They say you should never meet your heroes because you’re bound to be disappointed. But that’s not always true. Let me tell you about the time I recently spent with the greatest magazine writer alive, Gay Talese.
“How nice to see you again, Joe,” he said graciously as he opened the door of his elegant town house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In truth, we barely know each other, having only met a handful of times over the years, usually at someone’s book party. Many years ago, he sent me a handwritten note congratulating me on a column of mine he liked back when I was at The New York Times. I still have it, and I still treasure it.
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