Gay Talese, the chronicler of ordinary stories

Gay Talese was born on February 7, 1932 in Ocean City, a small city on the east coast of the state of New Jersey. Of Italian descent, his father was an emigrant from the Calabria region and his mother an Italian-American, he spent his childhood as an errand boy in the tailor's shop run by his family.

Coming from a family of tailors, he developed a special sensitivity for good taste and elegance from a very young age. Also, it was in the tailor's shop where, behind the counters, he used to stop and listen to the private lives, events and misfortunes of the local bourgeoisie. The clientele, taking advantage of the intimacy of the screen, entrusted their most secret intimacies to his mother. It was precisely from her that he learned many of the skills he would later use in his interviews.

"The shop was like a talk show that developed around my mother's friendly attitude and timely questions. Gay Talese, Origins of a Non-Fiction Writer, 1996.

Talese began her journalistic career as a teenager, writing sports stories about high school baseball games for the school newspaper, as well as a column devoted to high school events. One of her first journalistic milestones was a moving article about a pet cemetery outside Atlantic City that got published in the city's newspaper, the Atlantic City Press.

Even at the beginning, the reports of a young aspiring writer showed an unusual interest in stories that go unnoticed by other people because of their "ordinariness" and apparent news irrelevance.

After trying to get into several universities and being rejected by most of them, he managed to get admission to study journalism at the University of Alabama. In his university days, the tendency of professors towards a conservative and reliable reporting style did not appeal to him much, he preferred the influence of the realistic fiction writers he admired such as John Cheever, Raymond Carver or Joyce Carol Oates.

"When I became sports editor of the college newspaper in my junior year, I used my position to describe the desperation of the 'infidelder' whose deflected shot meant defeat, or the basketball player who savoured the action only when there was a fight, and many other unlucky characters on the margins of the sports field... If I wrote with more compassion about the losers than the winners in my sports writing days, it was because I found the stories of the losers more interesting, an opinion I retained long after I left the Alabama campus. Gay Talese, Origins of a Non-Fiction Writer, 1996.

This curious and shy journalism student preferred to know the story of the losers, the outcasts, the forgotten. Stories that were not considered news a priori, secondary actors who nevertheless have much to tell and from whom there is much to learn.

Talese, difference between curiosity and "snooping"; he never wrote about anyone for whom he did not feel a considerable degree of respect or admiration. He has written about gangsters, pornographers and other people who are disapproved of and censored by society. However, he was always able to find a redeeming quality, a misconception about them that he sought to amend or a dark vein to shed some light on.

The "snooping" referred to by Gay Talese has more to do with the petty interests of sensationalist journalists; those who seek to dwarf big names by airing their private slips, even if they have no relevance to the character's public activity. Nor does she see any interest in interviewing politicians, whose interest is usually fleeting and who she considers incapable of really saying what they think. Talese satisfies his curiosity with those reserved, unknown characters in whom he sees timeless qualities and stories.

It is not unimportant that his first story for the New York Times was about the guy who changed the headlines on the newspaper's illuminated sign in Manhattan's highlands. At the time, he was just a messenger and got this little story published by an editor.

Paradoxically, it was an article about Nita Naldi, a silent film actress who had fallen by the wayside following the consolidation of sound in the industry, which marked her definitive leap into the journalistic profession and a position as editor in the sports section. A story about a star's twilight was the prelude to another successful career that time confirmed.

Talese's style stands out for its elegance and stylistic simplicity, her interest in finding the human in every story, in every person. As well as an admirable respect and dedication to tell these stories in a beautiful and attractive way for the reader. The self-styled non-fiction writer rejects excessively objective and neutral writing, incapable of transmitting the background of current events, despising the sensationalist yellowism that dirties and degrades the profession.

Respect and commitment define the journalistic work of one of the fathers of New Journalism. Two qualities that he reflects in each of his stories or characters, Gay Talese is one of those figures who give prestige and dignity to a profession destined to live in constant crisis.