What would you expect from a book by a political journalist that contains the following passage?
I had thought it a blessing and still do that when I entered the profession, at the height of what was determined the personal essay boom for young women writers, I could not participate because I did not care to write of my own life and experiences because I did not find any of it terribly interesting and certainly not more interesting than whatever I might learn about the world from other people and their experiences. Now as then, I write to establish what can be established.
You might expect straightforward reporting on politics. You might expect exclusive quotations and new evidence from meticulously researched archives. You might expect a central thesis or argument, which an eighth grader could tell you is generally needed in any piece of nonfiction. You probably would not expect extended first-person meditations on the Pacific Coast Highway and other parts of California. Nor intimate moments with “the Politician,” the pseudonym given to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., prominent vaccine sceptic, secretary of health and human services, and alleged paramour of the writer.
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