Book Review: Going There by Couric, Katie

Abstract

The television news memoir is mostly a loathsome genre, self-absorbed and selfpromoting, blighted by humble-bragging and name-dropping—and light on meaningful self-criticism or insight into matters of consequence. In this, as in all else, Katie Couric conforms to expectations. It’s been more than a decade since Couric vacated the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News, but the perky young news woman who first catapulted to fame co-hosting NBC’s TODAY show in the 1990s has thrust herself back into the spotlight with a memoir that combines celebrity autobiography, dishy score-settling, gendered war stories, and selective self-disclosure. Couric starts at the beginning, with her “solidly middle class” upbringing outside Washington, DC, in a neighborhood that “was the postwar suburban dream: hilly streets teeming with kids riding bikes and playing capture the flag” (p. 24). The youngest of four kids, Couric realized that “my superpower was emotional intelligence—I learned at a very early age how to win friends and influence people” (27). She never stopped. Indeed, the secret of her success has been her preternatural ability to get people to like her, especially the powerful men in television who controlled the nation’s airwaves. Blessed by good looks, winsome confidence, and moxie, Couric’s rise in television news was quick and smooth. After college, she showed up unannounced at the ABC News bureau in Washington and talked her way into a job as a desk assistant. Over the next decade, Couric climbed steadily, from an assignment editor at CNN to on-air reporter at local TV stations in Miami and Washington, DC, and then NBC Nightly News. It wasn’t always easy. At CNN, a top executive humiliated her at an editorial meeting by announcing that she was hired because of her “breast size”—but she demanded, and got, an apology: “I liked the feeling of having his nuts in a vise,” she realized (p. 39). Book Review