Stephen Elliott's 'The Score' was offered in class as an example of literary journalism. While I was disinterested in some of the previous examples ( particular 'Anatomy of a Miracle' , which I found very dry and slow), Elliott's work kept me hooked to the very end as he explored Theo Van Gogh's death, his ex-girlfriend's triple infidelity and his own fractured emotional state.
I was hypnotised by Elliott’s poetic notion of loving like “we didn’t care if we lived or died”and felt compelled to read the entire piece to try and understand why the couple’s love was doomed.
Another technique used to great effect was the motif of basketball and its use to move the story between time periods. I noticed that Elliott replaces "I" ( which is often used in the text) with "we" when he is reflecting on the game and the fact that basketball also acts as a metaphor for the happiness he felt in Chicago and juxtaposes with the dark, seedy lifestyle he goes on to live in LA.
‘The Score’ is littered with beautiful description such as “the Tenderloin was full of fog. It floated near my knee caps,” and “he had long black hair and wiry arms. When he wore makeup he looked like a dragon woman.” The detail of Elliott’s prose is something that could only ever be gleaned from personal experience. The matter-of-fact way he seems to drop references to bisexuality, prostitution, sadomachism, domestic abuse, drug abuse, depression and suicide show that despair was a continuous aspect of his life and offer only a glimpse into the other stories he has to tell.
While these are only some of the literary devices used in the piece, 'The Score' appealed to me in a way that other in-class examples didn't. It opened my eyes to the fact that literary journalism doesn't have to be based soley on interviews of other people- it can centre on personal experience and have an almost confessional function for the author.
I hope that my own work can somehow express the honesty, black-humour and visual imagery of Elliott's 'The Score'. Read the 'The Score' for yourself.
