Portfolio > Older Bylines

My friends were getting married in Louisville, Kentucky, during the summer of 2019. For whatever reason, my husband and I decided to make a vacation of it and added a few extra days onto our trip. We’d never been before and I had no expectations, or maybe I had low expectations, which probably contributed to my falling head over heels for the place almost immediately. It was electric with the kind of strange possibility that cities called “weird” tend to be. I came back from that trip with an appetite for all the information I could get on its history as well as its prodigal son, Hunter S. Thompson, who was being remembered that year in a series of exhibits across Louisville.

I’d read Thompson’s work in my early twenties and again, in a new way, in grad school. I appreciated his work, though I wouldn’t have called myself a super-fan by any means. But studying his life and text for this piece gave me a new appreciation for him as a working journalist, as well as for his contributions to New Journalism. Published by GQ in December 2019. Read the piece here.