Book - Tricia Romano

The Freaks Came Out to Write

A rollicking history of America’s most iconic weekly newspaper told through the voices of its legendary writers, editors, and photographers.

You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention. It invented new forms of criticism and storytelling and revolutionized journalism, spawning hundreds of copycats.

With more than 200 interviews, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Colson Whitehead, cultural critic Greg Tate, gossip columnist Michael Musto, and feminist writers Vivian Gornick and Susan Brownmiller, former Voice writer Tricia Romano pays homage to the paper that saved NYC landmarks from destruction and exposed corrupt landlords and judges. With interviews featuring post-punk band, Blondie, sportscaster Bob Costas, and drummer Max Weinberg, of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, in this definitive oral history, Romano tells the story of journalism, New York City and American culture—and the most famous alt-weekly of all time.

FINALIST FOR 2024 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CHOICE AWARDS

FINALIST FOR 2025 GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE

LISTED IN BEST BOOKS OF 2024 BY NEW YORK MAGAZINE (VULTURE), THE NEW YORKER, LITHUB, AND CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

What Reviewers Say:

"A well-made disco ball of a book — 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."

-- Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

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"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."

-- Adriane Quinlan, The Washington Post

"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."

-- Michelle Orange, The New Yorker

"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."

-- Maureen Corrigan, NPR

"An oral history that’s as animated as a packed express train rollicking through the Manhattan underground."

-- James Sullivan, The Boston Globe

"The collage of interviews in The Freaks Came Out to Write extends from the paper’s idealistic beginnings to its tawdry decline … A rueful elegy for rawer, cheaper, better days."

-- Peter Conrad, The Guardian (UK)

"Extraordinary … A triumph of contemporary journalism, a fusion of aesthetic and political positions, a chorus of sound bites from both union and management, unfurling a tale of wild success followed by a slow disintegration."

-- Elizabeth Zimmer, The Village Voice

"Scrappy, compendious … Romano does an impressive job of keeping this Tower of Babel from wobbling too much, preserving the testimonies of a huge host of writers, editors, photographers, staffers, and bystanders sassing and contradicting each other, sharing fond memories while others gnaw on old grudges with beaver gusto."

-- James Wolcott, Air Mail

"The chorus evokes what now feels like the quaint bohemian radicalism of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s."

-- Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal

"Wonderful … A vital, comprehensive piece of media scholarship about one of the most influential outlets of the last century. It’s also fun as hell to read."

-- T. M. Brown, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Romano’s subtitle makes the point. A unique tabloid weekly centered on a few blocks of below 14th Street Manhattan did become a force that changed American culture by first changing American journalism … Beyond the abundance of information Tricia Romano provides in the book, her unique presentation should be noted. "

-- Walter Cummins, California Review of Books

"Like the Voice itself, The Freaks Came Out can be an unruly, lawless read, suffering the limitations of its strengths. Romano’s oratorio, so dynamic and robust, at times slips into cacophony … Still, this book is a bona fide treasure chest."

-- Jennifer Krasinski, 4Columns

"An absorbing firsthand history … An exceptional resource in which readers get a real flavor of the exciting and troubling times throughout the Village Voice’s run and the opportunity to draw their own conclusions about its rise (and fall in 2017)."

-- Maria Ashton-Stebbings, Library Journal

"A phenomenal oral history … Brimming with riveting anecdotes and capturing its subject’s rollicking spirit, this is a remarkable portrait of the “nation’s first alternative newspaper."

-- Publishers Weekly

"Eyewitness testimony makes for a vibrant media history."

-- Kirkus