Appearing at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church | 2:30 pm – 3:20 pm
In conversation with Courtney Zoffness.
About the author
Katy Tur is the anchor of MSNBC’s Katy Tur Reports and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History. Tur is the recipient of a 2017 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism. She lives in New York City with her family. Rough Draft is her second book.
MFOB featured book: Rough Draft
In Rough Draft, Tur takes us back to her provocative and volatile California childhood, punctuated by tragedy, celebrity, and police chases as seen from her parents’ news helicopter, 1,000 feet in the air. She retraces a close but complicated, and finally distant relationship with her father. Rough Draft charts her rise in the business: journeying from hyper-local reporter in Brooklyn, to country-hopping foreign correspondent, to breakout campaign reporter “Little Katy.” Tur also opens up about her struggles with burnout and impostor syndrome, what it means to own an hour of news television when fewer and fewer people want to hear the truth, and, of course, her fairytale relationship with someone who quite possibly had an even crazier childhood then she did: CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil, whose father was a drug dealer.
If journalism is the “first rough draft of history,” then Tur’s memoir is a stunning reminder that journalists are not only providing us with the draft, they are living its revision alongside us. Rough Draft explores the gift and curse of family legacy, examines the roles and responsibilities of the news, and asks the question: To what extent do we each get to write our own story?
