Sunday, May 25, 2008

Emily Gould, I Do NOT Hope You Burn In The Fiery Pits of Hell


Dear Emily, *?

I shit you not: I was at Franny's in Brooklyn on Saturday night and overheard four different conversations at four different tables (not counting my own, mind you) talking about you and your article in the NYT magazine this weekend. I would guess that there are probably between 12 -14 tables in the restaurant, so (counting us) that means about 1/3 of the people there were talking about you at some point in the evening. And truthfully, that number is way off, I'm sure, due to the fact that I am not the bionic woman and was not able to easily eavesdrop on all of the opinionated, know-it-all hipsters within my immediate proximity. So I'm going to bump my estimate up to 50%.

But this was just one little ole restaurant in Brooklyn. Add to that the 8 bazillion comments the story generated (waay before it was even published), the 9 trillion reactive articles about your article, the Twitter Tweets, and Gawker's virtual liveblogging of the whole darn thing as it unfolded.

Holy. Mother. Of. Christ.

I would imagine that your email inbox must be over-fucking-flowing with "Emily Gould" google alerts by this point. E-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y is talking about you...like, a lot.

True confessions: before this weekend, the thing I remembered you most for, was posting the above picture of yourself in this sparkly red bathing suit. Your "self-involved" posts and battles with nasty commentors do not ring a bell with me at all, but I distinctly remember this bathing suit shot. Mostly, I guess, because I think that voluntarily posting a picture of myself in a bathing suit is something I would only consider if someone removed a big chunk of my brain with a melon baller and then made me it eat with my bare hands. And that's still a big maybe. So, posting this pic...and flipping us all off, made me kinda love you back then.

For the record, I read all 7,937 words of your article on Friday and thought it was a really astute, well written take on one person's experience dealing with the bizarre world of blogebrity. I thought that you were fairly upfront about mistakes that you felt you made (and clearly: mistakes were made), showed some growth through the whole process, and all the while gave us all an inside look into a segment of the media we are all, obvs, insanely obsessed with. As such, I guess I'm a bit confused why everyone and their brother are:

  1. Angry at the NYT over the fact that your article was 7,937 words AND got the cover.
  2. S-e-r-i-o-u-s-l-y pissed at you for "going on and on" about yourself in article that was supposed to be all about...uhm... YOUR experience.
  3. Ready to burn you in effigy over the fact that you overshared about your own romantic life on your Heartbreak Soup blog (ok, I do agree that this was not a good idea, but it seems like you agree now too and are kinda sorry it ever happened--at least the way it did, so WTF??). Oh, AND the dude you were oversharing about already wrote his own tell-all piece for Page Six magazine that was waaay more personal and specific than yours was, but that was totally fine and not worth a witch hunt at all, apparently.
  4. So utterly fucking offended by the idea that bloggers tend to enjoy writing about themselves and being self referential...and that you clearly did too (NY Magazine: "we promise you: Some bloggers are able to write about things other than themselves"...uhm, ok? And?).
Mostly I guess I'm just utterly perplexed by all of the venomous hatred and anger this is stirring up in everyone...especially vis-a-vis the idea that you don't deserve anyone's attention (which is exactly what all of your haters are serving to create more of by talking about you, ad nauseum).

You may very well be "a piece of shit" "cunt" in real life (as Mark, May 25th 2008 so eloquently posits on your blog comments at 5:18pm), but I think I probably need to spend way more time with you than 7,937 words in a NYT Magazine article in order to reasonably come to that conclusion. In the meantime, I'm sticking with my original assesment: bathing suit badass.

Happy Memorial Day.
me

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i thought the emily gould article was great. i read all thirty pages of it. jeez. and i thought she was really candid about her experience, which is what they wanted. people are crazy. thanks for your comments about this.