This was the hardest part. I know there are people who think no revelation too great, who believe they should be unsparing of their privacy. It's a good intention, but it may make for a very bad book. I don't support what I think of as the undigested approach to memoir. What a memoir should achieve I believe, is a sense of the contemplation of life, of meaning, even if during the book one dwells in the dark.
Meaning is what digests the memoir.
On the other side, you have to resist any temptation to make yourself noble when, in fact, you were quite the opposite. National Public Radio has been my forum, but in the end I'm a separate person from my work, as we all are. So I had to be unsparing, fingers clenched. I would have nightmares about what people in my professional world would say, and then I thought, they can have their say over my professional work, but this is a different medium altogether. And by the way, Totenberg loved the book.