McGinniss shared housing with his book's subject, exercised with him, and sat beside him at the defense table during his trial. As Malcolm writes in her book, "They clothed their complicated business together in the mantle of friendship—in this case, friendship of a particularly American cast, whose emblems of intimacy are watching sports on television, drinking beer, running, and classifying women according to their looks." Within a month of MacDonald's conviction, McGinniss began a series of letters. Malcolm quotes McGinniss's expressions of sympathy—"any fool can recognize within five minutes that you did not receive a fair trial...it was utter madness"—as well as his tacit assurances that the book would help win his release: "it's a hell of a thing—spend the summer making a new friend and the bastards come and lock him up. But not for long, Jeffrey—not for long." Malcolm states that in fact McGinniss had become swiftly and easily convinced of MacDonald's guilt during the trial. She also describes how, in the same months that he wrote warm letters to the now-jailed MacDonald, he was also writing to his editor Morgan Entrekin, discussing the technical problem of not spoiling his work's effect by making MacDonald, in the book, appear "too loathsome too soon." Throughout the years of interviews, as Malcolm writes, "MacDonald imagined he was 'helping' McGinniss write a book exonerating him of his crime." What she terms MacDonald's "dehoaxing" took place in "a particularly dramatic and cruel manner"—a 1983 taping of the CBS news program "60 Minutes". As host Mike Wallace read aloud portions of the now-completed "Fatal Vision", the cameras broadcast MacDonald's look of "shock and utter discomposure." In the published "Fatal Vision", McGinniss depicted MacDonald as a "womanizer" and a "publicity-seeker", as well as a sociopath who, unbalanced by amphetamines, had murdered his family. But to Malcolm, MacDonald in person seemed sturdy, unremarkable, and incapable of such a crime. McGinniss drew upon the works of a number of social critics, including the moralist Christopher Lasch, to construct a portrait of MacDonald as a "pathological narcissist." But as presented by Malcolm, what drove McGinniss to this strategy were professional and structural liabilities—MacDonald's "lack of vividness," his drawbacks as the real-life figure who would serve as main character for his book.