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About The Dolly Freed Story
I’m self-publishing this story because it had no other home. I wanted it to live in the world, not die in my notebook.
Usually, freelance journalists find a buyer for their work before digging into the reporting, but when I heard about Dolly Freed I launched this piece on spec. I most love reporting and writing stories about truly original characters 1 , about authenticity, and Dolly is one of the most interesting people I’ve met in years.
I pitched the idea for this piece — not this actual piece, mind you, but rather the central concept of the story — all over the place: The New York Times magazine (rejected), Texas Monthly (rejected), The New Yorker (rejected), Philadelphia magazine (rejected), Slate.com (crickets), and others. Nobody was interested in the idea. In November, the Times accepted the piece for one of its Style sections; two days before publication, during edits, editors pulled the piece because “Dolly Freed” is a pseudonym, and Dolly declined to allow her real name to be published. I had told the Times from the start that “Dolly” was a pseudonym, but apparently I had failed to make it clear that I’d not be reneging on my word to Dolly and her family that I wouldn’t violate her decision to remain anonymous. The Times didn’t make it clear that they expected me to. 2 In agreeing to tell her story and have her book reissued, Dolly sought a balance between being helpful and maintaining her privacy. She doesn’t want kooks showing up at her home. When I told her that people will probably figure out her identity eventually, she said, “Maybe, but I don’t have to make it easy for them.”
I had been thinking about self-publishing a magazine-length piece of independent journalism, and the orphaning of Dolly’s story created the perfect opportunity. Just before Christmas, I assembled a team and started turning the 1,200-word newspaper story into the longer-form piece that I had in mind. It was a wicked sprint. We hustled to get the story out by the first week of January, to coincide with the book’s re-release.
Between April and December, I sank $2,000 into the piece hard money (and most of it while unemployed): travel to Texas, car rental, hotel, photographer, fact checker, and the website, which was launched specifically for this project. The $2K doesn’t include reporting and writing time. The story is available to anyone to read, for free, but I decided to include a PayPal link and ask readers to contribute whatever amount they chose. (You needn’t have a PayPal account in order to contribute, and the account accepts credit cards, transfers, and PayPal payments.) “Like Radiohead,” a friend said. I hadn’t heard of this, but in 2007 the band released In Rainbows online and asked fans to pay what they want. (I tried something similar once before, but with a car, and in even worse economic times: I was selling my classic Volvo station wagon, which I’d bought for $1,000 seven months earlier. Instead of setting a price, I told the prospective buyer to pay whatever he thought was fair. I wanted to see what would happen. The buyer, a Long Island firefighter with a family, offered me $300 cash. And under the terms I’d agreed upon with myself, I had to accept it. Dude got a killer deal.) That’s what I’m doing here, with readers, in hopes of at least recouping my expenses.
Finding Dolly Freed was edited by Geoffrey Gagnon in Boston (and Michigan), copyedited by Jennifer Johnson in Boston, fact checked by Leigh Ann Vanscoy in New York, and designed by Johnson Fung in Montreal, Quebec. Audra Melton, based in Atlanta, shot the photographs, and Eric Capossela, also in Atlanta, edited them. Adam Penenberg, a former NYU colleague and author of Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves, consulted on platform after I asked him whether I’m nuts for trying this.
Disclosures: I heard about Dolly by chance, on April 30, 2009, from Nanci McCloskey, the Tin House editor who secured Possum Living for reissue and who, for a short time years ago, was my literary agent. David Gates, whose novel Jernigan was partly inspired by Possum Living and who wrote the new edition’s foreword, was one of my teachers at Columbia, and is a friend of mine.
No one but Gagnon, Vanscoy, Melton, Johnson, and Fung read the piece before it went live here. Melton and I are the only ones who know Dolly’s real name. Obviously we support her decision not to reveal it. Dolly’s name isn’t the point, though; her story is the point, and I’m happy that she and her remarkable family let me tell it.
- This website will archive such stories. ↩
- Reputable newspapers and magazines have a policy about quoting anonymous sources, and while the paper rightly cited that policy, I found the Dolly case to be different enough to warrant its reconsideration. Dolly wrote her book pseudonymously for a reason, and it’s not my business to violate her privacy when she wants to maintain it. I tried to think of precedents but came up with only one, and not a very similar one: No one declined to cover the book Primary Colors just because it was written by “Anonymous,” and no one later punished Joe Klein by not writing about him after he revealed himself to be the author. I’m not saying there’s a double standard here; I’m saying Dolly’s situation is unique. ↩
