WHY WE NEED THE NERVE
A conversation with Maureen Callahan author of Ask Not
Maureen Callahan is a fervent advocate of the ten rules of writing as laid out by the novelist Elmore Leonard. She has adhered to these as a columnist, investigative journalist, author and, lately, presenter of the online podcast The Nerve.
It’s a few lines in and I’ve avoided breaking the first rule - never begin a piece of writing with a description of the weather. Now, I’m about to break the second: avoid prologues. The Nerve warrants a prologue, a fanfare even, it fulfils a crucial role at a key moment in the culture. Back in 2014, in her second book Champagne Supernovas, in which she writes on Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs and Kate Moss in an overview of the 1990s, Callahan mentions ‘a collective hunger for change’ following the excesses of the 1980s. This is equally true of the present. There’s a hunger for change.
I came to The Nerve shortly after its debut on YouTube in spring, and discovered that Callahan’s mission to take down those gui…