PicoBlog

Forgive two Substacks in the same day.

Several years ago, I posted a snippet of memoir on Medium.  Within five minutes, I got a text from a friend I trust. “You take that down right now. NOW.”

I did as I was instructed. I sent a Word copy of the proposed post to several friends, to see if there was any possible way to rewrite this all-too-true account in a way that would make it more palatable. All the friends said the same thing. It wasn’t worth the harm it would cause. The fact that the story was entirely true only made it worse. Some things should be saved for diaries and therapists’ offices, I was told, and not published.

I honored that advice, and I understand it was wise.

I do not know if South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem had a ghostwriter for her forthcoming memoir. I do know she must have had an acquisitions editor and a copy editor at the very least, as well as a fact checker. Somehow, all of these people read Noem’s now infamous account of shooting the family dog –in a gravel pit – and decided that the anecdote would place their client and her book in a good light.

Perhaps Governor Noem thought her tale of gunning down Cricket would illustrate her commitment to seeing hard things through? Perhaps she assumed readers would be impressed by her flinty-eyed determination, and say to themselves, “If she’s tough enough to pump a few bullets into her family’s misbehavin’ pup, just think how tough she’ll be on those darn big-spendin’ Democrats in Washington!”  

Kristi Noem goes on to tell us that her daughter, Kennedy, came home from school that day and asked why Cricket had not come running to meet her. The governor rests in the delusion that her willingness to tell Kennedy the straight-up truth (“I hated the dog so I shot it") will further burnish her reputation as a courageous public servant.    

It is the ghostwriter’s job to say, “Ma’am, no. This does not tell the story you think it tells. And all the craft and artifice at my disposal cannot clean up this mess.  We will cut this awful story right on out. Or perhaps we are going to invent another one, one in which you take an aging and pain-ridden Cricket into the woods, and you call her ‘good girl’ one more time right before you and Mr. Remington send her over the rainbow bridge. Why, you could barely see through the tears in your eyes, but you knew it was the right thing to do. Ma’am, that’s the goddamn story we’re gonna write.”

If necessary, the literary agent and the managing editor and young traumatized Miss Kennedy Noem can be brought into a come-to-Jesus meeting with the governor to discuss the proper framing of Cricket’s execution. Perhaps we take the governor to her state’s famous landmark and say, “Ma’am, none of these old boys here on Mt. Rushmore like what you did, and no one wants to read it.”

Clearly, this didn’t happen – and the resultant outrage across the country does not bode well for Noem’s aspirations, which many think included either a Senate run or serving as VP in the next Trump Administration. Call it the revenge of Cricket, but I call it the complete and abject failure of a ghostwriter to rein in a client before they say something equal parts dumb -- and defining.

I am glad I never published that particular memoir snippet. Kristi Noem will wish she had received that same advice.

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