New Memoir: Participatory Journalism, Anyone?

PARTICIPATORY JOURNALISM, simply put, is when you do stuff and write about it. I’ve done it, loved it, and am inclined toward any new memoir that includes it. For me, it was a venture into the world of forensic science, and while I did not actively participate in crime scene investigation, I tagged along enough to get the sense of how it is done, attending autopsies, blood spatter analysis school and a summer school for how to analyze the bugs that appear on the dead. The result was my book, Dead Reckoning, co-written with the great Dr. Michael Baden, and whenever I tell people about it, they seem somewhat surprised at what I did.

They shouldn’t be. I have long been deeply drawn to participatory journalism, having been raised with such fine books as George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, for which the author joined the training camp of the Detroit Lion’s football team, attempting to become their third string quarterback. Plimpton had previously pitched in an all-star baseball lineup and had done a little boxing and wrote about both sports and, as a result, got awfully good at the writing sub-genre, if not the sports. I loved the results, and read along as a kid and set my sites on trying something like that, as well.

And so I am drawn to books where someone is saturated in a culture, or submerges herself in a role, which is why I was immediately delighted to read about Primates of Park Avenue (Simon and Schuster, 2015), which chronicles another sport altogether, that of living the life and reporting on the rites of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Written by Wednesday Martin, a Midwestern Ph.D., the book chronicles the author’s struggle to fit in a new culture after she moved into one of the most famous neighborhoods in the world. Drawing on her professional training in anthropology and primatology to survive, she produced what The New York Times recently called an “amusing, perceptive and, at times, thrillingly evil takedown of upper class culture by an outsider with a front row seat.”

Making room in my beach bag now. What’s in yours?