By the time you read this, the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago will be old news. You’ll know it wasn’t a repeat of 1968. You’ll know Beyoncé didn’t show up. You’ll know which slogans stuck (I assume Michelle Obama’s “Do something!” is being printed on mugs as I type this) and have forgotten the ones that didn’t (my prediction: Eva Longoria’s “She se puede!” didn’t make the cut). I’m writing this piece on August 23, 2024, the morning after the convention wrapped, and even to someone who spent the last four days listening to every single speech at the United Center, the experience already seems oddly far into the past.

On paper, I might’ve been the worst person for this magazine to send to cover the event: I don’t know that much about American politics (I grew up in France), I’m not a reporter (just a fiction writer), and I’m uncomfortable in crowds. My demeanor could be best described as somewhere between Larry David’s in Curb Your Enthusiasm and Chloe’s from the Side-Eyeing Chloe meme. I don’t have a lot of patience for bullshit and am puzzled by public displays of political fervor. Chanting crowds scare me, whether or not I agree with the words being shouted.

There was something tempting about it, though, when Chicago suggested I go write about the DNC. It wasn’t just that I was unemployed, or that I was feeling blue after my last novel came out — the fiction tank all empty, my brain in need, perhaps, of a new type of assignment to jolt the writing muscles awake. It was also this: I’ve lived in the United States for 12 years and only recently became a citizen. This coming election will be the first one I’m able to vote in. It seemed like a good time to get acquainted with the way things work.

I did some research ahead of this assignment. I read Jean Genet, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, who all wrote about previous conventions. Hell, I even read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. When Joe Biden was still the presumptive nominee, I considered writing my piece before the convention even started, like Lewis Lapham did for Harper’s in 2004, and making my own cynical point about the predictability of it all. But when our current president dropped out of the race, it became clear I had no option to be such a wiseass. We were now in uncharted territory.

Day 1 is, for the most part, disorienting for me. Physically so, at first: Morning proceedings (untelevised press briefings, caucuses, and councils) are held at McCormick Place, not the easiest place to navigate. To make it even harder, signage is pretty much absent from the premises. We all follow the few people in front of us and hope they know where they are going. Miraculously, I find the press briefing in time. I have never been to a press briefing before and must admit that I’m somewhat excited: There was a time, circa 1996, when 9-year-old me wanted to be a journalist and produced five copies of the first and only issue of her own handwritten and illustrated magazine to distribute to her mother and siblings. I don’t think a single comment on it was made, and my career was nipped in the bud, but still, I take a seat in the briefing room expecting an old ambition to be revived. The hope is short-lived.

I was under the impression that a press briefing would be informational, would let us in on some kind of secret. But this one is, from the get-go, a campaigning event. Democratic National Convention Committee executive director Alex Hornbrook, Delaware senator Chris Coons, and Harris-Walz campaign cochair Cedric Richmond speak, in turn, of the contrast between the Democratic and Republican agendas, one being “about the people,” the other “about one person.” We are asked to remember the situation Biden inherited from the Trump administration in 2020. We are asked to realize that this is a battle “for the soul of our nation.” I’m trying to keep track of which speaker utters which platitude, worried I could misattribute the quotes I’m jotting down, but it quickly becomes apparent that it doesn’t matter: Anything anyone says at the pulpit could be said by the person who spoke before them or will speak after them. In fact, once Cedric Richmond is done talking, Minyon Moore, chair of the convention, comes to the microphone and tells us: “I want to say everything that Cedric said. He said it all.” Then she does. She says it all. Everything Cedric said.

It’s going to be a long four days.

When the time finally comes for questions, I regain hope, but it’s immediately dashed. Simple questions like “Will the war in Ukraine be addressed?” and “When will we have the schedule, for broadcasting purposes?” are answered with variations on “You’ll see.”

At the caucuses and council meetings, the mood is a lot cheerier. There’s a first-day-of-school feeling but in a school where everyone already knows and likes each other. Perhaps it’s because I moved a lot as a kid (first day of school was therefore mostly just me spotting my exits), but I feel distinctly out of place. I attend the Hispanic Caucus, then the Labor Council. At the Hispanic Caucus, ambition is expressed that this election could showcase the biggest Latino turnout ever. At the Labor Council, the injunction is to deliver the biggest labor turnout ever.

At both, the goal seems to be to give out talking points and instructions to an audience who already has them but pretends to hear them for the first time: “We have a prosecutor running against a convicted felon,” “Margins are small,” “Every door you knock on, every poster you paste, can make a difference,” “Go home and convince 10 people,” “When we fight, we win,” “Cuando luchamos, ganamos.” There is wild applause after nearly every sentence every speaker pronounces.

My ears are buzzing. It is 1:30 p.m., and it feels to me like I’ve spent the last four hours being shouted at. Maybe this is part of “firing people up” (another phrase slowly being drilled into our heads here). Does one create enthusiasm and excitement for a campaign by making heads spin? Is the goal to hypnotize us through sloganeering? Is it working? The psychedelic patterns on the carpets at McCormick aren’t helping me regain my grasp on reality.

I wander the hallways, see people taking selfies with their hot dogs while standing in line for the gift shop (of course there is a gift shop). I can’t imagine a French person wearing a T-shirt with a politician’s name or likeness on it, but here, the variations of color and messages are impossible to keep track of: “Nurses for Kamala,” “Alaska for Harris,” “Cat Ladies for Kamala.” As I leave McCormick for the United Center, on my way to the evening programming, I hear a young woman on her phone telling a friend how nice Chicago is. “Midwest, Midbest!” she exclaims. I have never heard this saying before and marvel at the capacity Americans have to come up with catch phrases for just about anything. (The French are not so good at it. Our language is stiffer, and it would probably take us 20 words to get to an approximate translation of “Midwest, Midbest,” whatever that may mean — which is perhaps, now that I think of it, why we don’t have the T-shirts.)

The much-anticipated detailed list of speakers and tentative time slots comes in just a little before the start of the show. I can’t believe how long it is: 32 people will take the stage before Joe Biden.

Speeches proceed at a breakneck pace, giving rise to the impression that everyone on the podium is auditioning for something. They don’t have the same lines exactly, the way auditioning actors would, and they might be auditioning for slightly different parts, but the feeling is the same: They have been given a chance to shine, and they are taking it. The amount of repetition, though, is killing me. It feels like one in every three speakers starts off with “We all remember where we were in 2020,” but nonetheless goes on to remind us: COVID’s bleak numbers, Trump’s bleach comment. Repetition of information is what I abhor most as a reader and fight against constantly as a writer. If an author feels the need to remind me of a plot point that occurred 50 pages earlier, I feel condescended to. Say it once, is the idea, and if you said it well enough, I’ll carry it in my head until the end of the story. But political speech could not be further from that. It is baggy, long-winded, and riddled with clichés.

I try to stay engaged, though, to focus on the slight differences between each speech, but really, I wish I were backstage and able to hear how all these members of Congress, lieutenant governors, and senators actually talk. I imagine they start cursing the second they get off the podium, like the characters on Veep. I’d give a lot to see that transformation.

The drone of “When we fight, we win!” and “We won’t go back!” (slogans the crowd happily chants back every chance it gets, reminding me of kindergarten) does get broken at regular intervals by remarks from everyday Americans. Those feel slightly less infantilizing. I am still confused, though, by the thunder of applause Sandra Abrevaya receives as she recounts the tragic day her husband, Brian Wallach, onstage next to her, was diagnosed with ALS, and by the bright smile Hadley Duvall is able to sport as she tells the audience about her experience of incest. She reminds us that Trump called the abortion ban “a beautiful thing.” “What is so beautiful,” she then asks, “about a child having to carry her parent’s child?” She lets this sit for a second, and the audience goes quiet for the first time all night. It feels as though something real has finally been communicated, and as a novelist, I naively believe that this was the goal, but of course, this is not a novel, this is a live broadcast in prime-time America, and we can’t linger too long on something so dark.

Moments later, everyone is cheering for Andy Beshear, but I can’t hear a word the governor of Kentucky says. That’s because, just behind me, in one of the United Center’s prime private boxes, Kamala Harris has just taken a seat. I am about 10 feet below our current vice president, and all the people in my immediate vicinity have turned away from the stage to take her photo. I do the same, of course, and immediately berate myself. Why do I need my own picture of Kamala Harris? Thousands of better ones exist online. I probably own the crappiest phone in the arena. Who do I even plan to show the image to? I guess I’m so tired that I don’t fully believe I am there. The photo will serve as proof that I was.

The next day, I learn from my mistakes. I don’t expect much from the press briefing, and walk in with the worn-out look of a veteran reporter. I arrive early enough at the United Center to secure a seat next to an outlet to charge my chronically dying phone. I time my movements right: Journalists are allowed on the floor for only one hour at a time, upon request, and I want to be there during roll call. I will place my request right before it starts.

But before then, I watch the opening speeches from the press box. Mitch Landrieu, senior adviser to the president, comes onstage and tells us, as he pays tribute to his recently deceased father: “We have lost so many patriots since the last convention. Let’s take a moment to remember them all.” Given yesterday’s astounding speed in shifting from sheer horror and sadness to joy and entertainment, I am surprised to see that the DNC made room to remind us all that death is real. I prepare myself for a solemn moment, an Academy Awards–style “In Memoriam” segment (still photos for most of the memorialized, a short clip for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, perhaps, and a standing ovation), but there are no images, just names on a screen, and before even the first one appears, Patti LaBelle is onstage, singing “You Are My Friend,” to everyone’s surprise and delight. Death has been swept under the rug. No one but me seems to pay attention to the list of names sliding behind LaBelle (Adlai Stevenson III, Bob Moses, Colin Powell). Everyone is cheering again, applauding LaBelle’s highest notes. So much for taking a moment.

An hour later, I’m on the floor, standing next to the Illinois contingent before the start of the roll call. The few delegates I talk to seem to have all agreed on a line to serve journalists (even the fake ones like me). Everything is so “joyful” here. Confessions to not having felt such enthusiasm since Obama’s first campaign abound. In spite of my inability to get good, original quotes, I let myself be carried by the energy in the pit. There’s no denying that the mood is electric, that people genuinely appear to be having fun. It is contagious, to some degree. I don’t sing, or chant, or dance, but I do applaud whenever a state or territory pledges its delegates.

For a minute, I consider writing this piece solely on the choice of music for each state. “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” by the Dropkick Murphys, is repping Massachusetts. A song I love, but a surprising pick nonetheless. There is excess entertainment and an abundance of gimmicks and single-use props (the thousands of balloons awaiting release above our heads; the foam-rubber cheese wedge hats worn by the entire Wisconsin delegation; the remote-controlled small plastic box on every seat that lights up for a few seconds whenever the DNC chooses, before it and its battery are discarded forever). But if I squint and ignore the waste that will soon join our landfills, turn down the volume on the music and the hollow cheerleading, there is a sense that democracy is, in fact, being enacted in the room.

Back in the press box after my allotted hour on the floor, I find the mood is entirely different. A few states have yet to cast their votes, but journalists are barely watching. The one just in front of me is playing Spelling Bee on his laptop. No one is clapping. Two minutes earlier, I was applauding New Jersey (whose song was, of course, “Born in the U.S.A.”), and now I’m back to taking notes on my steno pad, pretending this is a night like any other for me.

It can feel at times like Kamala Harris is running to be Trump’s successor, not Biden’s. Her champions (and the dozens of videos the audience is shown as reminders of her credentials) walk a fine line between owning what was achieved under Biden and offering a new path forward. It’s a balancing act: Pretend that the last four years didn’t happen, but also very much did. When Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, takes the stage, it’s a relief. There is, at last, a sense that an actual person is talking to us. That is why I don’t take notes while he talks. I can finally relax.

I take zero notes during Michelle Obama’s speech, too. All these years, I’ve read about her intelligence, presence, and grit. I knew there was truth to it but still assumed exaggeration. It turns out her command over our assembly cannot be overstated. When her husband starts his speech by saying, “I am the only person stupid enough to speak after Michelle Obama,” you get the feeling he isn’t just flirting.

On the third day, I skip McCormick. I try to get access to a panel hosted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus instead. She will be talking to the eight Democratic women governors. It’s a no-go: All I can do is stream it on my computer. The reason I want to see it is not only that I love Veep (a show Louis-Dreyfus starred in and whose viewership, I just learned, jumped 350 percent after Biden stepped aside) but that the blurred lines between politics and entertainment in America both fascinate and worry me — just like they worry Veep creator Armando Iannucci, who recently wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times that the interest journalists had in getting his take on the current situation disturbed him. “Politics,” he said, “has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom. … The stuff happening out there right now is madder than Veep and deadly serious.” (By which he means: It is real.) Yet to one of Louis-Dreyfus’s first questions for her panel (“Is there something that you wished that you had known on Day 1 that you know now?”), Massachusetts governor Maura Healey answers with a direct reference to Veep: “It turns out you really do need a Gary.”

The conversation alternates between light and serious. We learn that to get herself through tough times (the plot to kidnap her in 2020, for example), Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer keeps a gratitude journal, in which, each night, she writes down three things that she is grateful for: “Some days, it’s just my dog and my bed and tequila.” We are reminded of the critical importance of down-ballot elections, of voting early. But of course, the panel has to wrap up on a fun note, and Louis-Dreyfus asks her guests: “I played a POTUS on TV. Do you think that makes me ready for office?” A predictable answer is quick to fuse: “You are more qualified than Donald Trump.”

At the United Center, a new stream of politicians takes center stage, new flashbacks arise: I’m not in kindergarten but in high school this time, in French class, learning all about rhetorical devices. In an attempt to be less bored, I decide to treat the evening as Rhetorical Device Bingo. There are metaphors and hyperboles at every turn. The popularity of anaphora (repetition at the start of successive phrases — my least favorite trick) is quite grating, but preterition (mentioning something by professing to omit it: “And don’t even get me started on…”) is used less than I would’ve predicted. The sheer number of “Let me be clears” and “We’re just getting starteds” is making me physically sick (and no, it’s not because I made a drinking game out of this; this is a dry event). If we’re always only just getting started, when will this end?

Sure, there are some good lines here and there, mostly jabs at Trump loyalists (“even their lawyers need lawyers”), but Night 3 seems to be the moment I finally overdose on dull rhetoric. A colleague who also covered the Republican National Convention a few weeks earlier aptly compares what we’re going through to gavage: We are ducks slowly waiting in line to become foie gras. Even Stevie Wonder’s appearance can’t disrupt that feeling.

It might be why these conventions last four days and not just one. Maybe studies were conducted that showed that the third night is when people like me, usually impervious to buzzwords and banalities, start abandoning themselves to the current and the cadences: A short circuit occurs in the brain, and we reach such a level of dissociation that we let go of our inner skeptic. I am so zoned out, so hypnotized by repetition, that when I hear about the Harris-Walz plan to thwart gun violence, it’s almost like I’m hearing about such a plan for the first time. I start believing that gun violence in America might one day be solved. It’s a fleeting hope, but for the few seconds that it lasts, I understand what might’ve brought all these people together.

The final press briefing the next day riffs on “Coach” Walz’s (over)use of sports metaphors the night before: “Welcome to the fourth quarter, guys!” “It is 75 days before Election Day, and we’re going offense!” Once all football lingo is out of their systems, the hosts remind us that the evening’s goal is now to introduce Kamala Harris to the American people and give everyone a chance to “hear her story.”

I arrive early at the United Center, but it is already more crowded than usual. In the purest Chicago “dibs” tradition, journalists lay claim to seats by leaving their backpacks on them before disappearing for hours. They want to secure a good spot to watch Harris without having to suffer through the opening acts. I don’t have a backpack, or anything I can use to save a spot: I sit through it all.

I try to imagine what it must be like to be Harris in that moment. I can’t. No matter how much I’ve heard from her colleagues, friends, and family about “her story,” I have no sense of what her actual days look like. Did she lock in incredible new funding for her campaign earlier today? Did she skip lunch? Did she talk to Zelensky? Netanyahu? Is she exhausted? Energized? Nervous about her speech?

A video starts playing, going over her life and achievements. Her résumé is impressive, of course. Attorney general, senator, vice president. You don’t get elected to the first two and then chosen for the third by accident. The video has its cheesy aspects (like its division into three chapters cornily titled “The Protector,” “The Fighter,” “The Leader”) and seems to be narrated by the voice of all American movie trailers, but still, it has substance. It tells us about the Back on Track program Harris put in place as San Francisco’s district attorney, about her tackling the problem of transnational gangs, her confiscation of thousands of illegal guns, her serving on the Senate’s Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, her capping insulin prices, her push to replace every lead pipe in America. It shows images of her meeting with every possible head of state. It hits every note, including the personal, when it reminds us that her desire to become a lawyer arose out of finding out her best friend in school was being abused.

It strikes me that the DNC’s aim to present Harris as authentic and relatable by hammering on just how exceptional she is faces us with yet another rhetorical device: oxymoron on a gigantic scale. No one in her current position could ever appear approachable. Not in America, at least, not in clips with such Hollywood-level production values. In France, sure. Years ago, when I still lived in Paris, a prominent politician, François Bayrou, bummed a cigarette from me late at night on a café terrace, before walking back to his friends a few tables over. I pretended not to recognize him, of course: That is what you do. Could you imagine Nancy Pelosi bumming a cigarette from you on the sidewalk after dinner? And François Hollande, a former president of France (who, while in office, would often decline a security detail to ride his scooter through the streets of Paris with only one bodyguard), ran this summer to represent his home district in rural France in the National Assembly. No matter what you think of his politics, it’s hard not to see Hollande as normal, as “just like us.” Could you imagine Barack Obama running for Congress in the next election cycle?

I’m not saying that France is better, or saner, only that it perhaps hasn’t gotten the memo yet about the importance of “storytelling” in politics. During election time in France, what you see is what you get. There’s a lot of prejudice, sure, and exactly as much room for subjective judgment: A French person is just as free as an American not to vote for a candidate because they simply don’t like the way she laughs. But what the French don’t particularly feel the need for (at least not yet) is to hear a candidate’s story as packaged for them by consultants.

I am not surprised to have heard so few specifics about policy over these four days: Even in my ignorance, I knew not to expect them from a national convention. But I was still not prepared for the sheer amount of storytelling. I am moved by all the testimonies on gun violence, but unnerved to hear a school-shooting survivor tell us the following: “I was in high school when my classmate got shot. This changed my story.” The tragedy obviously changed this young man’s life, but he opted to call it his “story,” a word that implies an extra layer of construction and, therefore, unavoidably, of artifice.

The point of the DNC is not to prove that Harris is ready to be president. She has been since the day she became VP. (You may or may not want her to be president, but that’s a different question.) The goal seems to be to share her story, and to get everyone else to share it with as many people as possible.

As the balloons drop after Harris’s speech, I wonder, not for the first time since the week started, what my own story will be. Not the story of my life (I don’t need one, I’m not running for office), but the one I will write for these pages. A handful of people I met at the United Center asked, upon seeing my press credentials, what my “angle” was. To all, I muttered something along the lines of “I don’t have one yet.” And my fellow Americans, let me be clear: I still don’t. What has changed, however, is that I would now be a lot more dubious of any writer who does.

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