Book Tour Interview #3: Meaghan O’Connell

By Stephen Elliott

October 22nd, 2009

A few months ago for some reason I started following Meaghan O’Connell’s twitter posts and decided, while I was in New York, she was the person I wanted to interview for my Book Tour Interview series.

I realize all of the interviewees in this series so far are young and pretty. I assure you it’s mostly a coincidence and something I will be correcting in the near future.

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I’m nervous because I feel like I’m much less articulate verbally than written.

I’m 25. I was an army brat. I was born in Germany and then we moved to Alabama and Tallahasee, Florida. Then I went to college at Notre Dame.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do after college. I sat home all summer, freaking out, having a crisis. I talked to somebody who was going to be a nanny somewhere so I decided to do the same. I got on this website and the family I found was in New York. I came and lived with them for two years, much longer than I had planned.

Originally, I was going to move to New York, and write, and be a nanny and go to graduate school, that was my plan. Spend a year finding myself then go get an MFA. Then I didn’t get into any graduate schools. I had thought after I graduated that’s what you do, go to grad school and keep doing your thing. But I didn’t know anything about life or money and spending $100,000 for something you do everyday. I don’t think I knew enough about life or myself or anything to study writing. I got depressed and then I started blogging. I was nannying and telling stories on my blog about the kid. It was my no pressure way to express myself. My blog is pretty popular.

I met the people from Tumblr at a meetup and we became friends. They saw I was good at using their product and they needed someone to teach other people how to do it so they hired me as the Director of Outreach. I was an english major; I never planned on working with computers.

The real story is jakobandjulia.com. I heard about these people through Gawker who were writing about their relationship. I went to their site and their site was a Tumblr site and that’s kind of the big joke around the office. The reason I started using Tumblr was Jakob and Julia.

I think it’s going to happen more and more that people’s Internet activities lead to a job. It is a funny thing to say, “You use our product well so come do it for pay.” It’s odd now because I work there but I write about my personal life and I can be very vulnerable, very emotional. I know my boss and my coworkers are going to read it and I have to remember they knew that about me when they hired me. One time I talked to my boss about it and he just said, “As long as you aren’t being mean to other people,” which I don’t want to be anyway.

This woman from Harper Studio comes in and asks what blogs are popular right now and they get book deals the next day.

Sometimes boys like me because of my Internet persona, but they’ve never met me. I don’t want to say I’m not me on my blog, but it is like a filtered version and there’s a difference between idealizing someone from the bit that you know and showing up for them in life and dealing with their shit.

I never planned on having a full time job or a career that I loved. I thought I would work in an office in a job that I hated and come home and write about it. Instead I love my job and I come home and think about it. Part of me worries if I’m too happy I’m not going to want to write anymore. I guess that’s a myth or there’s a difference between being unhappy and striving to think about the world.

I love Joan Didion.

Everyone in Williamsburg is kind of gay, or half-gay.

When I came here I thought I would be here a year. But there’s this thing about New York; you forget that you can leave. I have all this knowledge about the subway and if I leave it will all of been for naught. I don’t know what I’ll do next. I didn’t think I would be doing this.

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