Dear Reader,
I don’t know about you, but I am fascinated with women who were little girls in one culture – your know, the one that said, “Be nice and wait your turn and don’t brag about yourself and maybe you should marry a lawyer…” – and defied those rules, in a big way, before or just when they were changing.
Diane Sawyer, the genteel, proper Southern beauty queen who ended up sleeping on baggage carts in airports and flying in dangerously tiny helicopters to crisis zones to beat out the competition…and not marrying (or having any furniture in her apartment) until she was 42. Katie Couric, who transferred the girlishness of her high school cheerleader and college sorority-sister self into a network-rescuing super-career as a morning star and then as the heir to Walter Cronkite – all while a far-too-young widow and single mother of two. Christiane Amanpour, a traditional housewife’s daughter with Farrah Fawcett hair and a Liza Minelli scrapbook who worked as a department store salesgirl after high school – and then became the bravest, most idealistic, and most policy-affecting war reporter of her time. These are the three women of The News Sorority.
Books that take the writer on unexpected journeys are always the most interesting for the author – and, hopefully, for the reader, too. Just as all three of these women morphed — by dint of their determination, charisma, strategic shrewdness, and love of the best storytelling of all: the truth! – into icons and pathbreakers, this book changed, for me, from its conception to its fruition. I started out thinking I was going to use Diane, Katie, and Christiane as markers for the change, over 40 years, in the idea of “what news is” – from a just-the-facts relaying of political events (by men in stentorian voices) to an understanding that societal changes, domestic life, psychology, and resonant human interest stories are as much “news” as legislation and wars. But as I researched and interviewed and wrote, I saw that the story was that of three women who woke up every morning of their lives refusing to say no. They believed in themselves when others didn’t, and they loved work the way, as girls, they were expected to love a man. You can’t bottle that kind of confidence and passion, but you can encounter in it a bracing lesson or two. And that, dear reader, is my hope for you.
– Sheila Weller
