File this one under "as long as everyone else is talking about it."
Emily Gould's cover story for this weekend's New York Times Magazine, which approximately ten media-internet-incestuous people have been holding their breath about for, like, months, is up on the Times' site. So, you know, I read it. It's already got 350+ comments, some snarky statistical analysis from NYMag's Intelligencer, and the requisite, barely civil Gawker coverage. But since the otherwise more circumspect Belle Lettre mentioned it, I figure I'll get in the mud too.
Here's how I feel: I don't get why the Times published this. It it's got three of the four P's of a college admissions essay: passive, past tense, peppered with navel-gazing. It's missing the fourth P: point. She never steps outside herself to make a broader societal point. She doesn't stand as a synecdoche for some secret social world that people are dying to get a look at. Perhaps most notably, she doesn't really undergo as much of a radical transformation as she seems to think she does, as she seems to premise the whole raison d'etre of her article on.
More than anything else, though, reading this piece feels like sitting in on Emily's intake session with her new therapist: it's a gloss of the psychological highs and lows of the last 3 years in the life, and it's told in such a tired voice that you get the feeling she's learned nothing--about the world, about love, about privacy, about herself--from writing this. "Here's how I felt then," she says. "And then I felt like this. And then this happened, and I felt like that. And now I feel this way, which makes me think back on that thing like this, even though back then I felt like that."
The thing is, Emily is a good writer. Anyone who read her when she was on Gawker knows that she is funny and smart, and there are some real gems of phraseology here in the Times piece ("I still felt unmoored in the way you can only feel after a breakup, as if you’re the last living speaker of some dying language" -- yessss). But Emily Gould is also a bad writer, in the way that only good writers can be bad, as might have been learned a while back by certain people who might have an unhealthy tendency to googlestalk everyone they've ever met, read about, heard about, or invented as a potential fictional character, as those people might have read her personal blog and learned that, sadness and rejoicing, it is not only me who, while able to be wry and pithy when commenting on the world, is unable to be anything but absolute crap when it comes to telling the world, in any serious way, about her own life.
Whenever I try to do that - write in a meaningful way about me, my life, and I - whether it's "I care about this issue" on RSGo(cue the dawning knowledge that this post is shamefully self-referential, if you haven't already figured it out and turned away in disgust), or it's an email to my friends on the rich topic of "holy crap, guys, I do not know how to handle the aftermath of the argument I just had with my mom/boss/boyfriend/self" - it comes out wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. It's stilted. It's ponderous. It's unfunny, unsparkley, uninteresting, un-worth-it.
Why? It's a forest-for-the-trees thing, and it's a taking-the-self-too-seriously thing, but I think more than anything else it's because I want to believe, in this very essential, existential way, that my quotidiana matters. That even if folks aren't caring about how I have these omg-deep emotions, that they ought to. That there is inherent value to others in knowing what I feel.
This is the key, I think. As my eminently wise roommate Mia said to me yesterday, when I onanistically expounded on how competitive I feel about my relationship whenever I hear that another one of my friends has gotten engaged: "Every couple thinks that. Not to be insensitive." And as she said later in the evening, when we were talking about a friend's inability to end a toxic relationship: "She needs to realize that everyone you fall in love with is going to be the person who understands you better than anyone else. She'll feel the same way about the next guy."
Which is to say: Within reason, everyone feels everything. What we feel is rarely unique, rarely unable to be replicated. So when someone is trying to write about anything - for an audience, to a reader - the value of attempting to explain and enlighten lies not in what you felt, but in how you tell us about it. People loved Emily Gould when she was being snappy and withering and self-deprecating and crass and sullen, because it is hard for us to look at our own lives and be those things. So she did it for us, on Gawker and on Heartbreak Soup, and it was riveting.
But here in the Times piece she misidentifies the location of her suffering's value. Emily Gould's highs and lows don't have the potential to be important merely because they were experienced by Emily Gould. They are - or they could have been - important because they are experienced by absolutely everyone, but Emily Gould gave us the promise of a candle to illuminate the intensity, deepen the tragedies, heighten the absurdity. Unfortunately, she didn't make good on that promise. Her article in the Times is just as self-regarding, as plodding, as boring as the eighth grade entries I made in my real journal - not the fake one that I tarted up with the expectation that someday, once I was suitably famous, it'd be published and adored.
In the pages of the Times, Emily is just like us. She's telling it by rote, as it happened, as she felt it. She's mired in minutiae that matter only to her, painting broad strokes over months and weeks and days. But we don't want that from her -- we don't need that. We have enough of "just like us" already, with us in our heads, wherever we go, all the time.
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