By Kira Taniguchi and Elena Watts

Bill Minutaglio

Minutaglio talks time:

By the time I started on it, and by the time it actually came out—it was two years. I hadn’t realized that until you just asked me. I turned it in—worked on it for about a year and a half in the sense of turning it in, but you know, books take awhile to come out after editors work their magic on them and actually produce them. So by the time I began it and by the time it came out, it was actually two years.

Minutaglio’s inspiration:

I knew her a tiny bit—I had met her a few times in my own work here in Austin as a journalist. I worked down the hallway from her for a while. I knew she was just this larger than life figure, I mean really, this magnetic personality. She had an incredible laugh, and an incredible presence and she was revered by tens of thousands of people. She was frankly, I believe at one point, the most famous journalist in Texas. So I wanted to write about it. I was attracted to Molly’s story for two reasons: She was a very influential figure and I had a feeling and a little bit of knowledge about her having a rather interesting personal history. She had a lot of peaks and valleys in her life. She lived real large, and she lived a really incredibly full, rich life.

Molly pioneered the way for female journalists:

She opened the doors for a lot of women in journalism. She broke through a lot of ceilings for women. She knew how to make fun of them [the people in power] in a way to knock them off their high horse. Unlike many other journalists in American history she had that ability. Very few people, I think, in American journalism have the ability to write consistently funny and write about people in authority in a funny way. It’s real difficult to do, and she did it in the right way, always with a message. Molly was often the only woman in the room wherever she worked. She was often in a lonely position of being the only woman in a social setting, in a journalism setting. She had great courage in the face of some unbelievably blatant sexism and objectification. She willed herself to succeed.

The surprises:

There are a lot of things that really kind of knocked me for a loop. One is that she has a reputation for those that followed her—millions of readers. She literally had millions of readers, and again, I believe at one point she was the most famous journalist from Texas, and arguably one of THE most famous journalists in America for a certain period of her life. She really was a public figure. But I learned many things: she grew up in an incredibly affluent set of circumstances alongside George W. Bush in Houston. She knew him growing up. She grew up in rather gilded, above-the-cloud kind of circumstances. I knew a little bit about that, but I didn’t realize how wedded she was to the upper echelon in Texas society. So she grew up in the same kind of rarified circles as the Bushes and other powerful figures. Her father was the president at one time in his life of Tenneco, which is one of the largest big energy or oil sector businesses in the history of the oil industry. So she grew up in this very conservative, big oil industry environment in Houston, Texas. She was expected to be a socialite, who would marry well and who would raise children and that’s about it. Her mother had gone to Smith College and her grandmother had gone to Smith College. Molly Ivins was to go to Smith College, graduate, come home to Houston, have children, marry well and just settle in. So that was kind of surprising to me considering the very fierce liberal progressive commentator that she became later. Her whole life can sometimes be defined by her resistance to her father, who was very domineering and almost autocratic.

Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life

Ivins’ journalistic style:

Ivins was an influential, extremely prominent journalist and what you see in her life is a pattern very early on of abandoning a lot of what we in journalism call objectivity and she began striving for subjectivity. She believed that you needed to weigh what people were telling you and not artificially balance your stories. She believed you shouldn’t fill up your stories with this improper balance, so that you would go out and talk to someone and get their side of the story, and then you would balance your story by getting the other side from someone else. She believed that the real thinking, smart journalist would consider those two viewpoints—they might seem at odds with each other—but in your story, you didn’t need to give equal weight to both of them if one of them was completely wrong. Her contention was why would I fill my story with complete lies. If one person is clearly lying, or doesn’t know what they are talking about, they are speaking mistruths, inadvertently or on purpose. She felt journalists need to be more subjective or discriminating perhaps in their work as they analyzed it. And rather than go through this artificial or fake exercise of writing “objective journalism” that you would apply a lot of critical thinking to your work, so when you talk to someone and interview them and really research what they were saying, if you decided through good, hard reporting, that what they were telling you was just full of hot air, you wouldn’t feel the necessity to fill your story up with hot air.

More surprises:

She wrote at a young age on a little piece of paper that she wanted to be famous by the time she was 25, or she would commit suicide. And then kept that little piece of paper in her wallet, through life. She became very famous. She became a pop culture celebrity almost. I think she wanted to be well known for being influential and sticking up for the little guy and pointing the finger at the blowhards in power. I think she wanted that. She had a decades long battle with alcoholism and very few people knew about that. I also didn’t know that Molly was a packrat. She kept every bit of paper from the age of 10 until the day that she died, and then donated all of it to the University at the Center for American History. There are high school essays, report cards, parking tickets she never paid, letters between her and her father, diaries, informal musings on life, and what we discovered, was this very powerful and destructive relationship that she had with alcohol. One of her very best friends in life told us that Molly never really embarked on a long-term serious relationship again because her lover was alcohol. There are snippets in her diaries, where Molly frankly comes very close to death. So that was very surprising.