Tricia Romano
“Writing, and all of the tools that help writers create— reporting, researching, interviewing, examining, excavating, imagining— is a way of getting at the truth of how we live in the world. And it is a way to cultivate new worlds, too.”
“ — it’s big, discursive, ardent, intellectual and flecked with gossip ... Romano, who worked at The Voice for eight years in its later stages, clearly asked good questions, and she has a snappy sense of conversational rhythm ... The tone of The Freaks Came Out to Write is a symphonic kind of anarchy.”
“A salacious oral history of the publication that reads like a night at a gossipy media party … The book re-creates the feel of chatter in a newsroom.”
“Raucous … Unfolds like the kind of epic, many-roomed party that invokes the spirit of other parties and their immortal ghosts … Most chapters offer an inside history of familiar events.”
“She keeps her narrative moving while sporadically highlighting crucial, but lesser-known figures … The Voice was the living center of the marginal, the weird, the rebellious. In the space and time of reading this wild ride of a book, I returned to that creative, crazy margin, and I think many other readers will, too.”
Tricia Romano is the author of The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture (Public Affairs, 2024) which Dwight Garner, writing for the New York Times Book Review, called “A well-made disco ball of a book.” It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Choice Awards, and a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize. A fellow at MacDowell, Ucross and Millay artist residencies, her work has been published in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, Men’s Journal, Elle, Alta Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. She has been a staff writer at the Seattle Times and served as the editor in chief of The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative newsweekly.
Romano began her eight- year career at the Village Voice as an intern. As a contributing writer she wrote features and award-winning cover stories about culture and music. Her reported column, Fly Life, gave a glimpse into the underbelly of New York nightlife.
In an interview with KGB, she was asked what it was about the environment of the Village Voice that attracted the writers it did: “The thing is, when I was there, it was probably more professionalized than it was in the 80s and 70s and 60s, but it still felt like a college newspaper atmosphere. When I left my college news- paper and went there I was like, “This is just basically like a bigger version of the college paper. It’s awesome.” It’s just kind of hands off, you could do whatever you want. No one’s checking that you’re clocking in or clocking out. You were just an adult. As long as you filed on time, and even if you didn’t, they were still not going to be too angry, because they were used to that.”
She lives in Seattle, Washington.
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© Morgan Bell
© Morgan Bell
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