Going There
Genre: Memoir
US Publication: October 26, 2021
Print: 528 pages
Audio: 15 hours 27 minutes
Confetti Rating: ?
REVIEW:
Going There reads like a book written by a woman who reached into her bag of charitable expletives and realized she simply has no more f*cks to give.
If Katie Couric’s storied career as an American journalist/presenter is a house of cards built on the foundation of a chipper nice girl persona, she seems perfectly content here to burn that house to the ground. Given that I don’t even remember a time before “The Today Show” was the background to my morning routines, there was no way I was going to miss this dumpster fire of TMI.
Here’s a short list of the Information that was Too Much:
She went on a date with Larry King, during which he tried to kiss her… with tongue.
When she was breastfeeding her daughters, she would squeeze herself to squirt the milk across the room.
You know what? I’ll spare you similar examples. I don’t want to relive them.
Yes, she dishes serious dirt about Matt Lauer, Ann Curry, Les Moonves, Diane Sawyer, and dozens of others. She goes into detail about losing both her husband and sister to cancer just a few short years apart. She talks about her insecurities on one page and then pats herself on the back the next. I guess you can say she goes there.
Going There should win awards for Most Accurate Book Title of 2021. In terms of delivering the gossipy goods you want in a celebrity memoir, it is a 5-star read. But in this case, I feel it would be in poor taste for me to try to actually rate the book without rating the woman. Katie Couric has shown us her unfiltered self here, for better or worse. If you want a glimpse behind the scenes of American journalism and upper middle class life, read this book. If you don’t like Katie Couric after you read it, change the channel.
PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:
Heartbreaking, hilarious, and brutally honest, Going There is the deeply personal life story of a girl next door turned household name.
For more than forty years, Katie Couric has been an iconic presence in the media world. In her brutally honest, hilarious, heartbreaking memoir, she reveals what was going on behind the scenes of her sometimes tumultuous personal and professional life - a story she’s never shared, until now. Of the medium she loves, the one that made her a household name, she says, “Television can put you in a box; the flat-screen can flatten. On TV, you are larger than life but smaller, too. It is not the whole story, and it is not the whole me. This book is.”
Beginning in early childhood, Couric was inspired by her journalist father to pursue the career he loved but couldn’t afford to stay in. Balancing her vivacious, outgoing personality with her desire to be taken seriously, she overcame every obstacle in her way: insecurity, an eating disorder, being typecast, sexism . . . challenges, and how she dealt with them, setting the tone for the rest of her career. Couric talks candidly about adjusting to sudden fame after her astonishing rise to co-anchor of the TODAY show, and guides us through the most momentous events and news stories of the era, to which she had a front-row seat: Rodney King, Anita Hill, Columbine, the death of Princess Diana, 9/11, the Iraq War . . . In every instance, she relentlessly pursued the facts, ruffling more than a few feathers along the way. She also recalls in vivid and sometimes lurid detail the intense pressure on female anchors to snag the latest “get” — often sensational tabloid stories like Jon Benet Ramsey, Tonya Harding, and OJ Simpson.
Couric’s position as one of the leading lights of her profession was shadowed by the shock and trauma of losing her husband to stage 4 colon cancer when he was just 42, leaving her a widow and single mom to two daughters, 6 and 2. The death of her sister Emily, just three years later, brought yet more trauma — and an unwavering commitment to cancer awareness and research, one of her proudest accomplishments.
Couric is unsparing in the details of her historic move to the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News — a world rife with sexism and misogyny. Her “welcome” was even more hostile at 60 Minutes, an unrepentant boys club that engaged in outright hazing of even the most established women. In the wake of the MeToo movement, Couric shares her clear-eyed reckoning with gender inequality and predatory behavior in the workplace, and downfall of Matt Lauer — a colleague she had trusted and respected for more than a decade.
Couric also talks about the challenge of finding love again, with all the hilarity, false-starts, and drama that search entailed, before finding her midlife Mr. Right. Something she has never discussed publicly — why her second marriage almost didn’t happen.
If you thought you knew Katie Couric, think again. Going There is the fast-paced, emotional, riveting story of a thoroughly modern woman, whose journey took her from humble origins to superstardom. In these pages, you will find a friend, a confidante, a role model, a survivor whose lessons about life will enrich your own.