I could. And there was just some deep-seated . . . I sound like Iâm 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 thereâs these four [six] Dylan quotes, and they canât be explained, and they canât 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, Iâd had the temerity, the courage, to do a fact check on my last book. But as anyone who does a fact check knows, theyâre not particularly fun things to go through. Your story gets a little flatter. Youâre forced to grapple with all your mistakes, conscious and unconscious . . .â
âSo you forgot that the fake quotes were in the book?â I asked Jonah.
â
Forget
gets me off the hook too easily,â he replied. âI didnât want to remember. So I made no effort to. I wrote well. So why check?â
âSo you were sloppy?â
âI donât want to just blame sloppiness,â he said. âIt was sloppiness and deception. Sloppiness and lies. I lied to cover up the sloppiness.â
Iâd been thinking that when I told Jonah his speech was fantastic it was probably a bad steer. In truth, Iâd needed to read it three or four times on the plane because the words kept swirling around on the page, and I didnât know whether that was a reflection of attention deficiency on my part or abstruse phrasing on Jonahâs. But like all journalists, I really love a scoopâa scoop keeps at bay the scream of failureâand I thought that telling him it was fantastic was my best chance of winning the interview.
âI worked really hard on it,â Jonah said. âI 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 thatâs not some deceptive trick. Thatâs the way I make sense of the world. Thatâs how I think. Clearly it was a mistake. But . . .â
âThat Twitter stream!â I said.
âI was trying to apologize, and to see the response to it live . . . I didnât 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
âWhat are the tweets you remember most?â
âIt wasnât the totally off-the-wall cruel ones, because those are so easy to discount,â he said. âItâs the ones that mixed in a little tenderness with the shiv.â
âLike what?â
âI donât want to . . .â
Jonah said he couldnât judge why people âgot so madâ 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.
âThey didnât want you to intellectualize it,â I said. âThey wanted you to be emotional. If youâd been more emotional, theyâd have gone for it more.â
Jonah sighed. âThat may have been a better strategy,â he said. âBut it wasnât a strategy I wanted to rehearse onstage. It was not something I wanted to share with the universe, with everyone on Twitter. I didnât want to talk about how this had ruined me. Thatâs something for me to deal with, and for my loved ones to help me through. But thatâs not something I wanted to get up onstage in front of the Internet and talk about.â
âWhy not?â I asked.
âOh, gosh, I donât know,â said Jonah. âCould you do that?â
âYes,â I said. âI
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