Betsy Carter captivated the audience with stories set in the fast paced and sometimes bizarre atmosphere of the magazine world, as she read excerpts from her autobiography, Nothing to Fall Back On: The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist.
Carter, who spoke in the Danna Center Wednesday night, described her time as an editor at Newsweek and Esquire and as founding editor of New York Woman and the AARP’s My Generation.
Carter’s book describes her various trials and tribulations. When she was a reporter at Newsweek she collected money for a friend who said his mother wad dead. As it turned out, it wasn’t his mother. It was his cat.
Later in life, after her husband left her, her house burned down, and she had lost all her teeth in a car accident, her therapist told her she must have been an evil person in another life and needed to be exorcised.
Approaching it as a memoir of her life as a journalist and someone who had “lots of ups and downs,” Carter says that the book isn’t strictly a sitcom version of her life. Some of it is funny, she said, but there are some dark parts as well.
“Writing it was a strange thing,” said Carter, “It made me look back.” She said she found the process to be cathartic. “I had always wanted to write fiction but I thought that I would always be fictionalizing the characters in my life, so I needed to get this out first.”
Although she grew up in Miami, Carter says she always dreamed of moving back to New York where she was born to become a reporter. On the day of graduation she had her bags packed and was on her way to the Big Apple. After leaving Newsweek, she joined the staff of the prestigious men’s magazine Esquire as senior manager. “I thought I would learn the secrets of men,” said Carter. “I didn’t.”
In the opening of her book Carter has a quote from a friend’s letter joking that “By now you must feel as though God is picking on you- well if he is, he has found a formidable opponent.” This seems to be the underlying message in her memoir, one of overcoming life’s inevitable pratfalls.
Carter recently finished her first novel.
