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Despite the provocative photo (and the big ass tattoo), the cover essay in the Sunday New York Times Magazine starts sweetly enough. Like a proper miss in a Jane Austen novel, editor and writer Emily Gould describes how back in 2006, she is happy in her cozy circle in Brooklyn, dreaming big dreams in a little world and blogging sweet stories of puppies and unicorns (okay, not really).
“Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn,” Gould writes, but the rest of her story, all 8,000 words of it, is a drawn out and oddly detailed story of her ascent to success as the co-editor at Gawker, the immensely popular pop culture and snark blog that seems a strange and somewhat sensationalistic choice for the NYTimes Magazine.
You see, the game in this story, like it so often is in the media, is shame and repentance, with the pretty maid, lower lip trembling, visibly upset. By 2007, you see, things were not so rosy. As Gould tells it, while she was experiencing great visibility and perhaps success at Gawker, she also began to experience an uncomfortable degree of anxiety and even panic attacks as she, ever more visible, pandered to the crowd by playing on her sexuality, whoring out her dating life, and transforming herself into an ambitious snark-mistress hottie/link whore.
Enter regret, soon to be followed by remorse.
You see, while the innocent reader might think Gould was trying to trade on her notoriety and success in the form of a TV show, book deal, editorship or some other of the spoils that previous Nick-Denton-touched writers like Jessica Coen, Elizabeth Spiers, and Choire Sicha had achieved, she’s writing this long article and painstakingly detailed article to share the reality that her own behavior—what she dubbed “oversharing”--was making her literally sick. Sick to her stomach, sick of writing, sick of life.
Writing about the end of this era, when she’d left Gawker, but was still trading on her personal life to get attention, and yet growing increasingly uncomfortable with her ways, Gould writes: “I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn’t want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made. “
Poor Emily Gould! And lucky New York Times Magazine!
Is there truly any less foolproof way to sell the Sunday issue that to get huge viral buzz from a damsel in distress story played out in that most modern of locales, the blogsphere?
Call it cynical on my part, but I can just see current NYTMag editor Gerald Marzorati looking back over the upper-middle class waif stories (and media sensations) of Joyce Maynard and later Elizabeth Wurtzel and wondering if Emily Gould’s sob story of error and reform would generate the same page views and buzz those two highly manufactured heroines achieved.
While much of the media criticism and the consumer comments have focused on Gould’s narcissism and opportunistic use of her beauty, sexuality and position, and the aggressive marketing of her subsequent prettily teared up regret, no one has talked much about the cold-blooded cynicism of the Times in assigning and publishing what is just the latest incarnation in an ongoing series of sensational stories by attractive young women who struggle.
Reading Gould’s accounts of trading online barbs with a former boyfriend (who outed their relationship in a much-discussed piece in the NYPost), I am reminded of nothing so much as articles the New York Times Magazine had previously published--notably Joyce Maynard’s revelations that she wrote to JD Salinger, went to his farmhouse and then spent some time as his much younger sweetie, and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s revelations of her life as a suicidally depressed Harvard hottie and girl about town.
As a blogger who has long been
