What Makes Gay Tick?

This was my English 141 journal entry for tonight, analyzing Gay Talese's essay, "Delving into Private Lives."

What drove Gay Talese to care more about people who don't make the news than people who are considered newsworthy? Talese is one of those writers everyone is supposed to read, but few do. I'm certainly not one of them.

I've heard the name a million times, and to be honest, I thought Talese was a woman. This may be the first time in all sixty of my years I've read a single word that came out of his pen. Definitely not a chick.

I'm really not trying to make myself sound illiterate here, just being honest.

Talese states in this tight little memoir [which we read for class, the one about the 1999 Chinese Olympic Soccer loss on penalty kicks], right up front, that his family was poor. The poor watch others, while others ignore the poor. As someone who is currently poor and whose voice goes unheard even when raised quite loudly and directed at more newsworthy people than I: yes, that happens quite a bit.

And it's interesting, how well they think they know us, and how well we actually know them, without their knowing. Reminds me of Gilligan's Island, where Gilligan would construct silly non sequiturs consisting of, "He knows that you know what he doesn't know is really what she knows he knows, except she knows he knows, so she keeps it from him, but he knows she knows he doesn't know, you know?"

Here we are in 2025, where everyone seems to know what everyone else is thinking, via social media where we weaponize our thoughts and shoot them out across the void at each other like bottle rockets on a drunken Fourth of July. Fizz-whoosh-bang!

Instead, Talese focuses his nonfiction writing on, what he calls, "private people whose lives represent a larger significance." He explains why he sought these private, rather than public, people: because the public ones require too much of his "time and space".

Which makes sense to me as a former newspaper producer: the public people are always working hard at getting their names in the paper, and anyone who isn't — trying isn't enough these days, one must hustle and grind — gets left out. Which really, leaves the rest of us living lives of quiet desperation, lots of free time to interview over coffee — or penalty kicks — with Gay Talese. Bon ami!

Then there are the public figures who actively try to avoid having their words published in the newspapers. In our incessantly loudmouthed social-media discourse, it's the quiet ones that interest me most these days. Even the marginally famous ones, who like penalty kickers, slink home to blend in with the rest of the crowd of anonymous also-rans.

Like Talese, those folks interest me the most. It's about time the losers got their say, isn't it?

China's doing just fine these days, though. I guess that missed penalty kick wasn't much of a setback for them after all.