Will Doig, editor, talks to associate editor Peter Smith
How did you land this job?
I was factchecking at New York magazine and I had written several freelance pieces for Nerve. The first story I did for Nerve was about bonobos, which are a bisexual primate, for the bisexuality issue. They liked it and I wrote some more. Then an editor left, and I was hired to replace her.
So what's your favorite story about the office?
I can remember the first Nerve party I went to after I started here. Way more people showed up than we realized would, and we didn't have nearly enough ice or mixers. So I went down to the deli to get tonic, and when I came back up the elevator there was a photoblogger in the lobby; she was covering the party. And she was taking pictures of girls with their pants off on the couch, and I was like, "Oh, so this is one of those Nerve parties." [laughs]
Do you remember the party that we had the video booth? And you were
promotion
supposed to go in and exhibitionize, and one of my girlfriend's friends went in there and flashed the camera and it popped up on Gawker with the caption, "It's not a Nerve party until an editorial assistant takes her cookies out of the oven" [laughs].
Yeah, as far as the actual office itself goes, there was one night, a few months ago. I was at this party for Out magazine down the street, and I had taken my friend Will there — another Will — and Will was single. He wanted to meet people at the Out party. So we met these two guys, and we were trying to come up with something to do. I thought, maybe it would impress them if we bring them to the Nerve office. We've got the keys, and it'd be funny. So we brought them back here. My friend is hitting on this guy, and I'm just there to —
Be a wingman.
Right, exactly. So I'm talking to his friend, and I said, "Do you want to see the roof? It's really cool." He's like, "Sure." So we climb up the fire escape, and we're just up there hanging out, and on the way back down, I'm climbing down the ladder and I somehow slipped and fell, but my pants were caught on a screw or something. I fell backward, and the leg of my pants splits all the way from my ankle up to my ass. When I landed, I was bleeding and I had this massive bruise. The guy is like, "Are you okay?" And I'm like, "I'm fine!"
So we came back into the office, and they're like, "What happened to you?" I'm literally almost wearing no pants. I felt really dumb about it. We left pretty quickly after that. And then I had to go out and
I realized that I was drunker than I should be for an interview with Maureen Dowd.
hail a cab on Broadway like that, and this group of drunk women walked by me, grabbed my pants and pulled them down.
I bet the higher-ups would approve.
I don't do that as a habit.
Of course. Is there a piece that you're most proud of writing?
Probably that piece on sexual harassment on the set of The Price is Right, which I've wanted to write since I was ten years old. I used to watch Price is Right as a child and think, "I'm totally writing about this for a magazine someday."
What was it like interviewing Norman Mailer?
I was really nervous. I hardly ever get nervous about interviews anymore, but I was really nervous about that one, because there's all these stories about Norman Mailer and how like he hates journalists and he's always drunk, a violent drunk, and how he once drove down to Newsday and headbutted Jimmy Breslin and all these things. I'm like, "Jesus, like, what's this guy going to do? He's gonna throw a chair at me or something." He lives in the top floor of this really grand townhouse in Brooklyn Heights. I got there early, and I was just sort of pacing outside, smoking cigarettes and worrying about going up there. Finally, I go up. His son answers the door. Then I go in, and Norman Mailer is sitting at the dining room table, and he's four-foot-eight and built like a little balloon. He's got a cane and he's wearing boots with duct tape on them — the least intimidating person you've ever seen in your life. And he was super-nice. At one point I said something to him during our conversation and he said, "Huh — I never thought of it that way." And I was like, I just said something Norman Mailer never thought about that way!
You did a bunch of interesting reported pieces. When I was the receptionist, I would get calls and letters for you from prisons.
Yeah, that was when I was working on that story about people who were in prison for criminal transmission of HIV. I'm still corresponding with a lot of those inmates. I send them books because we get so many books here.
What are you hoping to do in the future here?
I'm pretty excited that I'm here right now, actually. When you hear these stories about 1998, it's tempting to get nostalgic for this thing you weren't there for. Whenever something is successful, you think, Oh, it would have been so great to be there in the beginning. But it's pretty great to be here now. Back then, they had to constantly worry about their credibility, and I think, in a lot of ways, the magazine couldn't be as fun as it can be now. Even though the office was fun, the magazine itself was really highbrow and New Yorker-ish. They constantly had to prove that they weren't porn, basically. And now, we're here at a time where it's not a problem.
Generally.
Generally. Oh, let me add one more interview I'm proud of. When Rufus took us for our yearly holiday lunch last December, I knew I had to leave early because I was interviewing Maureen Dowd from the New York Times at two. I knew I shouldn't drink too much, but everyone was having fun, and Rufus was paying, so I drank three sidecars and then realized that I was drunker than I should be for an interview with Maureen Dowd.
Excellent.
So a little before two, I say I have to go do the interview, and Michael looks me hard in the eyes and says, "Are you drunk?" And I say, "Nope!" And I go upstairs and call Maureen Dowd, and found that I was able to ask her several questions I never would have been able to ask sober, such as whether she had ever faked an orgasm.
What did she say?
She said, "That is way, way, way too personal."
