When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines

When the Going Was Good is Graydon Carter’s memoir. Like most memoirs, it assumes a looser style than an autobiography. Whereas autobiographies trace the entirety of the writer’s life, memoirs take a more novelistic approach, focusing on a discrete era or facet of the writer’s experience. Memoirs are known for their use of the first person point of view, their narrative style, and their incorporation of personal anecdotes. There are a range of subgenres within the memoir genre, including the confessional memoir, the travel memoir, and the transformational memoir.

Carter’s When the Going Was Good is best classified as a professional and/or celebrity memoir, as Carter focuses on his rise to success and power in New York City’s magazine world. Similar examples of this genre include the memoir Personal History, by long-time Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, and The Vanity Fair Diaries, by Carter’s predecessor at Vanity Fair, Tina Brown. The subgenre extends far beyond the confines of magazine and newspaper publishing, encompassing memoirs by professional athletes (Brittney Griner’s Coming Home), food-centric television personalities (Ina Garten’s Be Ready When the Luck Happens), and a host of others.  

In addition to his influence in the magazine world, Carter is also an influential figure in the development of popular culture in the 1990s and 2000s. In the memoir, he details how his Vanity Fair Oscars party did much to revive the culture of Hollywood glamor that, in his estimation, was previously on the wane. In this way, his memoir is conversant with the conventions of the celebrity memoir even if he himself is a celebrity only in certain circles. Though it deploys many of the techniques of the celebrity/professional memoir, When the Going Was Good takes liberties with the genre’s parameters. Carter doesn’t simply focus on his life in New York while working in the publishing field. Rather, he also details events from his early childhood and adolescence in Canada. These sections of the memoir (which appear in the early chapters) assume a more autobiographical slant. They also provide insight into Carter’s professional trajectory over the years following. Carter embraces this autobiographical style to humanize himself and to establish trust with his reader. The sequences he depicts from his upbringing also lend the memoir a humorous mood.