So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson Page B

I could. And there was just some deep-seated . . . I sound like I’m on a couch with my shrink . . . some very dangerous and reckless ambition. You combine insecurity and ambition, and you get an inability to say no to things. And then one day you get an e-mail saying there’s these four [six] Dylan quotes, and they can’t be explained, and they can’t be found anywhere else, and you realize you made them up in your book proposal three years before, and you were too lazy, too stupid, to ever check. I can only wish, and I wish this profoundly, I’d had the temerity, the courage, to do a fact check on my last book. But as anyone who does a fact check knows, they’re not particularly fun things to go through. Your story gets a little flatter. You’re forced to grapple with all your mistakes, conscious and unconscious . . .”
    â€œSo you forgot that the fake quotes were in the book?” I asked Jonah.
    â€œ
Forget
gets me off the hook too easily,” he replied. “I didn’t want to remember. So I made no effort to. I wrote well. So why check?”
    â€œSo you were sloppy?”
    â€œI don’t want to just blame sloppiness,” he said. “It was sloppiness and deception. Sloppiness and lies. I lied to cover up the sloppiness.”
    I’d been thinking that when I told Jonah his speech was fantastic it was probably a bad steer. In truth, I’d needed to read it three or four times on the plane because the words kept swirling around on the page, and I didn’t know whether that was a reflection of attention deficiency on my part or abstruse phrasing on Jonah’s. But like all journalists, I really love a scoop—a scoop keeps at bay the scream of failure—and I thought that telling him it was fantastic was my best chance of winning the interview.
    â€œI worked really hard on it,” Jonah said. “I was looking at the Twitter stream during it and the things people were saying . . . Some people saw the FBI analogies as the worst possible thing in the world. But that’s not some deceptive trick. That’s the way I make sense of the world. That’s how I think. Clearly it was a mistake. But . . .”
    â€œThat Twitter stream!” I said.
    â€œI was trying to apologize, and to see the response to it live . . . I didn’t know if I was going to get through that. I had to turn off some emotional switch in me. I think I had to shut down.”
    â€œWhat are the tweets you remember most?”
    â€œIt wasn’t the totally off-the-wall cruel ones, because those are so easy to discount,” he said. “It’s the ones that mixed in a little tenderness with the shiv.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œI don’t want to . . .”
    Jonah said he couldn’t judge why people “got so mad” about his apology. I said I thought it was because it sounded too much like a Jonah Lehrer speech from the old days. People wanted to see him altered somehow. His not being overtly cowed gave the audience permission to envisage him dramatically, a monster immune to shame.
    â€œThey didn’t want you to intellectualize it,” I said. “They wanted you to be emotional. If you’d been more emotional, they’d have gone for it more.”
    Jonah sighed. “That may have been a better strategy,” he said. “But it wasn’t a strategy I wanted to rehearse onstage. It was not something I wanted to share with the universe, with everyone on Twitter. I didn’t want to talk about how this had ruined me. That’s something for me to deal with, and for my loved ones to help me through. But that’s not something I wanted to get up onstage in front of the Internet and talk about.”
    â€œWhy not?” I asked.
    â€œOh, gosh, I don’t know,” said Jonah. “Could you do that?”
    â€œYes,” I said. “I