The figurative language of Ronan Farrow….

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 I had read the remarkable Ronan Farrow book in any month other than December, I would have named it as the best book of the year. Sadly, I didn’t start Catch and Kill until Dec. 9th, long after my self-imposed deadline for reporting the books I’d read in 2019.

It is the best, most detailed, most interesting, most downright thrilling tale of the Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer saga that I have read. In fact, I’d say it reads like a bone fide spy saga with its reports on Black Ops and Russian interference.

Farrow is a remarkable writer and a mind-numbingly bright lad. I gave his credentials in an earlier post I wrote for my word-of-the-week column (where I forgot to mention that he has also won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize). 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:

  • 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.
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