Katie Couric Is Not for Everyone

Many years after her long career as America’s beloved morning-news anchor, she has decided to write a wild, unflinching memoir focused on the messy parts. Why?

- By Rebecca Traister

IN THE WEEKS before the publication of her memoir, Going There, Katie Couric and I would play a dark little game called Funny or Fucked Up? Over coffee, lunch, and Zoom calls, I would bring up an anecdote from the book— like, say, the first sentence, which is about the time she ate so many carrots in the summer after college that her skin turned orange—and ask her what, exactly, her reader was supposed to make of it. The carrots were on account of the Scarsdale Diet, the deprivational fad to which the 22-year old Couric had committed because her plan “was to look as good as possible for my wet hot American summer” before “finding a job—may be even a career—in TV news.”

That career would wind up being a blockbuster. At the peak of her fame at the turn of the millennium, which coincided with the heyday of the Today show and the primacy of the morning network-news program, she enjoyed near-unrivaled power. Along with a handful of other women—Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, Oprah Winfrey— Couric was one of the people who determined how American television audiences understood the world.

Nowadays, acknowledgment of Couric’s influence may prompt bafflement. She writes in the book about what it’s like, having once been prey to telephoto lenses and tabloid headlines about her boyfriends, her bitchiness, and her (alleged) brow-lifts, to go unrecognized. The monolithic media landscape over which she presided has been splintered by cable news and social media; her former co-anchor Matt Lauer was fired because of a sexual abuse scandal. The