An Enchantment of Voices
Why we talk about ourselves, our standpoints, our political passions — and a nod to the long reach of the VILLAGE VOICE
Dear Inside Readers: A nonfiction history of the Village Voice might not seem magical at first glance. But for me it is, and so this post is a response to the “enchanted by a book” writing challenge set by the redoubtable
.Tricia Romano’s 2024 book The Freaks Came Out to Write enchants me because I’ve absorbed so much of the Voice’s attitude about personal journalism — and what it means, for better or worse, to be a contrarian. Plugging into this history has jolted me out of my present, too, connecting to the sad losses I’ve experienced as digital media consumes print.
A last note about past and present: the Village Voice first exposed Donald Trump’s unsavory business practices way back in 1979 in Wayne Barrett’s “Like Father, Like Son: Anatomy of a Young Power Broker.” I wish the Voice writers of old could have documented the pandemic in New York City, revealing hard facts as well as gut-wrenching grief. I hope we keep speaking the truth as we see it in our own bad political moment. It’s a form of enchantment, this kind of wishing — but remembering can make a difference, too.
It would be impossible for me not to love The Freaks Came Out to Write, starting with the title. Tricia Romano’s subtitle, “The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture,” indicates the sweep of this 500-plus-page book. But while she guides her oral history with a deft hand, its rambling, rambunctious story is told without a traditional omniscient narrator.
It’s expansive and emotive, all that local reporting in the weeds and cracked sidewalks, be those sidewalks in a long-gone New York downtown or the heads of the writers, who often scrawled themselves across the world like street art. The story of how the city has changed from the late 1950s to the 2010s can’t be told from a single perspective, and this book is an ode to the personal journalism the Voice pioneered.1
As Romano proceeds through the decades, starting with 1955–1970 (the end of the Voice’s first era), each chapter splices together the stories of those involved at the time. The speakers remember and describe and snipe about what happened. Some quotes come from their words published elsewhere; a number of the speakers are no longer alive. But in general, this interweaving conversation is based on the more than 200 interviews Romano (herself a writer at the Voice in its later years) carried out: “Most of what is included here is original testimony,” she states up front.
I knew I’d be intellectually and nostalgically fed by this testimony, but what I didn’t expect was the enchantment of all those voices: the self-awareness, the blinkered obsessions, the mishmash of arts and culture and hard news, the admission of foibles — the life sifted through individual experience and hyper-local settings I most associate with my favorite social novels: Bleak House, Middlemarch, The Age of Innocence, Pride and Prejudice, Howards End (just for starters).
The impact of Romano’s social history feels more akin to a sprawling, multi-generational novel or to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which I’ll get to below. I was too young to be a reader of the Voice in its glory days, but it sparked much of the feminist writing I was drawn to in the late 1970s and ’80s (and some of the feminist alt-presses I worked for then). In the mid-1990s, when I started at the Women’s Review of Books as an editor, some of the writers quoted in Romano’s book were reviewers.
Just one example, from the 1970–1980 Voice section, in the opening chapter titled “Holy Mother Ireland. It’s the Women’s Liberation Movement”:2
VIVIAN GORNICK: Those were days when I was on the barricades for radical feminism, and I saw sexism everywhere, just everywhere. If I go out to dinner, or I saw a movie, or read a book, I’d write a piece that would somehow point out the sexism of the situation. I became known as a feminist journalist, and that was me and the Village Voice. It was a great proponent of personal journalism. It picked up that ball and ran with it. It published a lot of garbage. It also published some really significant ways of looking anew at a subject. It taught some of us how to do that kind of work well.
This excerpt from Gornick’s telling is closely followed by another exchange:
SUSAN BROWNMILLER: I once counted the I’s in someone’s story. I couldn’t believe it. I think the Voice overdid it. But now it’s just a regular part of journalism.
ROBIN REISIG: Someone gave me The Feminine Mystique in college, and I just got bored. I didn’t take it seriously — this woman complaining because she’s a housewife? I mean, give me a break. You don’t want to be a housewife? Don’t be a housewife.
Reisig goes on to call the Village Voice “the paper of record for the women’s movement.”3 While I think this might get pushback from other parts of the country, The Freaks Came Out to Write indicates how much latitude women writers were given there as well as the early attempts made (before many other publications) to diversify the mostly white staff. To her credit, Romano doesn’t shy away from the sexism, racism, and homophobia exhibited by some Voice writers and editors.
But the enchanting thing? What a relief to express your whole person as a writer or thinker! At least the idea of that! All that snarkiness about movement politics from those deeply engaged by them — I love it! Not just because it’s gossip but because it reveals journalists and opinion writers as more than doctrinaire automatons. They’re awash with conflicting feelings. If you spend any amount of time immersed in the welter of culture and politics of New York City (or anywhere, for that matter), it’s hard not to make in-jokes about the emperors with no clothes, be they mobbed-up, sanctimonious, narcissistic pols or crappy rock bands.
The Voice also seeded generations of writers who followed with “significant ways of looking anew at a subject,” especially in countering false omniscience. Say what you will of the media mess today, I’m happy to see more diverse voices publishing in the few Voice-like outlets that remain, such as Substack — or even on mainstream platforms like the New York Times, where first-person journalism and a critique of Objective Journalism have now been absorbed, if imperfectly.4
So, I’m enchanted by Gornick and others’ ability to look back at a younger self to expose being overly earnest or silly. In a recent New Yorker essay, “Twice-Told Tales,” Parul Sehgal takes on the phenomenon of “serial memoirs” — that is, revisions of earlier personal stories in which authors change their minds about what they’d previously published. (Most notably, Jill Ciment’s Consent, in which she reevaluates her 1996 memoir about marriage to a much older artist.) For Sehgal, such change-ups “can give off a particular scent . . . embarrassment mingling with self-regard.”
Perhaps. But The Freaks Came Out to Write avoids this simply because it doesn’t stare into one person’s navel. It includes many versions of revised history from a whole network of writers and participants and people in power who impacted a major urban center: feminists like Gornick, Brownmiller, Ellen Willis, and
; cartoonist Jules Feiffer; music critics , Stanley Crouch, and Richard Goldstein; nighlife and culture writers like Michael Musto and Lisa Jones; free-speech columnist Nat Hentoff; and investigative reporters such as and Wayne Barrett. Andy Warhol and even Donald Trump are quoted here.Rather than embarrassment about past gaffes, I prefer to embrace the notion that life changes us all and that reporting on the changes is meaningful, too. More important, our ideas about what life means keep evolving, and taking this on can be brave, not just self-regarding. It can involve looking into the abyss or laughing, as Gornick does at her younger radical self. Of the reckoning involved in revising “inconvenient” or “irreconcilable” details from your past, Sehgal astutely notes:
The writer’s “I” can be a persona, but it can also be a chrysalis, a placeholder for the self in making, the self to come.
When I inhaled The Freaks Came Out to Write a few weeks ago, across several nights after a back injury, my eyes pinned open by Prednisone, I was a slightly different “I” than I am now. I’m observing what I remember: lying flat on my back on a heating pad; spilling herb tea and attempting to soak it up with towels because I couldn’t bend over; my nightstand lamp pooling golden, mellowing the shadows; propping the big hardcover on a pillow, wondering when the night would end; wishing I could still talk to these writers — I want to join the conversation! so many arguments! so many questions! come back! — but grateful I could at least talk to them in my head.
Because we’re always looking back at ourselves and our histories: the big touchstones like the AIDS epidemic, the furor over the Central Park Five, 9/11, our historic moment now of election turmoil along with the specific personal memories these evoke. It’s why, after mulling over all those freaking writers remembering the Village Voice I’ve landed on Orlando, this “I” who’s Martha at this moment, both remembering and casting myself forward to whatever happens next.
It’s why I’m closing with a passage from Virginia Woolf’s 1928 time-traveling novel (“A Biography”), in which her protagonist Orlando observes history over four centuries from shifting gender perspectives.5 Here’s a cascade of language toward the end that conveys a shimmering moment of being:
She now looked down into this pool or sea in which everything is reflected — and, indeed, some say that all our most violent passions, and art and religion are the reflections we see in the dark hollow at the back of the head when the visible world is obscured for the time. She looked there now, long, deeply, profoundly, and immediately the ferny path up the hill along which she was walking became not entirely a path, but partly the Serpentine; the hawthorn bushes were partly ladies and gentlemen sitting with card cases and gold-mounted canes; the sheep were partly tall Mayfair houses; everything was partly something else, and each gained an odd moving power from this union of itself and something not itself so that with this mixture of truth and falsehood her mind became like a forest in which things moved; lights and shadows changed, and one thing became another.
The Village Voice closed down in 2018, although it was revived at the end of 2020 by Brian Calle of Street Media and remains a mostly online site. “But it’s missing the revolutionary feeling that everything is being done for the first time,” Romano writes in her Afterword, “or that it’s the only place where one can write in first person, take sides, be experimental.”
Most chapter titles in The Freaks Came Out to Write are direct quotes. In this case, “Holy Mother Ireland” was reported by Robin Reisig. She remembers a local bartender saying this when a group of women walked in to protest NYC bars at the time not serving women unless a man was with them (in case they were prostitutes, the thinking went).
Here are links for more about these feminist journalists: Vivian Gornick, Susan Brownmiller, Ellen Willis, and Robin Reisig.
Yes, I’m capping Objective Journalism, as Hunter Thompson and other New Journalists did, to convey that it’s an edifice of institutional power, not a verity.
Orlando’s ending has been interpreted as a psychedelic experience. It is psychedelic, but reducing it this way undercuts Woolf’s brilliant play on memory and the evolving self.
Thanks for this great celebration and for the mention!
I've been on a long list at the library. After your review, I may have to break down and buy this book. Laurie Stone, whom you mentioned, writes here and is one of the most original voices I've found on Substack.