Paper trail

Molly Ivins, who died in 2007, was a liberal idealist with her feet on the ground. Her take on Bill Clinton, for example, neatly reconciles his risky and rewarding sides: "I still believe in Hope -- mostly because there's no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas."

Journalists, just like the rest of us, do not live so as to provide a scoop about themselves. Yet Molly Ivins, renowned for her outspoken columns and bestselling books, assiduously documented her own life, practicing a transparency that awes her biographers. She kept everything -- from grocery lists to personal letters -- and began donating this stuff while she was still alive to the Center for American History at the University of Texas. She demanded candor from public figures and treated herself no differently.

With an oil company executive father and a mother who was a Smith College graduate, Ivins grew up among the privileged class at St. John's, an exclusive private school in Houston, then graduated from her mother's alma mater. Yet early on, she began challenging her conservative Texas counterparts and later said that standing up to her father's terrifying temper led to her defiance of the rest of the world in her bold newspaper work.

Nevertheless, during her college years Ivins thought of herself as part of an elite and had a lover, Henry Holland, scion of a wealthy Texas family, with whom she planned to conquer the world, Ayn Rand-like. Always intent on a career in journalism, Ivins carried on when Holland died in a motorcycle crash. But she was not quite the same, her friends testified.

Never again would Ivins dream of anything like a conventional Texas- style power matchup with a man -- although power itself became one of her favorite targets. Indeed, her irreverent attitude toward her own upbringing accelerated as she moved from three internships at the Houston Chronicle -- where she absorbed the black humor and therapeutic skepticism of reporters -- to two semesters at the Columbia School of Journalism in the thick of late '60s radical politics, to a stint at the Minneapolis Tribune covering conventional topics like the State Fair as well as leftist politics. And she did all of this before she created the work that made her a national figure.

In "Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life" (on sale Tuesday), W. Michael Smith, who did research work for Ivins, and Bill Minutaglio, a journalism professor, provide an inside look at the world of journalism while describing in moving detail Ivins' struggle with the cancer that killed her. In typical fashion, Ivins turned her suffering into a comedy: "Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you, then they poison you, then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that."

Carl Rollyson is a biographer and professor of journalism at Baruch College, the City University of New York.