What you weren’t supposed to see

As MAN IN THE MIRROR arrives, I want to open the workshop door for the Ink community and share some of what usually disappears along the way. I don’t do this often, so come in before I regret it

Glimpses of the reporting for MAN IN THE MIRROR

A book is a stone polished until every trace of roughness is gone. But it starts rough.

That roughness is something you generally want to hide from the world. In the kinds of books I write, I pride myself on dissolving the labor into the artistry of how I tell the story. I don’t need you to know how I finagled that phone number; I don’t need to spill my secrets of cultivating elusive sources. The work is often tedious and chaotic, full of stops and starts and frustrations. But you don’t want a book to read like that. Reading is, for most people, for pleasure, after all. The pain is my problem, not yours.

But the other day, I realized I wanted to break that rule with you.

Many of you have been here and supported me while this book was still taking shape — while I was disappearing into the reporting, getting stuck, changing my mind, finding things I never expected to find. And I thought: Why should the finished book be the only part you get to see?

Because there is so much that vanishes into the air when a book becomes a book. The notebooks and photographs. The strange little encounters. The music that gets stuck in your head because someone you’re writing about loves it — in this book, about the death of a Michael Jackson impersonator, there is a LOT of that. The scenes you fought to keep but had to cut. The people who helped you see what you were actually doing before you could see it yourself.

So I’ve been going back through three years of reporting for MAN IN THE MIRROR and gathering up some of those things — a little private archive from the making of the book — that I want to share with the readers who are joining me at the beginning.

Here’s what I’m putting together:

— A private Zoom conversation with my friend Sam Dolnick, a brilliant journalist and editor at The New York Times, who was the person who told me I needed to write this book — partly because he was worried about the direction my life was taking. The book is dedicated to Sam. On September 23 at 8 p.m. Eastern, we’re going to talk about what he saw in me then, what happened afterward, and what it took to make this book. I don’t usually arrange public occasions for my friends to air their concerns with me, so this should be…interesting.

— Photos, videos, notes, and scraps from three years of reporting — some revealing, some strange, some funny, most never intended for publication. There’s a very bare-bones preview in the collage above.

— The music of the book: a playlist drawn from the people, places, moods, and worlds I entered while reporting it. Music became such a major character in this story that it felt wrong not to give you the soundtrack.

— And, after an unreasonable amount of lawyerly negotiation, deleted scenes I still love but couldn’t keep in the finished book. They won’t appear anywhere else.

If you’ve already preordered the book, thank you — truly. It means a great deal to have people choosing to bring something I’ve spent years making into their lives before they’ve even had the chance to read it.

If you’d like to join us, preorder and submit your receipt by September 20 so we have time to send you the link for the September 23 Zoom with Sam, along with the rest of the behind-the-scenes material as publication approaches.

And there’s one other thing I especially want to invite you into.

On September 30, the night after the book comes out, I’ll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York, in conversation with the brilliant Tina Brown, a journalist’s journalist, an editor’s editor, and the least boring person in New York.

I’ve been imagining that evening for a long time — not simply as a book event, but as the moment when this very private three-year undertaking will become public. There are a lot of you in New York, and I would love for the room to be full of Ink people.

The 92Y is one of the great literary rooms in New York. So many remarkable conversations have happened there. I think this one could be electric — and I’d love for us to make it memorable together. (Virtual streaming tickets are also available.)

Come hear some of these behind-the-scenes stories come to life. Come celebrate the book being out in the world. And come say hello afterward at the signing.

More national — and international! — tour dates very soon.

For now, I wanted to open the workshop door a little wider and let you in.

Thank you for being with me through it all — the thinking out loud, the reporting and the writing — and, soon, the bookbirth.