Reading time: Less than 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors from Ronan Farrow….
If you want to read the best, most detailed, most downright thrilling (albeit it in a creepy way) of the Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer saga, check out Ronan Farrow’s remarkable book Catch and Kill. It reads like a bone fide spy saga — complete with reports on Black Ops and Russian interference.
Farrow is an extraordinary writer and a mind-numbingly bright person. (He’s the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen although many people believe that Frank Sinatra is is true father.) In an earlier post I wrote about him, I forgot to mention that he and fellow reporters on the New York Times won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service as a result of their reports on the Weinstein affair. But today I want to focus on his figurative language, which is all the more remarkable because he is essentially a hard news reporter. Hard news focuses on the content rather than the writing style.
Here are the best examples he used in the book:
- The reporting expanded like an inkblot.
- Weinstein ran his campaigns like guerrilla wars.
- I moved through the cubicles of the Today Show newsroom and up the stairs to the fourth floor, with battery acid in my mouth and red parentheses in my palms where I had pressed nails into skin.
- As I walked in, my phone played a scherzo of alerts.
An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog on Jan. 2/21.
[Photo credit: Fuzheado. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.]
