Best Seller
Tell Me Something Good
By Maureen Orth
By Maureen Orth
Hardcover
$38.00
Available on May 04, 2027 | 320 Pages
A rollicking, star-studded memoir from the trailblazing New York Times bestselling author and Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth, who tackled the power and privilege of celebrity for five decades
In Maureen Orth’s teens, a fortune teller told her that before she died she would have met everyone and gone everywhere, a prophesy that she has close to fulfilled. To Orth, being boring is a mortal sin.
As soon as she graduated from Berkeley, she went east for Peace Corps training and posed with President Lyndon Johnson in the Rose Garden, then argued with Bobby Kennedy aboard the presidential yacht about whether he should run for the Senate.
As one of the first female writers for Newsweek and then as a longtime correspondent for Vanity Fair, she watched Stevie Wonder as he recorded an album that would later be called part of his “perfect run” of records and spent eleven wild days on the set of Apocalypse Now before Francis Ford Coppola threw her off the PT boat. She had dinner in Paris with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. She got hit on by Bob Dylan and danced with the shy and scruffy twenty-six-year-old Bruce Springsteen. At forty, she married the love of her life, Tim Russert.
Along the way, she persevered through blatant sexism and helped redefine women’s roles in the newsroom. She broke news with investigative reporting about Gianni Versace’s killer and sexual abuse allegations against Michael Jackson and Woody Allen. A career in journalism allowed her to live at the white-hot center of power, sex, and culture. But it is her Catholic faith that has sustained her, inspiring a decades-long commitment to creating a cutting-edge educational foundation in Colombia, where her life’s adventure began as a Peace Corps volunteer.
In Tell Me Something Good, Orth vividly chronicles a bygone age when the world felt both bigger and smaller, and a determined and adventurous young woman chartered a course that brought her face-to-face with the most recognizable heroes, villains, and icons of the past fifty years.
In Maureen Orth’s teens, a fortune teller told her that before she died she would have met everyone and gone everywhere, a prophesy that she has close to fulfilled. To Orth, being boring is a mortal sin.
As soon as she graduated from Berkeley, she went east for Peace Corps training and posed with President Lyndon Johnson in the Rose Garden, then argued with Bobby Kennedy aboard the presidential yacht about whether he should run for the Senate.
As one of the first female writers for Newsweek and then as a longtime correspondent for Vanity Fair, she watched Stevie Wonder as he recorded an album that would later be called part of his “perfect run” of records and spent eleven wild days on the set of Apocalypse Now before Francis Ford Coppola threw her off the PT boat. She had dinner in Paris with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. She got hit on by Bob Dylan and danced with the shy and scruffy twenty-six-year-old Bruce Springsteen. At forty, she married the love of her life, Tim Russert.
Along the way, she persevered through blatant sexism and helped redefine women’s roles in the newsroom. She broke news with investigative reporting about Gianni Versace’s killer and sexual abuse allegations against Michael Jackson and Woody Allen. A career in journalism allowed her to live at the white-hot center of power, sex, and culture. But it is her Catholic faith that has sustained her, inspiring a decades-long commitment to creating a cutting-edge educational foundation in Colombia, where her life’s adventure began as a Peace Corps volunteer.
In Tell Me Something Good, Orth vividly chronicles a bygone age when the world felt both bigger and smaller, and a determined and adventurous young woman chartered a course that brought her face-to-face with the most recognizable heroes, villains, and icons of the past fifty years.
Author
Maureen Orth
Maureen Orth’s award-winning career began as one of the first women writers at Newsweek. Currently a Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair, she has profiled everyone from Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel to Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift, as well as researching and writing groundbreaking pieces on Woody Allen and Michael Jackson, among others. Her far ranging work not only includes the investigation of serial killer Andrew Cunanan but also a bestselling cover for National Geographic on the Virgin Mary.
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