Politics & Government
INSTANT NEW YORKTIMES BESTSELLER “It’s a hell of a story.” —The New York
Times “A stunning and revelatory memoir.” —OprahDaily From MSNBC anchor and
New York Times bestselling author Katy Tur, a shocking and deeply personal
memoir about a life spent chasing the news. “By the time I was two years
old, I knew to yell ‘Story! Story!’ at the squawks of my parents’ police
scanner. By four, I could hold a microphone and babble my way through a
kiddie news report. By the time I was in high school, though, my parents
had lost it all. Their marriage. Their careers. Their reputations.” When a
box from her mother showed up on Katy Tur’s doorstep, months into the
pandemic and just as she learned she was pregnant with her second child,
she didn’t know what to expect. The box contained thousands of hours of
video—the work of her pioneering helicopter journalist parents. They grew
rich and famous for their aerial coverage of Madonna and Sean Penn’s secret
wedding, the Reginald Denny beating in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and O.J.
Simpson’s notorious run in the white Bronco. To Tur, these family videos
were an inheritance of sorts, and a reminder of who she was before her own
breakout success as a reporter. In Rough Draft, Tur writes about her
eccentric and volatile California childhood, punctuated by forest fires,
earthquakes, and police chases—all seen from a thousand feet in the air.
She recounts her complicated relationship with a father who was magnetic,
ambitious, and, at times, frightening. And she charts her own survival from
local reporter to globe-trotting foreign correspondent, running from her
past. Tur also opens up for the first time about her struggles with burnout
and impostor syndrome, her stumbles in the anchor chair, and her
relationship with CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil (who quite possibly had
a crazier childhood than she did). Intimate and captivating, Rough Draft
explores the gift and curse of family legacy, examines the roles and
responsibilities of the news, and asks the question: To what extent do we
each get to write our own story? Read more

 

Genre Biography