One day in the very late 1960s, my father brought home a copy of Esquire magazine. Out popped a card offering an annual subscription for, I believe, $1.99. He filled it out and mailed it in, and subsequently the magazine, which was just a little past its New Journalism heyday, arrived every month in the mailbox of our home in New Rochelle, New York.

When the year was over, my father decided not to renew. But the magazine kept coming, possibly because its bean-counters judged that keeping the rate base up, even to the point of giving the product away for free, was worth it in terms of advertising revenues. Teenage me read the magazine not word for word, but scattershot: Malcolm Muggeridge on books, Dwight Macdonald on movies, Robert Alan Aurthur’s column “Hanging Out,” Rex Reed’s movie star profiles, occasional voices from the magazine’s past like Helen Lawrenson or George Frazier, and certainly the annual Dubious Achievement Awards and the Gorge Lois covers, including Andy Warhol drowning in a giant can of Campbell’s tomato soup and a smiling William Calley hugging a quartet of cute Vietnamese children.

Esquire stopped arriving after two years or three years. But that was long enough for me to absorb its ethos, similar to (though somewhat hipper than) what I was getting from a mix of newspapers and magazines that came into the house and were, without my realizing it, giving me a sense of what it was possible to do on a page. At the top of that list was The New York Times, which arrived every morning and where I would turn first (on his appointed days) to Russell Baker’s column, which offered a take on politics and other matters that was both funny and serious (but never solemn, to use Baker’s classic distinction). I’d read Robert Lipsyte on the sports page, John Leonard on books, Vincent Canby on movies, Craig Claiborne on food, and features by Charlotte Curtis and Judy Klemesrud (loved that byline). Second was The New Yorker, my mother’s Bible, where naturally I started with the cartoons and the newsbreaks like “Constabulary Notes from All Over” but grew to appreciate writers like Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, Pauline Kael, John Updike and Whitney Balliett. Then throw in in the New York Post, which my father occasionally brought home and where I read wise-guy “chipmunk” sports writers like Phil Pepe, Maury Allen and Larry Merchant; the even-wiser-guy Village Voice, which I picked up on my own forays into the city; Sports Illustrated and Sport magazines, which I intermittently subscribed to; and, needless to say, Mad magazine.

This is a story I’ve always told myself, that as writer I was formed by osmosis, not especially consciously. But recently, perhaps because I’ve reached the stage of life where taking stock seems called for, I’ve had an inclination to flesh out that story. And, thanks to Google’s hoovering up of most of most of what has ever been published, plus the existence of proprietary archives from Esquire, the Times, the New Yorker and other publications, I’ve been able to add specifics to the narrative: to track down particular articles, passages  or even sentences that had an impact.

Archived treasure

Just the other day, someone mentioned something about Richard Brautigan on Facebook, and I flashed back to a line in a Brautigan parody I had read in The New Yorker at least five decades ago. I had thought it was written by Donald Barthelme, probably because his 1973 spoof of Cosmopolitan ads had made such an impression on me.  But some time with Google and New Yorker digital archives revealed that the piece was by pre-“Prairie Home Companion” Garrison Keillor. It appeared in the issue of March 18, 1972, and here’s how it started:

The bit I remembered was, “Some of his stories are no longer than this.” Now, at the time I hadn’t read Brautigan, and I still haven’t. But something about the Keillor line instructed me as to effects it’s possible for a writer to achieve.

A couple of months ago, I saw Calvin Trillin speak on his book tour for “The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press.” I pondered when it was that I became a Trillin fanboy for life, and after rooting around a while found what I think of the Rosetta Stone. It’s the opening of a New Yorker article from July 3, 1971. (Trillin is not only a connoisseur but a perpetrator of great ledes.)

Larry Goldberg, the pizza baron, is slim, but I still think of him as Fats Goldberg. So does he. Although he has ‘been down,’ as he puts it, for twelve years, after twenty-five years of exceptional fatness, he sees himself not as a man who weighs one hundred and sixty pounds but as a man who is constantly in danger of weighing three hundred twenty. “Inside, I’m still a fat man,” he sometimes says. When Fats and I were boys in Kansas City, he was already renowned for his corpulence—though I can’t say I was ever approached about posing for Refugee Relief ads in those days myself. During college, when Fats weighed three hundred pounds and was known to some as Three Cases Goldberg, I occasionally saw him at the University of Missouri, where he was one of a number of storied eaters. According to one tale, when a restaurant near the campus instituted a policy of giving customers all they wanted to eat on Sunday nights for a dollar thirty-five, a fraternity brother of Fats’ called Hog Silverman, who weighed less than two and a half cases, went over one Sunday night and put it out of business.

A little later there’s this quintessentially Trillinesque sentence, about the first time he saw Goldberg after college:

It was a Sunday morning, and I was at Ratner’s, on Second Avenue. I was having eggs scrambled with lox and onions, and I was glancing around constantly, as I tend to do in Ratner’s, to see if some other table was being given a roll basket with more of my favorite kind of onion rolls than our roll basket had.

Given the well-known vicissitudes of memory, it’s not surprising that sometimes I get these passages wrong. I was sure I had read a bit by Dan Jenkins in Sports Illustrated where he was making fun of sports-writing cliches and had a list to the effect of, “Jack Nicklaus, the Golden Bear; Lee Trevino, the Merry Mex; and Arnold Palmer, comma” — the idea being that Palmer was so mighty, no epithet would suffice. For years I tried to find it with no success. Then I Googled “Jack Nicklaus comma” and was directed to SI of September 13, 1976, where Jenkins had this lede:

Jack Nicklaus, comma. Having a bad year by his own standards, comma. Bored when there isn’t a major championship on the line, comma. Disinterested in money earnings, comma. Well, there’s only one thing wrong with all of that. How do you explain the fact that every time they think up a golf tournament of special significance, Nicklaus goes out and hammers everyone so deeply into the bunkers that they think they must be living in a tent in the Sahara?

And speaking of Sports Illustrated, one of my favorite quotes of all time appeared in the issue of April 21, 1969. Curry Kirkpatrick was profiling a young golfer named Bruce Fleisher and reported his answer when someone asked him why he went to Miami-Dade Junior College: “Because I’m dumb and the weather is hot.” (I actually streamlined that one in my memory as “Because it’s hot and I’m dumb.”)

Revisiting early influences

Sometimes my efforts lead to naught. Probably in the late ‘60s, the New Yorker’s television writer, Michael Arlen, had a set piece about a Saturday afternoon so dreary that the most interesting thing on TV was a professional hockey game. It was probably the starkest evocation of ennui I’ve ever read, but the search capabilities of the magazine’s archives are so quirky that I haven’t been able to find it.

Here are some of the other influential lines, passages, or whole pieces I’ve recently tracked down:

Writing about Count Basie’s minimalistic piano playing in the New Yorker of April 7, 1975, Balliett made an analogy that opened my eyes to a thing that criticism could do:

What Hemingway had done for American prose Basie was doing for American music.

On the other hand, Balliett taught me that I did not want to be haughtily dismissive, the way he was in 1971 when he wrote:

There is no need to worry about (Dave) Brubeck anymore. He is what he is — a jovial amateur pianist who happened along at the right time with the right music and make a million.

It kind of blew my mind that the Voice could print a profile of a typeface, to wit, Helvetica, in 1976. And Molly Haskell, writing about the 1964 Howard Hawks film “Man’s Favorite Sport” in 1971, was my introduction to the auteur theory idea that even in an ostensibly witless Rock Hudson sex farce, there was more going on than met the eye:

Hudson is a virgin, who has written a ‘How to’ book on sex while harboring a deep, fastidious horror of it. His masculinity is a lie.

Meanwhile, costar Paula Prentiss:

…must take the initiative in Hudson’s sexual initiation, for which the fishing exploit is metaphor. Fish are phallic symbols, of course, and there is even a scene in which a loose fish thrashes around inside Hudson’s pants, causing him to jump and jerk uncontrollably.

John McPhee’s two-part article about a tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, “Levels of the Game,” appeared in The New Yorker in June 1969. McPhee’s description of Ashe’s backhand showed me something about precision and observation (and provided an aspirational template for my own one-handed backhand, a lifetime work in progress).

Ashe loves the movement of the backhand, because the follow-through does not cramp the arm into the body but does just the opposite-opens both arms wide and high, so that the stroke ends in the stance of the Winged Victory.

Later he quotes Ashe about the stroke:

…you fling your arms away from your body and you wind up in a position that looks as if you’re calling for help, both arms in the air.

And, the kicker (spoiler alert), when Ashe hits a backhand to win the match, is a callback:

When the stroke is finished, he is standing on his toes, his arms flung open, wide, and high.

In August, 1972, right after the Republican National Convention, my favorite columnist, Russell Baker, brilliantly appropriated my favorite novel. What could be better? Here’s how Baker’s Times piece started:

My name’s Huckleberry Dick. You ain’t heard of me less’n you watched a TV show called the Republican National Love-In. That show was made by Mr. Walter Cronkite and Mr. John Chancellor and Mr. Howard Smith and lots of other smart TV people, and mostly they told the truth, ‘cepn for leavin’ out a lot of the more disgustin’ scenes of crowds of love‐crazed Republicans a‐flingin’ themselves on me and a‐lickin’ my hands on account of my havin’ done so much to make the country a fit place to love in again.

In June 1969, Rust Hills published a piece in Esquire that was accurately titled “How to Do Four Dumb Tricks with a Package of Camels” and that started this way:

Another reason for smoking Camels, besides because they satisfy, never change, are available most everywhere, are romantically-dangerously unfiltered, and taste best, is that there are four dumb tricks you can do with the package that amuse children and other simpleminded, amiable people.

So much of that screams David Letterman — the air-quotey phrase “they satisfy,” the idea of doing dumb tricks, even the word “dumb” — that I am convinced he read it in Indiana and it made even more of an impression on him than it did on me.

The funniest and cleverest thing I’ve ever read remains “Albert Brooks’ Famous Schools for Comedians,” published in Esquire in February 1971. It changed my life.

Hearing your own voice

Later in 1971, I showed up in college, with the vague idea I wanted to be a writer. I took a couple of fiction-writing classes and didn’t produce anything very good. I went out for the school newspaper and wrote a few articles, including an interview with Robert Strauss, the head of the Democratic Party, and an account of a speech by the governor of Puerto Rico. I realized that hard news wasn’t for me either.

Then some people started a monthly magazine associated with the newspaper. My roommate was one of the people and one day I tagged along with him to a meeting. I left the meeting having been appointed Road Trips Editor of the magazine. In that role I assigned travel stories and wrote some of my own. The first one appeared on May 1, 1975. I know that because, sure enough, my complete college output is online, including the Robert Strauss interview.

This first Road Trips story was about going to the New York Yankees’ home opener.  I start out writing a bit about my history as a Yankee fan, then talked about arriving at the game:

Our seats today, are, again, in the mezzanine. My father, a champion of the middle way, always brought me to this sheltered cove, and it is like home.

“Sheltered cove” is a bit much. But that line about “champion of the middle way” and etymologically linking it to the mezzanine. Yup, that’s me. I didn’t realize at the time — I didn’t realize much at the time — but all that reading had borne fruit. I had a voice.

* * *

Ben Yagoda is the author or editor of fourteen books, including “About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made: and “Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English,: which will be published in September 2024. His podcast is “The Lives They’re Living.” 

The post Early influencers in a writing life appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

In his "New in Town" standup comedy special, John Mulaney tells how, when he was 10, he was in love with his babysitter, who he thought was much older. But as an adult, he discovered she’d been only 13 at the time of his crush.

That his parents would have hired someone so young makes him indignant. “It would be like you’re going out of town for a week,” he says, “and you hire a horse to watch your dog.”

Big laugh.

Much later in the show, he talks about going to a high school party where the host’s parents were gone and everybody drank too much and did risky things: "We were like dogs without horses!"

Huge laugh, followed by applause, even though the line, on its own, wouldn’t be especially funny or even clear.

Thus the power of the callback, which may be the standup comic’s most useful and dependable tool. Well-constructed callbacks elevate an ordinary observation to the level of hilarity, flatter the audience (always a good thing) for picking up on it, and provide a sense of continuity to the whole routine.

The device is mentioned in every guide to comedy. Less recognized is its value in all sorts of other forms of writing, fiction and non-fiction alike. One of my favorite theatrical callbacks is in Frank Loesser’s masterpiece "Guys and Dolls." In the first act, gambler Sky Masterson and “mission doll” Sarah Brown have a duet in which both describe how “I’ll Know” when they have encountered their soulmate. When it’s Sky’s turn, he sings and Sarah interjects:

“Mine will come as a surprise to me.
Mine I lead to chance and chemistry.”

SARAH (spoken) Chemistry?
SKY (spoken) Yeah, chemistry.

By the end of the act – surprise! – Sarah has fallen for Sky and expresses it in her number “If I Were a Bell.” This time she sings and Sky interjects:

“Ask me how do I feel from this chemistry lesson I'm learning.”

SKY (spoken) Uh, chemistry?
SARAH (spoken) Yes, chemistry!

In movies, a great callback is in "Kramer vs. Kramer."  A frustrated and exhausted wife, played by Meryl Streep, has just flown the coop, leaving her baffled husband, Ted (Dustin Hoffman) to care for their young son, Billy (Justin Henry). Dad resolves to make breakfast, but knows nothing from French toast. It is, of course, a disaster, with pans clanging, curses flying and egg-soaked bread burning. Months later, Billy is about to go live with his mother. It’s breakfast time again. Robert Benton’s screenplay says that Billy and Ted

stand side by side, like a surgeon and his assistant. Spread out on the counter in front of them are the makings of French toast. The following is done with great efficiency, in contrast to the first time we saw them go through the same ritual. They work in silence except for an occasional command.

As a director, Benton improved on his own screenplay. In the filmed scene, with Ted an expert short-order cook and Billy his sous chef, there isn’t even an “occasional command.” It’s my favorite silent scene is a sound movie.

Writers have known about the power of callbacks for a long time — at least since "Canterbury Tales," where, as the writing guru Roy Peter Clark describes in his book "The Art of X-Ray Reading," Chaucer deploys an elaborate one based on the Absolon’s previously established squeamishness regarding farting.

Kurt Vonnegut’s "Slaughterhouse-Five" may have more callbacks than any other single work. He returns to certain images and phrases again and again in different contexts: people nestled like spoons, “ivory and blue” feet, a bird going “Poo-tee-weet!” Vonnegut uses the repetition less for comedy than for emotional impact and thematic resonance. He is a character in and narrator of the novel, as well as its author, and on page 5, he says that late at night, “I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses.” He repeats the mustard-gas-and-roses line four pages later, just so we won’t forget it. It comes up again on page 92, this time in reference to the breath of a fictional character, Billy Pilgrim. The payoff comes on the second to last page, when Billy, at this point imprisoned by the Germans in World War II, is ordered to dig up the bodies of people killed in the bombing of Dresden. “The stink,” Vonnegut writes (and note how he signals significance by reversing the order of the terms), “was like roses and mustard gas.”

I’m aware that the most famous repetition in "Slaughterhouse-Five" is the phrase “So it goes,” which is intoned whenever there is a reference to death. And this might be a good time to sort out some different techniques related to or included in what I’ve been calling the callback. Vonnegut’s “So it goes” is a refrain, as you would find in a song’s chorus. Foreshadowing is a hint at what’s in store — for example, the witches’ prophecies in "Macbeth," and the terrible weather in "Great Expectations" portending bad things ahead for Pip. “Chekhov’s gun” refers to a story element that more or less promises a callback. Anton Chekhov expressed this idea in different phrasing on several occasions, for example: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.” In the opening of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” we’re placed in what appears to be an idyllic New England village on a lovely June day. In the second paragraph, Jackson introduces us to some kids, one of whom, Bobby Martin, “had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones.” Those stones are a bunch of veritable Chekhov’s guns, and they very definitely go off in the last line of the story.

For feature and narrative journalists, a popular kicker, or ending, calls back to something that was mentioned earlier, often in the opening lines. Author and New Yorker contributor John McPhee is especially fond of this kind of circularity, and uses it to good effect in a chapter of his book "Encounters with the Archdruid" that profiles a U.S. land official named Floyd Dominy. From our first meeting with him, Dominy is almost always pictured with a cigar, in the manner of an opera character’s leitmotif or the objects held by saints in religious paintings. And it suits Dominy, suggesting some of his large personality bordering on arrogance, in his total assurance that damming up rivers is a good thing. McPhee takes us with him on a Colorado River rafting trip, and through one rapids, Dominy’s cigar improbably stays lit. But then the raft enters the very big and very alarming Lava Falls. In a calm moment, Dominy hubristically lights up. The waters pound and engulf the raft, then deposit it in calm water. McPhee’s kicker:

Dominy said nothing. He just sat there, drawing on a wet, dead cigar. Ten minutes later, however, in the dry and baking Arizona air, he struck a match and lighted the cigar again.

Wally Lamb deploys a lovely long-game callback in his 1992 novel "She’s Come Undone." The main character, the damaged Elaine, takes to expressing herself through drawings on an Etch-a-Sketch. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, a psychic suggests she make a picture of “whatever might make you happy.” She draws a guy, a really big guy: “I covered his head with loops of curly hair and added eyes, a beard, linear eyeglasses—wire rims.” She decides it’s an image of her future husband. It’s not mentioned again for a 110 pages. Then Elaine, who’s taking a college writing class, tells her friend about a guy in the class who’s “so huge he couldn’t even fit in the desks.” Five pages after that, we learn that he has “a mopful of blond curls.” They start dating, and — boom! — on the second-to-last page of the second-to-last chapter, he shows up with new glasses. Wire rims.

Game over.

That’s good stuff. However, I would like to say a word for writers who — like standup comics — employ callbacks in the middle. The effect is more subtle and less expected. When the longtime New York Times sports columnist Dave Anderson died last year, his colleague George Vecsey reminisced:

I always whined about schlepping over from Long Island to New Jersey for Sunday football games, which Dave loved. The roads were confusing. The signs were misleading. The fans were drunk — on their way to the game! And traffic back home Sunday evening was inhuman.

Dave told his petulant colleague: Didn’t you know enough to get off at Route 46 and take the local road through Fort Lee to the bridge?

A few paragraphs later, Vecsey writes that Anderson’s wife, Maureen, had died a few years before her husband:

When I drove over for her wake, he needled me at the funeral parlor: Wow, I cared enough to brave New Jersey traffic. In a sad hour, we all laughed.

Straight to the heart.

Anne Fadiman’s "The Wine-Lover’s Daughter," a memoir of her father, Clifton Fadiman, has so many recurring notions and phrasing that when I was reading it, I started making a list. They include her parents’ old-fashioned reference to themselves as “the Clifton Fadimans” and some favorite terms of her father, including “hotsy-totsy,” “meatball,” and “oakling.” I emailed Fadiman about it, and she responded by confirming that she was partial to the technique but unfamiliar with the term “callback:”

I've always thought of them as seeds planted early and harvested later. But that metaphor isn't as good … since a seed can't bear fruit until it's harvested, whereas ‘callback’ implies that the performance holds meaning on the first go as well, and that's important. The first mention needs to work on its own; it should never have a sign over its head that says I'M BEING PLANTED.

She said most of the callbacks in "The Wine Lover’s Daughter" were at least partly humorous, but

‘Blessings’ — what my nonreligious father always said when he bade farewell to a family member — is introduced on page 80 and then recurs on page 234, when my father is on his deathbed.

Fadiman is matched and probably surpassed on the callback front by British novelist Kate Atkinson, notably in her most recent book, "Transcription." I emailed Atkinson, too, and told her I had covered both sides of a sheet of paper with all the callbacks in that book. Here’s a partial list of phrases, words, or names that come up in the life of the main character, Juliet, that Atkinson returns to again and again:

• “Can I tempt you?”
• “An eye … Two, even.”
• Shostakovich
• “We must finish her off, I’m afraid.
• Father a fishmonger.
• Elizabeth David
• Pink hydrangea
• “My girl”
• “This England”

What makes this work especially well in "Transcription" is that it relates to Juliet’s discursive cast of mind. She worries, we’re told at one point, that she may “think herself to death."

Atkinson responded that she, like Atkinson, hadn’t heard of “callbacks,” but the term struck her as “quite descriptive,” and something she used not in many of her novels:

"Life After Life" is, structurally, one big callback. "God in Ruins" circles around one event all the time (the last flight). I was probably influenced there by both "Catch-22" and "Slaughterhouse-Five.”

For me, a novel is a very textural thing.  It’s not a stream of unregulated words, it’s something that has been put together like an artifact and it often needs a lot of ‘pinning’ (callbacks, I guess) to make sure it makes sense and that it’s poetic in some way (I can’t think of another word, so poetic will have to do for now). It gives a novel depth and heft. (Plus it gives me considerable pleasure.) A lot of this you don’t always notice on one reading (I think) but it’s still there knitting everything together, making the whole thing more than a sum of its parts, giving the reader a sense of cohesiveness (I hope!).

A lot of this you don’t always notice on one reading.

That comment by Atkinson is a good lead-in to the limitations of callbacks. They demand attentiveness, and not all readers are attentive, especially in the distracting noises of the 21st century. As Anne Fadiman wrote me:

It occurs to me that when writers use callbacks, they assume the reader will start on page 1 rather than dipping in here and there. I wonder if callbacks will be part of the collateral damage as readers' attention spans get shorter and shorter and they become less and less likely to read in the sequence intended by the author.

The takeaway is that a callback should not depend on the reader or viewer remembering the first mention: The line or scene shouldn’t puzzle or mystify her or him, but should function on its own in the piece. And that’s true of all the examples in this essay, with the exception of John Mulaney’s dogs-and-horses line.

Moreover, while I hope I’ve shown that first-rate writers use callbacks, callbacks are not a prerequisite for first-rate writing. It’s the sort of thing that lapidary stylists like McPhee, Fadiman, and Atkinson are drawn to. But there’s a whole other category of wonderful writers — the Dostoyevskys and Dickenses and Saul Bellows and David Foster Wallaces — who just plow ahead and never look back.

Finally, it’s possible to take this idea too far — larding a piece of writing or cinema with endless references to itself, so that it ends up feeling self-indulgent and navel-gazey. That’s especially a danger with “intertextuality,” a literary-critical term meaning a reference in one work to another. Probably 50 percent of country songs, 75 percent of  hip-hop songs, and every movie in the Marvel “universe” are intertextual. This can be fun but it fairly quickly becomes self-congratulatory and exclusionary, calling to mind fanboys bragging about finding a secret message in a "Simpsons" cel.

The relevant, mildly derisive term for this is “fan service,” which originally referred to the insertion of irrelevant titillating or soft-core images in Japanese anime. Now, more generally, it means any fan-pandering feature that doesn’t serve the story, such as breaking the fourth wall, gratuitous callbacks, or abundant “Easter eggs,” a term derived from computer games and programs that now refers to hidden treats or references.

With those caveats stipulated, the comedian’s callback is a potentially very effective technique for writers and artists of all kinds. It adds energy and kick, through a powerful chemistry.

Yeah, chemistry.

The post Foreshadow forward; echo back. How writers harness the power of the callback appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Whether you spell them “ledes” or “leads,” opening lines get a lot of attention. And why wouldn’t they? Sitting at the keyboard, with all the tedious and sometimes annoying reporting done, a writer is spoiled for choice, a world of possibilities at his or her disposal. To be sure, that seemingly limitless choice can be daunting, but once you get down to it, the freedom is empowering and more often than not results in a fairly awesome opener.

Then you have to write the piece. With each word, sentence, and paragraph, the world of possibilities is constricted, until you find yourself with one more bit to write. Even if you haven’t painted yourself into an uncomfortable corner, you have to steer between being too obvious and too enigmatic. At the same time you feel you need to leave readers with something that will move them and stick with them, preferably for a long time.

The time-honored strategy is closing on a quote, and even if you end up having to cannibalize one from earlier in the piece and patch the hole that’s left, this is a graceful and efficient exit strategy.

But there are quotes and there are quotes. Joseph Mitchell’s 1940 New Yorker profile of a bearded circus performer, “Lady Olga,” starts off as a typical feature on an offbeat topic, with many odd and interesting facts about carnival life, but gradually changes into something more profound, with a subtle but insistent suggestion that we consider the circumstances under discussion insofar as they relate to the human condition — in this case, what it means to be a “freak.” By the time we get to Olga’s stunning last quotation (with its cascade of one-syllable words leading to a killer kicker), we have been prepared to accept it literally and unconditionally:

“If the truth was known, we’re all freaks together,” she says.

Where Mitchell fades in and out over the course of a piece, his friend and New Yorker colleague A.J. Liebling is a personable, voluble, and frequently boisterous companion from start to finish. One of his series of 1959 pieces about the colorful Louisiana politician Earl Long (collected in The Earl of Louisiana) ends with a simile that not many people other than Liebling could pull off. The reporter spies Long at the racetrack; the pol is happy because it appears that his election scheming has paid off, and because he has made a killing on the ponies. Liebling writes (and you need to know that Jimmie Noe was one of Long’s cronies, and Hasan and Husain were, in Wikipedia’s words, “the last descendants of Prophet Muhammad living during his lifetime and remaining after his death”):

As he stuffed the bundle of money in his pocket, another stout, jolly, ruddy man, also a winner, strolled up to his box and leaned over the edge, and they had a good laugh together. It was Jimmie Noe, and the two Companions of the Prophet looked as happy and well attuned as Hasan and Husain the Beatified, looking down from Paradise upon a world in which other Arabs sweated.

Mitchell and Liebling represent the two basic strategies: minimalist and maximalist. Those in the former camp usually close with a brief quote or a terse but telling detail or two, the latter with something lyrical. To pull that off, you need the courage of your conviction, plus chops.

W.C. Heinz had both. One of his most famous pieces was a 960-word column that appeared in the New York Sun in 1949. It was about, in the words of the title, “Death of a Racehorse” — the horse being Air Lift, who breaks his leg in the course of the sixth race at Jamaica. Heinz’s meticulous tick-tock shows us what happens after that, including, unflinchingly and respectfully, the killing of the horse. Only in the final sentence does he turn up the rhetorical heat, with Biblical cadences, the pathetic fallacy, and a searing final image:

Then the heavens opened, the rain pouring down, the lightning flashing, and they rushed for the cover of the stables, leaving alone on his side near the pile of bricks, the rain running off his hide, dead an hour and a quarter after his first start, Air Lift, son of Bold Venture, full brother of Assault.

A lot of good endings partake of what comedians refer to as a “callback”—an unexpected reference to a previous joke. In his 1957 New Yorker article about Marlon Brando, “The Duke in His Domain,” Truman Capote basically invented the modern celebrity profile — in particular the way the writer appears as “I” and the piece is structured around his encounter (often in a hotel room, as in “Duke”) with the celeb. But Capote’s leisurely pace and penchant for metaphor is anything but 21st century.

Somewhere in the middle of the piece, Brando describes his sudden fame after appearing in A Streetcar Named Desire: “It was like I’d been asleep, and I woke up here sitting on a pile of candy.” At the end of a long, rambling interview/conversation, Capote finds himself wandering the streets of Tokyo at two in the morning, trying to find his way home. Finally he sees a familiar sight: “Sixty feet tall, with a head as huge as the greatest Buddha’s, there he was, in comic-paper colors, on a sign above a theatre that advertised ‘The Teahouse of the August Moon’ [a Brando movie]. Rather Buddhalike, too, was his pose, for he was depicted in a squatting position, a serene smile on a face that glistened in the rain and the light of a street lamp.” And then the callback:

“A deity, yes; but, more than that, really, just a young man sitting on a pile of candy.”

Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1966, is an extremely badass piece of writing, what with its bow to the “hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the Eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves,” its disapproving sighting of The Forty Winks Motel, and its overall stern and unforgivingly ironic moral gaze. Didion tells a story straight out of Raymond Chandler or James M. Cain, of a housewife who embarks on an affair with a lawyer named Arthwell Hayton and ultimately is convicted of the murder of her husband; the implication is that she is also responsible for the death under mysterious circumstances of Hayton’s wife. Didion’s closing lines suggest (as does much of the article) a narrative about the principals who refused to talk to her, and the killer details she nonetheless unearthed. Her digging earns her the barefaced symbolism of the stunning kicker, which otherwise might have been a bit over the top:

Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew. In any case, on October 17, 1965, Arthwell Hayton married again, married his children’s pretty governess, Wenche Berg, at a service in the Chapel of the Roses at a retirement village near Riverside. Later the newlyweds were feted at a reception for seventy-five in the dining room of Rose Garden Village. The bridegroom was in black tie, with a white carnation in his buttonhole. The bride wore a long white peau de soie dress and carried a shower bouquet of sweetheart roses with stephanotis streamers. A coronet of seed pearls held her illusion veil.

Richard Ben Cramer was a digger too, and that plus his almost supernal charm got him to a great many restricted places, including intimate moments with presidential candidates recorded in his book What It Takes. True to form, by the end of his 1986 Esquire piece “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?,” Cramer is actually sitting around the kitchen table with the former ballplayer, whose orneriness is on a par with and perhaps exceeds his ability to hit a fastball. Even in calmer moments, he bellows and roars IN CAPITAL LETTERS. The meal over, Williams embarks on a train of thought that leads him to a meltdown of indiscriminate rage. “I feel I should leave the room,” Cramer writes, “but too late.” Eventually, the ballplayer’s companion, Louise, talks him down and his attention returns to the reporter:

... he tries to sneer through his grin: “WHEN ARE YOU LEAVING? HUH?

“...JESUS. YOU'RE LIKE THE GODDAMN RUSSIAN SECRET POLICE!

“...OKAY, BYE! YEAH, SURE, GOODBYE!”

Williams walks Cramer out to the driveway and the reporter starts to drive away. In his kicker he avails himself of a puppy. Normally this would be slightly cheesy, but, similar to the Didion, the unflinching view of Williams’ demons earns him, and Cramer, a Kodachrome moment:

Ted is bent at his belly, grabbing their new dalmatian puppy, tickling it with his big hands while the dog rolls and paws the air. And as I ease the car into gear, I hear Ted's voice behind, cooing, very quiet now: "Do I love this little dog, huh?....Yes, this little shittin' dog....Yes, yes I love you....Yes, I do."

“Tennis, trigonometry, tornadoes: A Midwestern boyhood,” by David Foster Wallace, is a meditation about how “Between the ages of twelve and fifteen I was a near-great junior tennis player,” and how both geometry and the wind of Wallace’s native Illinois pertained to his life in the sport. Wallace was a master of changing speeds, and I don’t mean on the tennis court. The most noticeable thing was the way he’d go in an instant from highfalutin diction and metaphors to the most demotic shortcuts and slang; but he was also constantly wrong-footing the reader in lots of ways, including alternating short sentences and paragraphs with really long ones.

He closes this essay with a 1,136-word graf, about the time when he and his longtime practice partner and foe, Gil Antitoi, had their hitting session interrupted by a tornado. The penultimate sentence is 299 words its own self:

This all happened very fast but in serial progression: field, trees, swings, grass, then the feel like the lift of the world's biggest mitt, the nets suddenly and sexually up and out straight, and I seem to remember whacking a ball out of my hand at Antitoi to watch its radical west-east curve, and for some reason trying to run after this ball I'd just hit, but I couldn't have tried to run after a ball I had hit, but I remember the heavy gentle lift at my thighs and the ball curving back closer and my passing the ball and beating the ball in flight over the horizontal net, my feet not once touching the ground over fifty-odd feet, a cartoon, and then there was chaff and crud in the air all over and both Antitoi and I either flew or were blown pinwheeling for I swear it must have been fifty feet to the fence one court over, the easternmost fence, we hit the fence so hard we knocked it halfway down, and it stuck at degrees — Antitoi detached a retina and had to wear those funky Jabbar retina goggles for the rest of the summer, and the fence had two body-shaped indentations like in cartoons where the guy's face makes a cast in the skillet that hit him, two catcher's masks of fence, we both got deep quadrangular lines impressed on our faces, torsos, legs' fronts, from the fence, my sister said we looked like waffles, but neither of us got badly hurt, and no homes got whacked — either the thing just ascended again for no reason right after, they do that, obey no rule, follow no line, hop up and down at something that might as well be will, or else it wasn't a real one.

Wallace’s final sentence would have worked anyway, but by making the genius move of affixing it to the end of that mammoth sentence, rather than doing the expected thing of giving it a new paragraph, he makes your heart skip a beat:

Antitoi's tennis continued to improve after that, but mine didn't.

Here’s the thing. An opening line can be tricky or gimmicky or off-the-wall, or pretty much anything. Like I said, limitless possibilities. All you have to do is sort of follow where it goes, track it down, and lead it back to the narrative you want to tell. But a great ending isn’t about eccentricity or quirkiness or fancy. It can be plain as Wallace’s closer, as long as it follows from and is earned by what came before.

John Jeremiah Sullivan is something of a next-generation David Foster Wallace: The writing of both shares that loosey-goosey go-anywhere quality, a shrewd deployment of the first person, and a Federeresque command of many different sorts of moves. “Upon This Rock,” Sullivan’s 2004 GQ piece about a Christian-rock festival called Creation, covers a lot of ground (some of it muddy) in its 11,000 words, and contains some estimable sentences before the end, including:

• “I'd assumed that my days at Creation would be fairly lonely and end with my ritual murder.”

• “Somebody farted; the conversation about who it had been lasted a good twenty minutes.”

• “I was staggering through the food stands when a man died at my feet.”

• “We all ran down the hillside, holding guitars and—in Josh's case—a skillet wherein the fried meat of some woodland creature lay ready to eat.”

The ending is a set piece in which Sullivan experiences an epiphany that I can’t adequately describe, so read the piece. For now, suffice it to say that he earns his kicker, with its pun on the shared name of festival and universe:

I left at dawn, while creation slept.

“The Marriage Cure,” by Katherine Boo, and “Enrique’s Journey,” by Sonia Nazario, are two remarkable pieces of immersion reporting about the lives and situations of poor people. In Boo’s 2003 New Yorker article, it’s a 49-year-old African-American woman who lives in an Oklahoma City housing project called “Sooner Haven” and is deemed eligible for a then-fashionable social-engineering concept called “the marriage cure.” In Nazario’s Pulitzer-winning 2002 Los Angeles Times series, it’s a Honduran teenager’s search for his mother, who had emigrated to the United States when he was a little boy. The ending for each is simple — seven words for the Boo, a six-word quote for the Nazario — and devastating. But they only work in context. Again, read the stories.

When I told my wife I was working on this piece, she said that not a week goes by that she doesn’t think about the ending of a New York Times magazine article by Michael Winerip, and the “new dress.” Winerip is one of the great feature writers of the last 30 years, and the fact he hasn’t won a Pulitzer is only a statement about the Pulitzers. The piece my wife was referring to, “The Blue Collar Millionaire,” begins as a rags-to-riches story about a Long Island guy who started out with nothing and built a $50 million commercial cleaning company. Almost precisely halfway through, it makes a 180-degree turn, enumerating the human costs of success. And by that I mainly mean the company’s minimum-wage workers, treated and talked about by the owners — whom we’d come to think of as such great down-to-earth guys! — with disdain.

Nowadays not many works of journalism, or of anything, have an O. Henry-style shock ending, as in The Front Page’s “The son of a bitch stole my watch.” Not only does it seem old-fashioned, but there’s also the pragmatic concern that by the end, the reader’s attention may be lagging, if it’s intact at all, so it wouldn’t do to withhold any jewels. Winerip doesn’t care. He ends with a scene at the ribbon cutting at a renovated airport for which the company has the cleaning contract. The on-site manager introduces a company V.P. (and I’ve changed the quote so as to refer the these two men by their titles) to Marie Baxter, the head cleaner:

She had worn a special dress for the ribbon cutting and was nervous about whether the airport would meet the V.P’s standards. Several times she had asked the manager, “What do you think he'll say?”

As it turns out, the V.P. was impressed. “This place looks 100 percent better,” he said.

“It'd mean a lot to Marie to hear that from you,” said the manager, who told the V.P. that they never would have finished in time for the grand opening without Baxter. “Marie's been unbelievable,” he said. “She worked 60 hours this week, on her hands and knees. I'm going to put her in for 50.”

“That's fair,” the V.P. said.

In other words: The son of a bitch stole my watch.

Ben Yagoda coedited The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism and is the author of About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made and the new e-book You Need to Read This: The Death of the Imperative Mode, the Rise of American Glottal Stop, the Bizarre Popularity of 'Amongst,' and Other Cuckoo Things That Have Happened to the English Language.

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How true does a memoir have to be? That question has been the basis of an ongoing debate kicked off by the revelation, five years ago, that much of James Frey’s bestselling “A Million Little Pieces” was made up.

Unfortunately, it has never been adequately answered. Commentators have tended to gravitate to oversimplifications: one side asserting that every word in a book sold in the non-fiction section of the store must be fact-checked and airtight, the other that “memoir” implies memory, which implies a not-the-truth-but-my-truth subjectivity bordering on carte blanche.

A better, more nuanced answer would recognize the complexity of the issue. Here’s a try: Inaccuracy is a problem in a memoir based on the extent to which it gets details as well as larger truths demonstrably wrong, depicts identifiable people in a negative light, fails to recognize the limits of memory, is poorly written, is self-serving, or otherwise wears its agenda on its sleeve. The more of these things it does and the more egregiously it does them, the bigger the problem is.

A rating system for memoirs

We decided to devise a way to apply these standards to the truthy aspects of memoir. Here's the (half-facetious, but also half-serious) scoring system we came up with:

The charts below, analyzing some recent and not-so-recent memoirs, attempt to quantify the process; selected annotations have been added. Obviously, the charts themselves have a strong element of subjectivity, both in some of their metrics (especially E) and in the interpretation of the final scores. For us, a memoir “passes” if it scores 65 or more (the "Yagoda Line"). For others the threshold may be 40, or 80. In fact, such a notion of personal judgment is part of the point.

Clear-cut cases exist only on the extremes, the completely discredited “Love and Consequences” (that's the one in which an upper-middle-class white author fabricated a childhood in the L.A. ’hood) on one end, Rousseau’s “Confessions” on the other. In the large middle, an informed reader has to make the call.

Interested in making a pre-emptive strike for truthy writing? Memoirists can use our convenient printable one-page PDF worksheet to evaluate their own work alongside some of the most famous and infamous examples in history.

Ben Yagoda is an English professor at the University of Delaware and author of “Memoir: A History.” He blogs at britishisms.wordpress.com. Dan DeLorenzo is a journalist, cartographer, infographics artist, photographer, painter and ping-pong enthusiast living and working on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

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