In his new memoir, “The One That Got Away,” Howell Raines writes about what it was like to be fired from the New York Times after a distinguished career was brought to an end by the fabricated articles of a young reporter named Jayson Blair. But the book is about much more than just the famed newspaper, it's a love story between a man and a fish. Here's an excerpt:

Chapter One: On the Goneness of Lost Fish
In a century of fly fishing, one thing has not changed. “It is our lost fish that I believe stay longest in memory, and seize upon our thoughts whenever we look back on fishing days.” A paradigmatic Victorian gentleman, Lord Grey of Fallodon, published those words in a book called Fly Fishing in 1899. Over one hundred years later, there is still nothing as gone, as utterly lost to us, nothing as definitely absent and irretrievable as a lost fish.

“Seize our thoughts” is an apt phrase, for there are some lost fish that haunt us like old love. They live forever in what Izaak Walton called “the boxes of memory.” Yet not all lost fish are equal. Sometimes there is a soothing completeness to the loss of a specific fish. The encounter has an accommodating narrative arc — a beginning, a middle and a conclusion, at which, for some reason, one does not feel robbed. These flashes of enlightenment are rare and a blessing when they come. But fishing in the main does not allow for such an absence of Avarice, such a deliverance from Desire and its handmaiden Regret. That is because, once a fish is on our line, we don't want the imperial feeling of possession ever to end.

NBC VIDEO Howell Raines on his memoir May 10: "Today" show host Matt Lauer talks with former New York Times editor Howell Raines about his career and his new memoir, "The One That Got Away." Today show

The governing emotion of fishing therefore is not one of attainment but one of anxiety about incipient loss. Every moment that a fish is on the line, we dread the sensation of being disconnected against our will, of being evaded, escaped from, of grabbing and missing. Every fish that slips the hook instructs us in the surgical indifference of fate. For like fate, a fish only seems to be acting against us. It is, in fact, ignorant of us, profoundly indifferent, incapable of being moved by our desires, by our joy or sorrow. We regard the moment when the fish rises to a fly as a triumph of piscatorial artistry, and when the line breaks or the hook pulls out, we feel cheated, outfoxed, chagrined. We take it personally. But to the fish, such an encounter is simply an interruption, unremarkable and unremembered, in the instinctual, self-absorbed journey of fulfilling its fishhood. What we experience as an exercise of will and hope, the fish encounters as an accident, no more or less remarkable than meeting a shrimp.

So, perforce, each departed fish pushes us toward a dim, momentary and reluctant acceptance of that inescapable fact against which the mind constantly rebels. For against all reason and evidence, we try to believe that life is shaped by a process of acquisition. It is, in fact, a process in which our dear things slip away, slowly and elegantly if we are lucky, rapidly and brutally if we are not. We try to believe, in poor old Jim Dickey's mysterious line, that we can “die but not die out.” Lost fish remind us that time, like an undertow or gravity itself, will pull us down, will confound every hope of lasting, every dream of possessing something — anything — wonderful for more than an instant. Lost fish chasten us to the knowledge that we are all, in each and every moment, dwindling. Imagine my surprise when I discovered well into my sixth decade that losing fish can prepare us for a blessing as well as for pain.

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