

During an early-September lunch in an outdoor covered booth on the Upper East Side, I noticed two middle-aged women walking past us six or seven times, staring at Couric, who had just come from the hospital where her 25-year-old daughter, Carrie, was being treated for an infection.

The concept that any morning show could be a bona fide celebrity-maker is now mostly available via overheated fiction, especially the Apple TV+ drama The Morning Show, on which Jennifer Aniston plays a mercenary version of Couric.īut if you know, you know. The Today show, which she helmed for 15 years before embarking on a notoriously ill-fated stint as the anchor for CBS Evening News, has only a fraction of the audience it once commanded. The monolithic media landscape over which she presided has been splintered by cable news and social media her former co-anchor Matt Lauer was fired because of a sexual-abuse scandal. She writes in the book about what it’s like, having once been prey to telephoto lenses and tabloid headlines about her boyfriends, her bitchiness, and her (alleged) brow-lifts, to go unrecognized. Nowadays, acknowledgment of Couric’s influence may prompt bafflement.

Along with a handful of other women - Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, Oprah Winfrey - Couric was one of the people who determined how American television audiences understood the world. At the peak of her fame at the turn of the millennium, which coincided with the heyday of the Today show and the primacy of the morning network-news program, she enjoyed near-unrivaled power. That career would wind up being a blockbuster. The carrots were on account of the Scarsdale Diet, the deprivational fad to which the 22-year-old Couric had committed because her plan “was to look as good as possible for my wet hot American summer” before “finding a job - maybe even a career - in TV news.”

In the weeks before the publication of her memoir, Going There, Katie Couric and I would play a dark little game called Funny or Fucked Up? Over coffee, lunch, and Zoom calls, I would bring up an anecdote from the book - like, say, the first sentence, which is about the time she ate so many carrots in the summer after college that her skin turned orange - and ask her what, exactly, her reader was supposed to make of it.
