Field Report 302.2

Blogging, shiny legs and Oprah

(Note: I call these posts “302s,” a nod to FBI field notes of the same name. I picked up the term in the nineties, back when I was a journalist. A 302 is a crucial document for recording evidence in real time - in the field. It’s the agent’s written (not taped) account — unedited, uncorroborated, a distillation of what a witness recalls. Official, but slippery. Because memory is like that: precise in the moment, distorted in the retelling. Here, I’m both witness and agent. These are my unedited notes, my recollections, my truth. Enjoy!)

FR-302.2: Good morning! I hope you loved my Sunday Story as much as I loved sharing it. This is the part where I go a little off-script—give you a story adjacent to the Sunday story. Something I wouldn’t necessarily tuck into the main piece, but worth telling for the background, the context, and the gossip. 😉

I think most of you know me from when I popped up on RHONY in 2012— a single downtown writer girl, equal parts reality Bradshaw and commitment-phobe. But before Bravo gave me a tagline, I had a whole other life. Some of it was spent in Oregon, where my brother and sister-in-law Teresa lived. I wrote there—far from the chaos and well-meaning New York friends. On weekends Teresa and I would head downtown to Powell’s, the kind of bookstore, like The Strand, that makes you believe writing still matters.

So when they asked me to be their first guest blogger, I was— thrilled. This was January 2006. Blogging was still a novelty, not a career strategy. My assignment? One post a day for a week. Five hundred words. Any subject I wanted. I’d just wrapped my book tour, so I told them I’d write about the tour. My first blog — I’d write about my experience on Oprah’s talk show.

The background: She’d read an early galley and called my agent —said she loved it, wanted me on her show. That’s the kind of call authors fantasize about. In 2006, Oprah’s Book Club wasn’t just a club, it was the holy grail.

Me with Oprah and my shiny legs

And yet, I wasn’t nervous. I’d met her once before, in the summer of ’99 on Martha’s Vineyard, right after the plane crash.

She came by the house where I was staying with friends. But it wasn’t that introduction that steadied me—it was the work. I believed in my book, in the story I’d told: a childhood in a small upstate town, putting myself through college, then straight to New York City to work at ABC News. No family connections, no secret shortcuts. Just a young girl with big dreams and enough grit to make them happen.

I thought Oprah would love that!! She, too, had started from nothing and built an empire out of