should be like a little embarrassed to buy it. And Us Weekly had, I mean, the genius of it was kind of like back when newsstands mattered, right? it had great covers. I mean, those cover lines are, A, they're glossy, B, they're super catchy. I mean, they just had, you know, I think some of the, a lot of people talk about, like, the Janus Min cover line where she just had, it was always like, there were a lot of questions,

you know, like, in the vein of like, you know, either why, maybe, I can't remember if this is Bonnie Fuller era or Janus Min era, but like, why aren't they married? And it's like the three friends girls, right? like Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston. I mean, bad stuff, right? But like, but you're just, but you're kind of like, oh, I mean, why aren't they? So, so things like that, I think really, it was kind of this alchemy where it was, I mean, highbrow, lowbrow is so overused now. But that's really what it was.

I mean, she really kind of did, as you say, slide right in between those two genres of celebrity journalism. And Fuller is the one who invents the feature, which gives your podcast. has its name, stars are just like us? Yes, correct. And what is the genius? What is the spark of genius here? I mean, Stars are just like us was, it was basically paparazzi photos of celebrities doing banal everyday things, like getting coffee, walking their dog, like dropping something. And it was the kind of idea was, and this is, I think, the whole, the whole ethos is like,

yes, on like the previous pages of this magazine, we have printed pictures of these people in like banging red carpet outfits, but like here they are with their gut hanging out pumping gas. And like they are just like us. So it would, she was, they were kind of playing both sides of it.

The, you know, the duality of celebrity to get all American studies on you or something. But like the, the idea that like these people are glamazons, but also they are just like, like you. They're human beings. But not in a compassionate way. Let's make ourselves feel better by looking at their cellulite kind of way, which is a theme of 2000s media that gets even worse when

blogs come around. That's what I was going to ask you. Are we making the stars relatable? Are we just bringing them down to our level and humbling them? We're bringing them down to our level. I don't think there's anything particularly compassionate about 2000s tabloid media, either us weekly or Perez Hilton in particular when he starts his rise. I mean, I think there was really this sense of these people are, you know, they're kind of cardboard cutouts, right? They're paper dolls. And like, I think there's some like, you know, a little resentment that we all have of,

like the beautiful people. And they were harnessing that or, you know, the schadenfreude of like, I was joke with people that like Google any celebrity plus nose job and you'll find before and after Google image results. And that's totally like a thing that I got from probably the mid-2000s celebrity blogs and this kind of idea of like, well, it's beautiful, but it's all fake. So I do think it was kind of cutting people down to size, which I think we've gotten better about and maybe have a more complicated take on how we should view celebrities. But it's definitely I think a still ongoing conversation.

Yeah, I think we're still working it out in real time. Now, the early 2000s, this is the end of the golden age of magazines. So what are the spoils that somebody like Bonnie Fuller would enjoy by being editor of Us Weekly? Really big paycheck. Yeah. I don't have the sort of reporting on what Bonnie Fuller's Us Weekly. paycheck was, but there was reporting that Janice Min was making around one to two million dollars a year, which would put her on par with like what Graydon Carter was making at Vanity Fair, just like really

big money. You know, there was, there were also a lot of, I think it was a real lifestyle. I mean, these people, these were the sort of stereotypical, I talked to Tabani's assistant, and he was like, you know, she was always, she had. She would commute in. She had three kids. She was a busy lady in addition to like running a magazine. But he was like it was kind of the stereotype of Bonnie's in the makeup room at 4 p.m.

Someone's doing her hair and makeup for a red carpet she's doing that night. And she's on the phone or like looking at page proofs. There's just so there was a lot of there was a lot of work. But I think a lot of lots of parties, lots of red carpets, lots of schmoozing. It was kind of a New York that was. I guess devil wears Prada-esque, right? Like that's probably people's most, the easiest reference point for what these,

these, you know, women, women editors were kind of living. She's cutting celebrities down to size and she is also a celebrity who's being photographed on the red carpet. She's a media celebrity. Yeah, I think she's like a page six, she's like a page six New York celebrity. Let's put it that way. In early 2000s,

just to just mark the moment in media time here. So magazines are, still a thing. People are still picking up a print object, which they do much more rarely now. But the celebrity doesn't have Instagram or social media yet. No. So they kind of can't fight back or cast this just, you know, bury us in a torrent of photos of them out shopping and stuff like that. Yes, exactly.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think I can't remember what year us weekly actually. They had a website, but the website was like, buy our subscription. I don't think they were actively using their website for people to read articles until like 2006. And I think, you know, celebrities really had to, you know, kind of play ball with first the magazines and then the blogs. I mean, we talked, you know, I talked to a couple bloggers, you know, particularly one who was, let's say, covering Kim Kardashian during her rise in 2007. The blog was like writing a lot of crazy stuff about Kim, maybe some of it true. some of it not.

And Kim had to reach out and sort of say like, listen, I'll do a sit down interview with you because I want to present my side of it. I mean, that's unheard of now, right? Because Instagram rolls around in, I think in 2010, it's officially invented. And then just completely changes the paradigm of celebrity control while obviously

print is falling apart. You know, it's not sustainable. There's lots of these, you know, websites popping up, just everything kind of changes and celebrities have more room to put their side of the story out into the world. So I think the 2000s were really this point when, you know, the rise of TMZ, the rise of Perez, there was kind of the shift of publicists don't run this town anymore. We're going to do some real reporting on you guys. And I think that I think we like should pause and say like there was real reporting that was happening. Like TMZ has a whole boatload of like

ethical things, but they were doing shoe leather reporting. They were kind of applying these these basic journalistic, like call everyone, you know, or call everyone associated with the story and like get the juice. And that I think hadn't really been done a ton in the sort of soft focus, here are my baby photos, people magazine kind of thing. And that's the interesting part, right? Because there are elements of that of journalism in here, as you say, of real journalism. And it's not like a world where we just get Instagram baby photos all the time as like a, you know, it might be a happier world in just a narcotic sense. Like, oh, yeah, look at that. But journalistically, that's not great. You know, that's not. Yeah. And I think the other thing that's really notable is

that the celebrity stories and the power of celebrity media made its way into mainstream media. So CNN was covering Benefer, you know, there were, like, people were following the Britney Spears news on cable and, like, CBS news was covering Britney's breakdowns. I mean, this stuff made it into the mainstream. TMZ, I think because of its reporting, and I talk about this a little bit in the series, like, TMZ, mainstream places had to credit TMZ for breaking big stories, you know, which I think they were uncomfortable doing. doing, but it was kind of like, you know, this is, these are the people who were there first. And I think that like that was another really interesting element, the way that this kind of fluff stuff was smuggled into kind of the nightly news or like people's regular mainstream diet. So kind of everyone was was, was digesting it.

And the reason that's happening is because CNN is seeing how successful this is and says, we just, we just have to find a way to get this on our network somehow. I think people, yeah, I think like cable, even the sort of, you know, terrestrial networks, the ABCs, the CBSes, yeah, that was what people wanted to watch. And it kind of felt like a new thing. I mean, like TMZ's, the celebrities that TMZ created like Paris Hilton and sort of the cast of characters that come with Paris Hilton, those were sort of fascinating to people. And there was a lot of access. There were a lot of paparazzi on the street doing videos. There was a lot of e-roll. Like, it was just kind of good for TV and sort of easy TV. And, yeah, I think it's in the same way that, like, frankly, over the past five or six years, TV execs have realized, like, wow, people really love arguing about politics and people really like, I mean, like, there's, there's some more of that on her area. Yeah. There are certain fundamental principles of, like, what makes good TV? And it's like conflict, sex, pretty people, like, that stuff's good. And so,

like I think that's why it made it into the airwaves. Yeah. And you saw talk about this all kind of happening in the aftermath of 9-11. There's so much gloomy news. There's so much just awful news in the world that this whole level exists kind of as something to distract us for us to look over here and feel good or at least not awful for a few minutes. I think so. I mean, it's like the early aughts were, you know, 9-11 war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, Bush.

Um, obviously the financial crash happened in 2008. I mean, there was a lot of hairy stuff happening in the 2000s. Um, and I do think we liked escapism. I mean, you know, I talked to, um, Ben Whitacom who was a long time, you know, gossip columnist and wrote this really smart book, um, called Gatecrasher. And he was, he kind of had the, the, um, like sort of the OG pre-Perez gossip blog around town. And he was kind of, kind of, he was kind of the, he was kind of the, kind of covering that just post 9-11, 2000s New York gossip world. And that's where gossip was really centered. I think it was like a very New York business for a while. And then I think TMZ's rise sort of shifted things a little bit to the West Coast. But I think Ben is very

smart about the fact that people were looking to be, to be distracted. I mean, we all want something a little palliative, right? Like, that's why we're all scrolling Instagram or like, you know, watching whatever, we spent the past two years watching whatever, you know, junk is shoved down our Netflix thing. So it makes sense. I mean, we want something that's just, you know, it's like, it's my dad always says like about movies. He's like, I don't want to see something serious. Like I've spent my entire week at work. Like I want to, I want something that like takes my mind off it. And I think that's sort of what gossip and this, this sort of this whole subculture of tabloids was to us during that decade.

The second episode, you talk about how the early 2000s is also the high period of the paparazzi in America. What conspires to make that the case? Yeah. I mean, a big part of it is the war between the sort of newly ascendant Us Weekly and People magazine. So paparazzi agencies, you know, we're realizing that, I mean, one owner of a paparazzi agency told me, you know, people,

magazine would pay in the six figures, not even for like a newsy shot of a new couple, but just like something where the person looked really pretty or they, it was the thing that they wanted. But so the two magazines kind of going after each other and driving up prices really made the paparazzi kind of say like, all right, well, we're going to, we're going to feed this beast. The other thing that happens is that in the mid-2000s, you get more, you know, So traditionally, paparazzi had been, I sit in a car or I hide and use a long lens to kind of to catch the celebrity in the, you know, unawares.

Someone told me it was like wildlife photography. And in the mid-2000s, as we're getting more camera phones, as we're getting more digital cameras, you don't have to be a skilled photographer. More and more people can be paparazzi. So there was this one particular guy who ran this one particular agency. who kind of had this genius idea, genius or devious, depending on whatever you think, just he's, he kind of democratized it and said, listen, I'm going to give, I'm going to hire a bunch of these valets from this restaurant. I'm going to give them cameras. I'm going to give them video cameras. And I'm going to tell them, instead of hiding away in a car, just go up close

to, you know, the main shopping strip and like take pictures of Paris Hilton right up close. Take pictures of Britney Spears right up close. And people could sell those pictures for a ton of money. And so you got more and more paparazzi. I mean, it's economics, right? Like people were making a huge amount of money. And so, you know, I think that all kind of culminates around Britney Spears in 2007 and 2008, where it was really just a person having an obvious mental breakdown, an American society that wasn't particularly compassionate about mental health, as we talked about, wanted to see

celebrities knock down. And then just, you know, I think a lot of guys who were probably middle to lower middle class who were making bank on selling these photos of Britney Spears. And I think all of that sort of drove this really insane paparazzi rush, because obviously there had been paparazzi before, but it had been kind of like a photojournalist thing. Like, I mean, you know, you could still, you could still say a lot about like the ethics of the paparazzi, but it was kind of like this skilled set of people. And in the mid-a-a-a-dots, people just like, it just, like, it just was like an onslaught of massive numbers of pop bratsy on like the streets of L.A.

Spencer Pratt talked to you for this podcast? He did. So he has this one quote of the first episode, Famous people have ruined fame. Can you give us an idea of what he means by that? I thought that was intriguing. Yeah, I mean more from Spencer on episode seven and eight. Oh, here we go, yeah.

He's, I mean this in all seriousness. Spencer is extremely smart. And, like, he and there are a couple, we didn't, we didn't actually get to talk to Ben Affleck for the show. But Ben Affleck, I think is actually quite also quite an agile thinker about the media and about celebrity. But Spencer has spent a lot of time thinking about celebrity in this era. And basically his point is, like, famous people have ruined fame by being too available to us. So he'll say, like, why are you on Instagram, like, you know, showing me, like, how, how to bake bread with no makeup on and like, you know, if you're going to do that, sell it to a

magazine for money. But also like, I don't want to see you as a normal person. I want you to like be something different from me. I want you to give me escape. And that's kind of Spencer's point is that like by putting all the content out for free on Instagram and by becoming now just like us, celebrities kind of have taken the magic away. And, um, and he, you know, he has a, he, he has a, obviously has an interesting perspective on fame because he's like openly a hustler right like openly talks about his deals back in the day with the paparazzi agencies openly talks about like being a fame whore and like how that works and he's kind of like you know the a list celebrities are fame horror too they just like they just didn't do it in the right way they they they kind of gave it all up

for us. They screwed up the economics of it. So Spencer, Spencer is an enlightening interview. He's got skin in the game. That's for sure. Yeah, from every side of it. That's amazing. You do also say we can see the values of America fairly clearly in celebrity media. So this is the part that really scares me because I think you're absolutely right. But what are the values? What do those values turn out to be? Well, that's a good question. I mean, I think I think it's, I'll answer it. I'll answer that this way. I think there's a, I think we all, I think a lot of us know that there's an American mythology, right? You know, we're here for quality and, you know, whatever, home of the brave, land of the free, that kind of thing. And we like to think that, you know, we're a just society or we strive for justice. And I think the thing about tabloids and tabloid stories is that they bring out in us like the things that you actually talk. about with the people you're closest to over dinner or like it reveals the things that you feel deeply and someone has embedded in you from the time you were a child but you're maybe like a little

bit afraid to say out out loud and i think so like you know tabloid stories reveal a lot about i mean you could say it's what are the what do the kids say you're telling on yourself i mean but we tell on ourselves in through tabloid stories and how we view them our views on on on race on race, on women, I mean, gender in general, but like women in particular. And I think like, I think that's the one that I kind of started with because I was reading all this stuff as a teenage girl. And you do realize, like, the beauty standards of 2002 versus 2022 are really different. I mean, obviously, whatever, there's still a lot of problems.

But, like, that is kind of this notable thing to me, having kind of lived it and lived those insecurities. So when I talk about like they reveal our real values, it's kind of like take any meaty issue and tabloids will sort of show you like, well, here's what people are actually talking about when they talk about this issue versus like, here's the thing that like, you know, whatever you're supposed to say about this about this issue or the thing you're supposed to believe. And it's a little more complicated because it, because it specifies the problem for us. It's not about, it's not about race in class. It's about how do I feel about this particular couple? And like, you know, or, and I think like kind of the perfect example and complicated

example of 2022 era tabloid media are Megan and Harry, right? Which is, obviously it was a story about race because of the way the British tabloids covered her. But then it also became the story about like wealth and money and privilege and like, you know, who's using who, whom, right? Like, is Harry using the media? Is he like a spoiled rich kid? Like, there's just a lot of stuff going on there.

So I think it's, they provide, it's fertile ground for us to actually talk about how we think about things in the world. Claire Malone, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me. Now, a lot of you know the name John Darniel. He is the singer-songwriter with the band The Mountain Goats, and he is also a novel.

I just read his new book, Devil House, this week. It is really, really interesting. Because Devil House starts out like a standard thriller. Its main character is Gage Chandler, who writes True Crime Stories. Chandler. Chandler moves to a small California city to write a book about some murders that happened there and were never solved, exactly the kind of murders you could imagine being the subject of a podcast or a Netflix documentary today. But Devil House turns out to be not about those murders. Really, it's about the whole genre of true crime.

Why do we like stories like this? Why do we read and listen to them? And what are the journalists who dredge up old murders and interview the survivors really doing? As someone who is very much not a true crime person, I love uncomfortable questions like these.

I actually want to ask more of them. Here's John Darnille. All right, John, your first novel, Wolf and White Van, out in 2014, and I know you'd written fiction before that. Why'd you want to write novels? As with a lot of things, it's because somebody asked me, hey, aren't you want, don't you want to do this? It's like, sure. I mean, but in the case of my van, what happened was somebody had asked me why I wasn't pitching to 33 and a third, like all the other music critics were, right? And when they asked me that,

David Barker, I think his name was, I said, well, I don't know, I don't get the sense you you guys read the kind of music that I'm into, but I, you know, what about Black Sabbath? And I pitched an idea that was a work of criticism cloaked in a fictional conceit, right? I mean, you could argue that all fiction is in some way critique, cloaked in a fictional conceit, right? But that was explicitly about a particular work of art, right? I ended it in and started waiting to hear back from the editor and kind of dreading because I don't have a great history with people line editing me for better or worse. and as I was waiting, I'd been writing every day, so I just started working on something else,

just to be doing it, you know? And those became, that became Wolf and White Van. What happened there was, then we wanted to edit on Master Reality. It published, right? I kept pecking away at this thing I was doing, but it was not a first priority. It was just sort of an idle pleasure,

and it had like 11 chapters written with no real end designed or insight or intention to do anything with it. when an agent called and said, hey, I liked Master of Reality, and if you were ever writing anything else, I'd love to represent it. No pressure, right?

Actually, that was before I got to 11. He said, no pressure. You know, if you want to be signed and then if you wound up with something you wanted to show people, I could be the guy who did that. I said, sure. And then at one point, like four years later,

he says, hey, if you had anything to show around, you know, people will sometimes buy a manuscript based on what's called a partial if you have five or six chapters to show. I said, oh, I got six chapters. So I sent him six chapters. and then he sold them. And then I had to finish the book.

This process repeated after I handed in that book. I handed in a Wolf and White Van. I'm waiting to hear from Sean McDonald on it. You know, it's not like it took forever, but I'm a busy-minded guy. So after about a week, I'm like, okay, well, I'll start working on something else. And that became Universal Harbister.

Same thing happened with a new one. I just start working again, you know. What was your issue with editors? It's young arrogance, to be honest. Like most young writers, I sort of have the sense that anybody messing with my text doesn't have the best, you know, ends in mind. I don't think like that anymore, but also I now am the best critic of my own work. People say your own worst critic, but I don't think of it that way.

I don't deliver anything that needs line editing. I just don't, right? It's like when I hand stuff in, it means I have edited and re-edited, and I don't hand in stuff that anybody needs to go over at that level, right? I have gone through it a bunch of times. If they did, I'm open to it. But it just doesn't come to that at this point because I'm really very intense with myself about it. Back when I was younger, I had that arrogance that many young, especially boy writers have where you write something.

You go, my God, look at that beautiful sentence there. You know, and then I said, well, this seems a little long. You refer to your saying, oh, my God, you're trying to edit my work. You know, you grow up with a lot of these myths about writers who don't want to be edited. You sort of have to spend a lot of time ridding yourself of those notions because your editor is your friend. just trying to make the text as good as it can be, right? But in the case of my relationship with Sean at FSG, he doesn't edit me for lying because he knows that I will take care of it.

This may be a dumb question, but can you write a novel and songs at the same time, or does your brain have to be in one particular creative mode? Well, I mean, not in the same moment. No, not literally at the same time, but like on the same day, same week? Oh, yeah, no, all the time I'm working on something. It's not, it's not. Yeah, they're not exclusive of each other at all.

Songs are fast and, you know, and I always think, you know, I think this if I have other bits of work to do, like cooking or whatever else, is like, if you're working on one thing and you've been working out for a while, one way to go get inspired about it is to go do something else, right? And there's something else now will have like the, oh, I get to do this. I'm away from the other thing for now and you get excited and you do that. You go back to the other, you get the sort of same ping pong effect, you know. I mean, you can do that with multiple texts, too.

I imagine that there's, well, I'm certain that there's plenty of writers who've had many books going at once. And I know this from, I remember this from school. If you're doing schoolwork and you have seven classes to study for and you're deep in one and it's kind of getting painful now. I just ping pong over the other one, you know, and then do that. I'm good at this. This is great. Get a little more confidence, go back to the other, it's sort of like that. Is there a different pleasure in writing a good sentence for a novel versus writing a good line for a song?

Oh, yes. I mean, one thing, when I talk about editing with sentences, you know, they don't all come out good on first draft. Many of them come out terribly, and I don't even notice this is very interesting to me to revise on this one. It's like, I'll finish a big section. I'll know it's good. I know that in terms of the story, it's going where I want it to go

and it has a good musical flow to it. You know, a lot of my sections that end in the double-line break are about sort of a musical build, you know, or some progress that has a relationship to music, to pure music, not music with lyrics. But when I'll go back to Revise, lies. I'll go back to that I wrote a year ago as I was getting along and I'll go, oh my God, this is so bad. The story's fine. You know, you've got all the details in place.

Details are good, but some of the sentences will just be appalling to me. The thing is, I am not curious about whether people would publish them or not. I don't want to know, right? But I always fix them. It's like when I see them, it's not hard to fix a bad sentence. You just have to know that it's bad, you know, and then it's easy. Fixing sentences is mechanical work, you know? And then you get to do the fine tuning of like, well, now the sentence is good and now which words in it do I think might be a little harsher or prettier or gorier or whatever, you know? Yeah, it's knowing it's bad. That's the fraught part. Sometimes people don't know it's bad. That's very easy for me because I don't take it personal if I write a bad sentence. It doesn't

say anything about me negative to me because I know I'm capable of good sense. So I write a bad it just means that the other parts of bookwriting, the story writing, the world building, all the other stuff was running ahead of that. It's asking a lot to jug to get all those right the first pass. You know, that's a lot. It's the same with songs, you know, like you find you wrote,

often with songs is like you'll have some complicated sequence of passing chords getting to something. You know what's better? Instead if I went from the five to the three to the minor two to the one, if I just go minor two to one, right? maybe just really break it down like that. And often that's a good solution musically to, not always.

I was actually figuring out how to play a song of a goths this week and debating what to do about it for the live arena. So we haven't played in a long time. And it has some pretty complicated breakdowns, like a lot of the stuff on that record, has some complicated transitions. And I was debating whether to simplify them or go figure out what they actually were.

The main character in Devil House, Gage Chandler writes true crime books. Are you a true crime reader? No. Like a lot of young goth-leaning people, I used to read a lot of true crime or be interested in it. Look it up at the library, check out the Zodiac book, the Greysmith book. I read Monkey on a Stick, Murder Madness in the Harry Christian's book. That's a true crime book.

I mean, the thing is, I probably own a fair number of true crime books because I'm an inveterate book buyer. I just buy, am I using an inveterate correctly? I'm not sure. I think so. I buy a lot of books anyway. And I have often bought plenty of true crime books look interesting enough. But a lot of the issues that Devil House raises about true crime are ones I also have. I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to be leering at people's tragedies, you know.

Nor do I want to be sort of performing righteousness over. Well, you read it, you know, like a lot of the reasons people give read a lot of stuff like this is like, you know, so you know what's out there. I know what's out there. I don't need to be further advised that human beings are capable of terrible things. That's not news. It's never been new.

So, yeah, but at the same time, it's human to be very interested in this stuff. This is normal, right? Whether it's news or not, it's very normal in a lot of ways to be attracted to those stories. I do think people fool themselves about what, about why they're into it.

You know, I think it's the same as the urge to watch a public hanging. You know, it's like you take some pleasure and some gore that happened to somebody who's not you, you know. I think it's a lot of it. So, you know, but also, I mean, the other thing is, if there's good writers in the field, good writing is good writing. Good books are good books. It doesn't matter what they're about. You know, it also sort of doesn't matter what their moral weight is to a certain extent.

A good book is a good book, right? And it's a pleasure, right? So when, you know, in cold blood is a true crime book. but we all know it's a great pleasure to read Capote. He writes great sentences, right? Sure. And takes great pains to make sure the sentences are all in a nice order, you know. And so there's a lot in there.

But I myself know, I mainly read literary fiction. When I read nonfiction, it's either it's by Annie or no, who's a memoir as to French memoiras too. I hope to read as much of her translated work as possible because she's a genius. or it's something historical. Does you back up for just one second, can you say we fool ourselves when we read true crime about what we like about it?

What are we, what is the story we're telling ourselves then? What's the reason we think we're reading this stuff or like this? Well, I mean, look, I can't speak with authority about this because like this, you know, I can't pretend to say why other people do things. That's why I'm not a pundit. I don't think I know what's going on inside their people's heads.

But it feels to me like, if somebody says, look, you know, I've read my eighth story about some families that got slaughtered, and the lesson I took for it is the same as the lesson I took from the last seven of them. And I say, well, there's something more about this reading than getting a lesson. If you got the lesson from the second one, then you've done it six more times, then I know a little something about your behavior. I know you're taking simple pleasure in it, right? I know that they're not all Truman Capote's.

In fact, there's very few of those, right? And so I know then that probably there's some pleasure in, now there's many other possible pleasures. There's a pleasure of repetition. Plenty of people like to read the same type of book a lot of times because it's a known quantity. And in this life, known quantities are increasingly precious. Right.

It's like in the course of the pandemic, if you got into mysteries, I would not blame you if you read 29 O'Marsh books in a row, you know, because you know how that works. There's something that you can have. But in the case of true crime, this is the documentation of other people's misery and a human monstrosity. It is a choice to immerse yourself in some bad-bibe stuff. And unless you're doing that to further research that somehow alleviates or ameliorates those ills in the world,

then I would say there's a straight pleasure principle work. And that's the thing that I think people would be. But I don't think everybody is. I do plenty of people. I could name friends. I like, no, no, I like it because there's blood and people got hurt, which I think is an honest and okay take. There's other wrong with that. I watch splatter movies. But again, in the case of true crime, we are talking about people's lives. And that, to me, is different. When you talk about hallmarks of a genre, you have Chandler sort of reflecting on this

and a couple times in the book. There's always like a secondary victim that the writer is ginning up some sympathy for, just enough sympathy, I think you put it in the book, so that we care when that person? When they die. That's one of my favorite lines of Gage Chandler's because it's true. It's like, you know, all these books that I've read, they do, not all. Like the Greysmith book, the Zodiac book, plenty of the victims don't get much of a buildup. They're just sitting there and the zodiac arrives.

I mean, it's another of Gage's lines where he gets a secondhand from somebody where he says there's there's two types of people in true crime books. There's a hero and there's his victims, right? And in the great space book, that's almost true. It's like, you know, you are supposed to be impressed with this guy who writes these comps like ciphers that seasoned code crackers can't get, right? It's like you are supposed to sort of be in awe of him, right? I think Thomas Harris does really interesting stuff with this in the way he elevates

Hannibal Lecter as a figure you can't help but admire in some way, you know, and makes everybody in the books feel that way. One thing that really spoke to me about the book is you have two of the murders happening in 1986, and they're covered in tabloid style by local news. Yeah. How did local news in that era cover crimes like that? What was the tone? So this actually comes from experience insofar as I was in Southern California during the McMartin arrests and trials, right?

Do you know what I'm talking about? Sure, yeah. So that was a full-on hysteria in a real sense, right? is like that was a moral panic, right? And but I worked in children's psych at that time. So we believed all of it, right? Every last one of us, there were no naysayers. And there's a book about this moral panic that I'm always recommending

called We Believe the Children, very, very subtly written and very good sociological book. So that's where I was. You know, I was there when this was happening. There was new, and you could see. And like real cynics would be going, you know, the news people, they love this. They, they, they, they, they, any detail they get. And, and this is a true crime sort of related things.

I just say, you know, grim news today out of Manhattan Beach is the third day of interviews. And you really, it's very, it's very, you know, it's very, uh, it has this tone of like, you know, of the, of the, you know, the youth counselor saying, no, I don't take any pleasure in telling you what could happen to you. if you choose to indulge in premarital sex. There's a disease called syphilis, right? And then they give these speeches, right? And it's clear they do take pleasure in describing potential ends. A lot of pleasure, actually, right?

And the news took, you know, took the pleasure in the form of getting eyes on the news and getting viewers and sponsors from presenting this case in the light that they presented it in, right? It was, you know, and this isn't too impute, you know, I don't think people are going, ah, this is probably a lie, but I'm going to air it. because it was in the midst of the moral panic.

But, but, but, yeah, so that was, that was the mood, and that's where I get that from. It's like every station, all three networks in Southern California, every night for months. MacMartin on the lead, McMartin on the lead, every single night. There was this thing about local news in the 80s, and maybe they still do it, where they would have a murder, and then they would interview the prototypical man or woman on the street. Oh, yes. And the person didn't have to know anything about what happened or who they'd, person was, it was almost like, I mean, what was that? You have that in this book, too.

Like, what were we getting out of that interaction, the sort of, oh, you know, it's so crazy. The police are here. I don't know what's going on. So, I mean, this continued on into the early 2000s. I haven't watched a lot of local news in a long time. But there was a guy who got memed down in Georgia when somebody was, was crawling in through windows. And he said, hide your kids, hide your wife. Right. This is a whole thing. catching the man on the street interview is like such a storied news technique, right? It's not only for murders also is for almost everything. I mean, I think the reason we don't have there anymore is we have the internet.

The man of the street is heard loudly in their millions and billions every single day in every language. But I think back then it was the case that like then you would hear from somebody in the town. You know, you would hear from somebody nearly affected and that humanizes the case a little bit. And it also gives the, you know, it pads the story a little bit. It relieves the newscaster of having to be the one to say, well, this news is certainly quite grim. You know, you can have some other, here's a person who lives nearby. He's even more upset than I am, right? And so, and they can frame this, they can help frame the story like it lends support to your argument.

Does that, I take no pleasure in reporting this tone, jump from local news in that period to national news in the 90s, 2000s. I'm thinking here of Dateline 48 hours, those kind of. of shows? I mean, I think, yeah, I think daily in 48 hours, what proceeds those 20-20, right? In the late 70s, those sorts of somewhat muckrakey and sometimes very useful, you know, investigative reporting. And the pioneer of this was Geraldo Rivera, of course. He was the guy who was always injecting a tone of moral outrage into his reportage, right? When he did, what was the name of that asylum? He made his bones on this story. He went to an asylum. And the thing is, I don't know the fullness of the story, but if he succeeded in exposing poor treatment conditions

at a psych facility, good for him. Good for him, however, he got that done, because patients deserve dignity in their lives. And although the other thing is, if you go into a facility and you haven't been into any other facilities, then perhaps your view on the nature of how things work there isn't very complete, some ways in a good way, because it's always good to get outside eyes to go, look, from where I stand, what you're doing is terrible. That's always good, right? But at the same time, if you don't know anything about the patients or the patients or the patients, they're doing it's going to be a little weird, because you don't know what it's like inside a hospital. And you don't know the patients themselves or their unique needs, which are individual, right? And so, but all that being said, conditions in a lot of hospitals in the 70s were appalling. And he probably exposed some that were appalling. But he did so in the process of doing so. He was morally outraged. And he found that that was an effective way of telling your story, right? Now, you could argue that if you don't have an effective way to sell your story, that your story isn't going to get anything done, right? And that's true.

I could talk to you dryly about conditions and hospitals right now, but if I don't have a platform and I don't succeed in inspiring emotion in you, you might say, well, that sounds pretty bad, but you're not going to care five minutes from now. There's too much other stuff competing for your attention, right? So, but yeah, but so that tone rose, I think, from there, if not earlier, but those are the ones that he, of course,

went on to, to use that more and more. I actually think he's kind of a complex figure as far as how stuff goes, because I think at the end of the day with a lot of these stories, his heart is in the right place, but it often comes out,

comes out a little weird. Yeah, and there was like a film that was like a rebrand of those shows somewhere around the turn of the century where they would ostensibly be part of the news operation, and then they got rebranded as like Dateline Mystery and 48 hours mystery, And it just became about a current affair, I think.

You remember a current affair? Sure, yeah. Bill O'Reilly, I think, was one of the anchors of a current affair. And I think that's right. Yeah, Mori Povich, too. Yeah, Mori Pobich. It's right. Mori Pobish, who went on to do the most exploitative type of daytime talk show stuff,

you know, the stuff where you bring people on with nothing to lose and have them act out of their trauma for the camera over, right? And right, right, the Mori show? Sure. Right, one of those, and there's so many of those shows in the 90s you came in. And, yeah, so Current Affair was doing that sort of thing where you'd have a 10-minute capsule version of this sort of thing. So you get just the tease, you know, just enough to make you sick and be a little outraged. And then you don't even have to spend a whole hour thinking about the complexes up.

We've got another one lined up for you, right? And they did all the, any of the, you know, I'm reasonably certain there was a Ricky Caso piece there, who was a killer in Long Island, killed a bunch of his friends, or several of his friends anyway. And yeah, so I think all that stuff is sort of in the bloodline of this stuff. And I don't, the thing that I'm always wanted to stress is like when I talk about devil house in these terms, it sounds like I've written sort of a morally instructive book, which I don't think I've done. Because I don't, I think what I'm talking about is intensely human. You know, it's like it is normal, right, for people to be.

behave this way and to be this interested in things. You know, we are a people who once attended fights called gladiator fights. They had to build a building large enough to house, you know, a large segment of the population of Rome to host these fights because everybody wanted to see them. They were good entertainment, you know?

And, yeah, it was only the 20th century. Somebody started, they're 19th, I think. People's talking, you know, maybe having an execution in public is not a great thing. You know, we're not, we're not that noble as creatures. You know, we have some strides, you know, but, but we should be calling on ourselves to be like, you know, noble all the time. But I, but obviously we should do our best. And here I'm telling a story of a person who I think sees a complication in the way he's been describing the world and tries in some way to atone.

So not morally instructive, but morally curious? Morally curious is exactly right. Morally curious insofar as as soon as you start to say, you know, as soon as you start to become corrective in the sense of a, you know, Dreiser, who I like, by the way, I like to read Dreiser. I think Dreiser is intensely corrective. I think Dickens is corrective and on purpose, right?

Dickens is trying to make you feel bad for the children in the poorhouses in the hopes that that whole system be reformed. And in fact, reforms were enacted in the wake of the vast popularity of Charles Dickens' work. good for him, right? But that's not what we do for a platform. I don't think I can actually affect any substantive change at that level for a number of reasons. But beyond that, I do think that getting the questions posed is part of that continuum, right?

And the people who are good at getting the questions to lodge in a way that they stick with you for a day or a week, that that's our position, in the sense of baseball player position. as the shortstop stands in between second and third base. That's your alley, right? And for me, I think fleshing out some of the difficulties of the question is what I'm going to be better at than telling people what they ought or ought not be doing. Because I really do struggle with, you know, for me, that would feel very arrogant to think, who the hell am I to say what people ought to do and how they ought to do it? I don't know. I'm not in their shoes.

I mean, that's really, that's the, I'll look at the whole book. It's like, if you should be cautious in telling stories, it's because you have not walked in the shoes of the people who are in the stories, right? And that's maybe the central theme of this book. Did you talk to people who write these kind of books? Because you have all these details about buying things on eBay and mapping out crime scenes. It really felt like they were from people who have worked in this genre. This is the part of the interview where I wish I was better at lying to interviews.

Because I would love to say, yeah, I did. a few people they asked not to be named. They said they do they keep it on background. So with respect to that, I'm going to say I had a couple long phone conversation. But in point of fact, I made it all up. All I did was I said, what would I do if I were writing this book?

If I were this guy who has this thing about primary texts and about artifacts and about locations, I had made all that up. And then I just said, well, you know, let's say I pitched this book and I got an advance to write it. Now I have to write it. What would I do? well, I would go on eBay.

And I know that there'll be things like this on eBay, right? I know that I know this because a band called Acid Bath used a John Wayne Gasey painting for their front cover, right? I know this because I know killer artifacts or a thing that Goths get into, right? And it's just like relics of the saints. You know, it's exactly that sort of thing, you know? And so I just guessed. I just made some stuff up.

Working backwards, essentially, from what you like, you just like, you said, create a character. You're familiar with the genre from your younger days. And they kind of work backwards from there. How would I do so? That's right. Just start asking questions. I mean, to me, 90% of writing a book is asking the right questions, you know,

or just asking a bunch of questions and then figuring out which ones are interesting rather than the right questions. There's, I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but Chandler moves to small city of Milpitas, California. He is attempting to write a new true crime book when he then, well, let's just say he faces complications, means to think about the genre. As you say, pitching these questions out into the world about how this works and how it should work. Another line struck me, and I think we'll end it here, but you said, making everybody feel like they know what it's like when they don't and never will, in which you mean writing with this kind of confidence when we do journalism or true crime, whatever it is, right, and saying like, I'm good at this, I've done my research, here's the story. But leaving readers with what is necessarily, help me hear, like an incomplete story, not the whole thing?

I mean, well, look, the thing is, all stories are incomplete. You don't have a story if you're telling the complete story. You have a mess because narrative is generally something we impose from the outside. This is one reason that people are constantly using the narrative as a term right now, which, by the way, that's my windmill right now. I'm like trying to get people to stop saying the narrative and everything. Or describe somebody's stance as, well, that's your narrative. No, no, that's my opinion.

It's like, stop using, stuff throwing narrative around and you mean something a little simpler, you know, but at the same point, the reason they're doing that is because people have noticed over the past, past while, however long,

hundred years or whatever, that we do tend to ascribe a narrative, right, to any situation, right? We want there to be an overarching narrative. We want there to be a story that is the strongest storyline coming through it, and then we're going to probably call that the true one, right?

But we know, there have been a lot of work doing this in fiction for years. I mean, there's a, you know, the old fable for thousands of years. The fable of the blind men of the elephant, right? You have, you know, one of them's holding onto the tail and one of them touching the side and one of them's searching the trunk, and they're all asked to describe this animal. Well, they all give three very different descriptions because they cannot see the animal, but they're having their own experience of these parts of the animal.

Well, that's the story about narratives, right? That's a story about when you are telling a story, I don't care how hard you work, you're not seeing all the angles. There's no way. Every story is too complex for that, unless the story is like, you know, I mean, even the story, if I pick up this pillow that's on my bed and then I put it down, well, the fact that I'm the guy who did it means it's a complicated story because I am a complicated person like anybody else, right?

I'm not more or less complicated anybody else. So anything anybody does is necessarily hopelessly complicated, right? and we want to simplify it because stories are great and vital and precious tender for us. We need these stories and want them, right? But they're all incredibly complicated. And when you're telling one that is rooted in truth, the responsibility is to sort of tell the one that sort of holds the most space for the various truths in it. Now, often the way we would think of this these days is like, look,

I'm going to tell the one that elevates anyone who is a victim in this story and gives lesser space to anyone who made those people the victim. I think that's a noble impulse, but it also is the same sort of behavior. It's the same sort of tendency to simplify a story that is not actually that simple. We know this, right? It's like, this is what makes life difficult. It's like, and this is where, I mean,

this is where Jesus comes into the picture, because you can't stay mad at most killers if you know how they got that way, right? You know, most of the killers, they didn't come into this world that way. Something shaped them that way. Now you still, of course, want to hold them accountable for their actions,

but people who sort of just say, I hate that guy that I know nothing about because he did these things. It's like, well, I bet that if I were to show you that guy's childhood and make you actually watch a couple of days of it, you would have a different opinion, right? Unless you're, you know, a moral infant, you wouldn't be able to say, well, he should have just dealt with that.

It's like you can't. Some of the stuff that happens to these people, Charles Manson, growing up in prisons, you know. There was no hope for Charles Manson. Now, this is an excuse his behavior in any way at all. But it does mean that if you just say, and I hate him, well, you know, what you hate is the world that made a Charles Manson possible. And then who are you really angry at? You know, so these are the complicated stories that are necessarily effaced by telling one

story. After you read the world of the word narrative, can you work on the word storytelling? It's kind of a catch-all. I suspect in your field, that one plagues you more than it does in mind, because to me, to be storytelling, interesting. But I think if it's doing that work in your world, it's probably just because somebody's trying to weasel their ideas about narrative in there, and they know you're going to catch him because my crusade has crossed their desk.

John Darnille, thanks for coming on the press box. My pleasure. Good to talk to you. Huge thanks to Claire Malone and John Darnille for coming on the podcast. I'm Brian Curtis, production magic. As always, by Erica Servantes. Next Thursday in this space, we have an interview with Margaret Brennan. She is the moderator of CBS's Face the Nation.

We're going to ask her, how do you get politicians to actually say something on television? And on Monday, my man, David Shoemaker and I will have plenty to talk about, including more lukewarm takes about the media, have a fantastic weekend.