City hall, on the record and off

I covered city hall for the Globe for twenty-two years and before that I covered courts, and before that I was a general assignment reporter, and I retired in 2019 at the age of seventy with forty-five years of notebooks and a firm belief that nobody in city hall has ever written a good memoir. The good memoir of city hall would have to be written by someone who is no longer in city hall and no longer needs anything from the people still in it. I qualify. The problem is that forty-five years of source protection is not a habit you shed in retirement. I know stories I will never tell. The memoir I'm writing is working around the edges of those stories, which turns out to be where the interesting writing lives anyway. I'm writing about what it felt like to be a reporter in Boston from the 1970s through the 2010s. Not what I reported. What reporting felt like as a practice: the specific texture of waiting outside a courtroom in January, the relationship between what a source tells you at lunch and what they'll say on the record, the moment you know a story is real and the longer moment before you can prove it. My wife thinks I should have started this ten years ago. She's not wrong.