Review of WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD
A look into the golden age of magazines, from Graydon Carter
Tl;dr – Great memoir from Graydon Carter who tells the stories of his time working in magazines in NYC, with a great emphasis on his 25 years at the helm of Vanity Fair. Good listen on audio, and would recommend to those with an interest in publishing or interesting people who create cool things.
I’ll be honest: I don’t think I’ve ever read an issue of Vanity Fair, and if I did it was in high school or something and I was just looking at the fashion ads. To be even more honest, I basically thought these types of magazines were essentially fashion magazines given the hundreds of pages of ads. Turns out, they had a lot of writing in them.
Despite my (embarrassing) ignorance over what Vanity Fair even is, I like reading about publishing and the writing industry more generally. I also like stories of interesting people. Enter: Graydon Carter, the editor-in-chief at Vanity Fair until 2017. So, when I saw his memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, come across the ‘2025 new releases’ lists earlier this year, I was anxious to read listen.
Carter was no doubt an interesting person. He led the award-winning Vanity Fair as editor for 25 years (or as he prefers to say in his book “a quarter of a century”), assembled an all-star staff of creatives, and organized must-attend Hollywood events under the banner of the magazine. But you probably wouldn’t know it from looking at him or knowing his early career.
He was a kid from Canada with dreams of life in New York working in magazines. He essentially tanked his college degree to work for The Canadian Review and didn’t know what to do next. He traveled to New York and all but begged for a job, landing a low-level gig at Time. He struck out on his own shortly after, creating Spy. Eventually he landed at Vanity Fair as editor.
Most of the book focuses on “the quarter of a century” in which he received his true education while running a massive publishing operation. The stories he tells across the book showcase the challenges an editor of his stature faced: reader acquisition, dealing with the wide variety of writers on staff, editing long form content that can run 20,000 words, running a monthly magazine in a (then) daily world (which has now become an hourly world).
He tells stories of celebrities, his early escapes from parties like the Met Gala, and shares what life was like when people were still reading physical things and how it slowly descended into all things digital. He comes across as a smart, experienced and wise, yet quite a normal guy who just really likes magazines.
This was a great book that was a wonderful read. I did listen to it, as I prefer to do with memoirs that are read by the author. But the physical book is a nice one, with little sketches at the outset of each chapter. Though I feel like it’s missing the center photo pages! Definitely recommend if you like interesting people who have done cool things, or have an interest in the publishing industries.
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Published: March 2025
Publisher: Penguin Press
Format: Audio
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now (2018) by Alan Rusbridger
The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America (2024) by Sara B. Franklin
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