Gould is the author of the essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever.

She was an associate editor at Hyperion Books before becoming co-editor of Gawker.com, a job she quit and wrote about in a 2008 NYT Magazine cover story.

Gould has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The New York Observer, and Jezebel. Gould co-founded the online bookseller Emily Books.

Here she is conversing with our own Sari Botton about ”the emotional price of writing stories your parents might not like.”

For more information on Letters in the Mail, click here.

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Her mother makes a few appearances in the book, most notably in “Off Leash,” an essay which I found to be pivotal to this coming of age memoir. While reeling from the recent end of a six-year relationship and preparing to move into a new apartment by herself, Gould is visited by her mother – who is simultaneously navigating some mid-life transitions of her own, and mentions that divorce is a vague possibility.

There is so much about this chapter that to me feels vital to the book: the contrast between the two women and their stages in life; the way the author labors, uncomfortably, not to clash with her mother, to try and be patient and tolerant at a time when she feels adrift and emotionally raw; the sense that her parents’ marriage is one more pillar of Gould’s then wobbly life that could topple. And yet it’s understandable that her mother didn’t see it that way, and would have preferred if her daughter had left all that out of the book.

When I read that chapter, and later the remorseful blog post, I felt I had to get Gould’s perspective on the emotional price of writing stories your parents might not like – whether or not they are appear in them. “I don’t know how much braver than you I’m feeling these days,” she wrote back when I first emailed her. Still, he indulged me, even making me lunch at her apartment in Brooklyn, aka the studio where she shoots “Cooking the Books,” a show on which she interviews and cooks with a growing list of current authors.

***

The Rumpus: That blog post really touched me. You wrote that you and your mother had been having “difficult interactions” about your book.  You’re at this yoga retreat place with her, and you’re singing these corny Sanskrit-translated-to-English songs. You’re holding hands with her, and the lyric is something about “Children, turn to your mothers,” and as you turn to her, you start to cry. I got really choked up reading it. Had she read your book before it was out?

Emily Gould: Yeah, but I think the huge mistake I made was letting her know that someone else that I wrote about had final cut.

Rumpus: Ooh…

Gould: I think she feels like I should have extended that same privilege to her and maybe I should have, I don’t know. It would have been a really different book. There is one chapter where the person I was writing about, as I said, I gave it to her before it was typeset and I said, “Change anything you want. Our relationship is more important to me than anything like my artistic integrity.” And she changed a lot. It was still hard. It was hard for her to even know that I had written the thing that I had written about her. It took us a long time, and it will continue to take us a long time, to get over that.  But I’m so glad now that I did it. I’m glad that stuff isn’t in the book.  The story is worse. I know that it is. But that is okay, because it would have felt like a huge fuck you. In the larger context of our relationship it would have been like this weird salvo against her.

I didn’t at all feel like that was what I was doing in writing about my mother, but that is what it felt like to her. And to some extent there was some stuff that I could have controlled, and to some extent there is just not, you know? You never know how people are going to respond to the stuff that you write and often it is stuff that seems very innocuous to me that is the stuff that really, really upsets people. You know, mentioning in passing that my parents might get a divorce, it was almost a joke. My parents were not really going to get a divorce. They were just having a rough patch in what has been like a long and phenomenal relationship to me.  I mean, I look at them and their relationship is amazing to me. I feel so lucky also that my parents are still married. It is super anomalous. But I honed in on that one moment where I was writing from the perspective of this person that it feels like there is nothing stable in her life and her parents’ possibly failing marriage is just another of those things. That is the moment that I chose to write about as opposed to all of the like wonderful, great, happy times that my family had shared. Of course it feels like an attack, but it’s not.

Rumpus: But that part was also what was interesting. I was trying to think if there was a way for you not to write about that, or to leave your mother out, and I thought, this was such a pivotal essay in the book. Here you were at twenty-six, and your parents had gotten married when they were twenty-six. And you were going through a painful break-up, contemplating the nature of relationships and how long they last and whether they last, and what’s love and commitment all about, and here’s your mom tossing out the idea of a divorce. I just thought it was such an important thing that every detail was there. And even your annoyance at how much she keeps “externalizing her internal monologue,” talking and asking questions when you just need her to be quiet. Your grief, your being so consumed by it, is drawn against that, and I found it very effective.

Gould: But she just sees the caricature and it feels insulting.

Rumpus: That’s perfectly valid too. That’s what is so tricky about all of this.

Gould: My fear always is that I fucked up by not writing about something fully enough that people could understand it the way that I have intended. But you just don’t have that power.

Rumpus: So what was your mother’s response to what you wrote about her in the book?

Gould: I don’t remember all the specifics. And I don’t want to misrepresent what happened or what has been happening with her like since the book came out. But we come up against over and over again this problem of, I want to be able to apologize to her in a way that is meaningful. And it is really hard to accept the apology of someone who is essentially saying, “I apologize to you for this thing that I may well do again.” Yeah. That’s a really tall order for my mom.  Keith says that in Russian or one of the other Slavic languages there is an accepted proverb or idiom like, “It is a huge misfortune to have a writer born into your family.”

Rumpus: The way one of my parents, I can remember which, says it is, “A writer is born, and a family trembles.” My father and stepmother at one point threatened to draw up some kind of contract for me to sign that would forbid me to write about them ever again.

Sari Botton

Gould: That’s like – what do people get when they afraid their ex-husbands will hurt them?

Rumpus: You mean like a restraining order?

Gould: Yeah, like a writing restraining order.

Rumpus: They also asked me to promise I would never write about them again. But I told them I couldn’t make that promise. I said I’d be more careful in the future, but I am not sure what that means. So, other than your parents, were there people in your family who had problems with the book?

Gould: Yes, definitely. My grandmother especially – and my book is dedicated to my grandparents. My parents, when the book came out, had a book party for me, which was so nice of them. It was an open house at their apartment all day. My grandmother was the first to arrive. She came and she sat down on the couch and she was like, “I want you to know that these are the things that I was uncomfortable with and did not approve of.”

Rumpus: Was she nice about it?

Gould: Not really, no. I mean she did not call me a slut but she was like, “The drugs, the drinking. You meet someone, and then in bed.”  To me, in the grand scheme of people’s memoirs, and also just people I know, it’s like, come on. So what? I smoked pot. But it’s not how it seems to her.  To her it also feels like this is stuff that I held back from her and it is hard for me to explain that, of course I held this stuff back from you.  This is not stuff that you just –

Rumpus: Call your grandmother and tell her about?

Gould: Yeah! If she asks, “How was your weekend?” I’m going to say, “Oh, well, I saw my friends and went to the museum.” I’m not going to say, “I woke at 4 p.m., I was so hung over.” As a person in their early twenties, of course you are going to give your family a sanitized version of the truth so that they do not actively worry about you all the time. That is just being considerate! But then you write about it and then you get caught out for being a liar, when you feel like you have told the truth. So that was weird, and sort of colored the whole day. It was this gathering of people who are my close family members, my family’s friends, people that have known me since I was a little child. I looked around that room and I thought, Please, please, none of you read this book!

Rumpus: And so many of them probably already had.

Gould: I had never thought that people in my family would be so interested in reading the book, which was incredibly naïve and shortsighted of me. I thought maybe they would just sort of know that it was not a great idea for them to read it. It’s kind of funny because they will get offended by something that I post on my blog, and I am just like, why? Why are you doing this to yourself? You have a choice. It’s different if I am having conversation with you, or if I am writing an email to you. But I am not writing this to you. It is not a letter to you. It is not something that I am ever imagining you reading at all.

Photo by Lisa Corson

Rumpus: I relate to the idea of writing something and hoping that they don’t read it.  I had written an essay for Marie Claire back in like 1999 or 2000 about what it was like to become single again after marrying, at twenty-three, the second guy I had ever been with and then getting divorced at twenty-six or twenty-seven. It was a lot about sex, but in a funny way, like how weird it was for me. Like, I didn’t know when it was okay to start sleeping with someone. And did you go around the bases again like you did in high school? I had only a teenager’s understanding about how you progress sexually. It was a big deal for me to have the courage to write that and put myself out there in that way. I didn’t like the way it got edited, hated the finished product, but I still felt good that I had done it. But I knew it would be awful for my parents to read. I called my dad and I said, “You know, you probably do not want to read this. Actually, please do not read it.” Well, he told me he didn’t read it, but he definitely did. After it came out, he called me and said, “I did not read it, but I have heard from people that it is disgusting, and it is a waste of your talent, and you are a disappointment and I have written you a ten-page letter about what a disappointment you are, but my therapist will not let me send it to you because he knows what you are like – very defensive.” I of course remember every word of that conversation.

Gould: Oh yeah. All this sounds, by the way, super familiar to me. Super.

Rumpus: Yeah. There is no way to get them not to read your work, or to guarantee that they won’t.

Gould: It is weird because you simultaneously always have to assume, you have to be tricking yourself on the one hand that no one will ever read it, to just be able to do it. But then once it is done and edited, etcetera, you have to be totally prepared for the possibility that your absolute worst nightmare scenario is probably going to come true.

Rumpus: I have already had some of the nightmare scenarios happen, with essays I’ve had published that people in my family have reacted to, so I know that if I go through with writing and publishing a memoir or book of essays, I am sort of cruising for a bruising. I have already had some really bad experiences with them, which I think is what is making me so terrified.  When I published a Modern Love, in which I revealed some things about my parents’ marriage and divorce, my father was not happy about it.  At first he could not talk to me. That went on for a while, a week or so. It’s been three years now, but he still brings it up a lot when we talk. And there is always this looming threat of being disowned for writing more.

Gould: Geez, it must be really enticing to have a conversation with him. I think I know what that stuff that you’re dealing with is like. I know that my parents love me, and they feel like they actually are supportive, but my mother will also say things to me – like, she has told me that she thinks that when we talk to each other, that I am constantly sitting outside the conversation observing it and mining our interactions for material, and this is not the case. I understand why she would think that. It is totally a natural thing to think, but I feel so insulted by it because on the one hand she is telling me “I do not trust you.”  Which, okay. She is also telling me, “You are kind of a sociopath.” And the worst dimension of it – and this is the part which I would never expect her to understand – is that she is kind of saying that I am a hack, and I am just not. That is not how it works, for me. I think that is probably how it works for some people. Some people are observing things and are sitting there like, “How can I shape this into something that will be a fifteen-hundred word personal essay that I can sell to a women’s magazine for three dollars and fifty cents a word?”  Fortunately and unfortunately, that is not how I work.

But this is what I always find myself wanting to say to you when I read these interviews that you’re doing: Just write it, and then you can decide later like what is going to happen with it. You have to like a.s.a.p. just stop fucking around. You already made the choice. Now you’re worrying about the consequences.

Rumpus: I keep dancing around this.

Gould: Yeah. But it will be a relief to you no matter what happens, when you can stop anticipating the consequences and actually just start having them. No matter how bad they are, you will be just trading in this kind of pain for another kind. Just write it. (Pauses, then laughs.) Go into a self-induced trance where you think, no one will ever see this. Just be able to convince yourself of that! It is so super easy and fun!

Rumpus: Ha. Is there an app for that?

Gould: Totally. Yes.

Rumpus: The Oblivion app.

Gould: Yes, instead of turning on the Freedom app, you turn on Oblivion! I guess there are various reasons why that does not actually work for me so, I probably shouldn’t try to convince you.

Rumpus: Recently my father brought up the Marie Claire essay again, too, out of the blue, and that one ran like ten years ago – of course, still claiming not to have read it. He said something like, “Go and write something great – not like that horrible crap you wrote in that magazine that was totally beneath you.”

Gould: But this is nice, though. Maybe this is him saying that he thinks that you have this amazing talent and potential.

Rumpus: But I think that he is also saying that to write about yourself and write about sex is inherently bad. By the way, the piece was not explicit or erotic even. It was more about, like, Oh, Jesus, this guy is jerking off in front of me and I have never seen anybody do that before. Is this what people do now? And does that count as sex? I was more like an awkward observer within the piece. So yes, he thinks that I have better things ahead of me, but then there is the other part where he is like, “Can’t you write about something else?” I think about that a lot. It’s funny, I was mowing the lawn the other day, obsessing about, why can’t I just write about something else? And I had this epiphany. I thought, sometimes as a writer, you don’t choose your subject. It chooses you.

Gould: Uh-huh. Yeah.

Rumpus: Do you feel that way?

Gould: Oh yeah, of course. But I think there is probably a more sophisticated perspective that I haven’t quite reached yet. I don’t know, I always feel like I am coming right up against the walls of my innate limitations and just banging my head against those walls all the time because I do feel like I have sort painted myself into a corner with this stuff to some extent, and I think I thought for a long time that the answer was always to tell the truth and be myself and that was the ultimate goal. You know? It didn’t matter if some people hated it and were really repulsed by it or did not understand it at all and had violent negative reactions to it. You know that some people would see this, and I would be seen in this way that would be so fundamentally fulfilling, and I have been so lucky because I have had it.  People have seen it. People have gotten it. But what do you do then? Eventually I’m going to have to write something else. Eventually I’m going to have to tell a story.

Rumpus: Do you and Keith have a policy about writing about each other or anything like that?

Gould: We have not talked about it for a while but when last we visited this topic, it was, I cannot write on my blog about him, which is totally valid. An editor has to look at it. You can’t just think it and then hurriedly publish it. You have to make sure it has been edited, ideally several times. And then at that point, you have to look at it, and if it is the fucking truth, if your artist’s conscience is okay with it, then yeah, you put it out there.

Rumpus: Right. Would you show it to him first? Before publishing it?

Gould: Oh, yes. He helped me edit my book. We never specifically talked about this, so I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I can only assume – especially because at some points he would write, “eww,” or put a sad face in the margins – that it was like not pleasant for him to read about me having sex with people that were not him. His book is hard for me to read and things where he would write about his ex-wife in like a very sort of nostalgic and sweet way. That’s just gut-wrenching.  You cannot get around that. It’s awful, but I do not feel like he shouldn’t be doing it.

Rumpus: Right. And he is not writing it to you. He is just writing it.

Gould: I think it would be really different if there is some character in his writing and it was like one of these Woody Allen movie situation where you’re like, “But of course that’s me! And she’s so terrible!”  When you’re writing fiction, there is that plausible deniability. “Oh, that guy? No! Certainly he has elements of you, but I was just imagining him with my amazing imagination! I was just making all that stuff up!”

Rumpus: People often suggest I write fiction instead, as a way around all this inner conflict I wrestle with. But in a way I think fiction is almost worse in terms of revealing people. Chances are the fictional extrapolation of a person you’re afraid to write about in memoir is not any more flattering than it would be if it weren’t “made up.” And that person is going to recognize himself.

Gould: In Freedom there is a character who [Franzen] gives the most asshole-ish characteristics to. I feel like it must be fun to just have this one character who can say all that stuff that you would never remotely think of saying out loud.

Rumpus: There’s a Larry David character in Freedom?

Gould: Yeah basically, but sexier. A sexy Larry David character. Oh my god so devastating! Yeah, every Jewish girl’s dream. But, anyway, of course, Keith has not written a Phillip Roth novel about our relationship, and I have also not written a Phillip Roth novel about our relationship. Yet. (Laughs.)

Rumpus: What about the ex-boyfriend you write about in And the Heart Says Whatever. Have you ever heard from him about that?

Gould: No, but I feel that is a shoe that will drop eventually. Or maybe not. But I would be surprised.

Rumpus: In the book you wrestle with the feeling that you were betraying him in writing about him. At one point you write about showing him your cover essay for the New York Times Magazine before it runs, to make sure he’s okay with everything. And at first he is, but then a few days later he has a change of heart and gets kind of legalistic about it.

Gould: It was this weird situation where like he read it and he was so fine with it that I felt this surge of, “I have been totally wrong about you! And I still love you.” His being fine with it was like he had passed this test. And then we spent a night and a day together, really like physically living in the past, in that old apartment. And then a few days later he called just sounding like a totally different person. He had been spending time with his mother who was a newly minted lawyer. It sounded as if he had been brainwashed. He was saying, “I am going to call your editor at the Times.” I was like, whoa. I wound up feeling like I cannot be in the business of protecting this person anymore. I really just can’t be in a relationship with someone who I feel like I’m constantly having to protect from myself.  That is a terrible feeling.  When I was first seeing Keith, I was working on that article and he said something about, “What will my father think when he reads your article when it comes in his Sunday Times?” And at that moment I thought, I can’t be with anyone right now. I really can’t. I can’t worry about something like that. It is just enough for me to think about what my own father would think.

Rumpus: So that’s when you broke up for a short time?

Gould: Yeah, we broke up briefly. It was like the most bloodless breakup ever. But then we got back together. But I’ve been thinking a lot about having written about other people, what it means to write about other people. I said to my therapist recently, “I guess one option is to just not have any relationships with anyone, ever.” And she was like, “Well that is just not an option.” And I asked, “Do you mean in general, as a human? Or do you mean for me?” She said, “No, I mean for you.”

Rumpus: So, have you been scared out of doing this sort of writing again? I mean, I hope you do more of this at different points in your life, from different perspectives. I think you’re good at it, and that it would be good.

Gould: That’s almost inevitable. But I don’t think I’ll be as…open. If I had been older or more experienced when I wrote the book, I wouldn’t have been that open. I don’t think I’ll ever be that open again.

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A review of The Drunk Sonnets, a poetry collection by Daniel Bailey.

From Russia With Love — A review of The Possessed, a memoir by Elif Batuman.

They Want To Call You By Name — A review of Living Must Bury, poetry by Jesse Sigler.

Who’s The Narcissist? — A review of And The Heart Said Whatever, a memoir/essay collection by Emily Gould.

And be sure not to miss Elissa Bassist’s excellent essay Have I Earned These Cliches and Cometbus#52, The Spirit Of St. Louis.

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Like so many of us, I spend an unhealthy amount of time reading blogs. My fall down the rabbit hole really began, I guess, around 2004, when I first moved to New York and was working cubicle-bound at a non-profit. In that situation, Gawker was both a revelation and a lifeline, and I probably spent as much time refreshing it as I did proofreading fact sheets about sustainable coffee production. Jessica Coen was the editor back then, and I remained more or less addicted through various staffing turnovers, until that fateful week in November, 2007 when Emily Gould and Choire Sicha (then editors of the site along with Alex Balk) read an uncomfortably apt piece about their workplace in n+1 and decided to quit.

During the years when Gawker was a disturbingly vivid part of my life, I ate up posts about celebrity sightings, layoffs in the publishing industry and Gould’s personal life, as only the bored and generally aspiring can. I watched as the site got meaner and the posting rate accelerated from reassuringly regular to relentless, and as the comment system morphed into something vaguely fascist. The latter bothered me, but not as much as it might have—though scrolling through pages of comments was one of my preferred methods of procrastination, I myself didn’t comment.

To read the comments unfurling at the end of most any post on any Gawker Media blog, you’d think every reader were chiming in—but lurking is actually the default (in)action. There are thousands and thousands of readers who are, to put it a little dramatically, witnesses rather than collaborators. And there are lots of reasons for not commenting: laziness, shyness, intimidation, voyeurism, a sense of superiority; all I know is that despite my fixation on these blogs—and, by extension, the lives and personalities of their writers—something stops me from wading in.

Emily Gould

I don’t pretend, though, that this keeps my hands clean. When it comes to the saga of Emily Gould—reaching new heights this month with the publication of her memoir/essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever—I’ve been transfixed, from her tenure at Gawker to her prolific blogging elsewhere, to the 2008 New York Times Magazine story in which she recounted how her life and long-term relationship unraveled as she revealed more and more about them online. I’ve paid attention because I’m genuinely interested in Gould’s writing, and because, being in my late 20s in New York, navigating the exhausting, incestuous, barely paying world of freelance writing, I relate to her and what she writes about. We both like books! We both have cats! I don’t know, it might stop there. Whatever.

To say that Gould’s book has been highly anticipated would be true, but wouldn’t get at some of the disheartening reasons behind that anticipation: people are hungry for a newsworthy target for their snark, an excuse to revive the attacks that unfolded in the aftermath of that Times Magazine article, and, generally, a pretext to be dismissive, dickish, and haughty about our oversharing, blog-based culture. Admittedly, I came to the book expecting to like it. And I did. Actually, I loved it: I thought it was gut-wrenching and smart and naked and beautifully written. You can read it as a document of a particular techno-era in New York (and of confessional online culture in general), and as a chronicle of the fallout from a specific moment in Gawker’s reign. But the stories Gould tells here are also very personal, and very sad. The fact that she’s told parts of some of them before doesn’t change that—she captures better than almost anyone the feeling of what it’s like to be young(ish), both ambitious and aimless, more watchful and introspective than is good for her, at this particular moment in our culture.

That doesn’t mean Emily Gould is “the voice of her generation” (as certain publicity materials would have you believe), or even that she’s speaking, as Curtis Sittenfeld recently fawned, “to the truths of women’s lives.” She’s certainly speaking to the truth of her own life, as someone with experiences that are very much of a certain generation. But as we’ve seen over and over again, it’s not enough for a writer to “just” tell her own story, particularly if that writer is a woman; at the same time, if people suspect a writer is trying to speak for her gender or her generation, they’re ready to resent or ridicule her for it. As Gould told Sittenfeld, “If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition. But people seem to evaluate your work based on how much they relate to it, so it’s like, well, who’s the narcissist?”

To Gould’s credit, in And the Heart she writes about Gawker mostly with pleasing vagueness, and leaves out her Times story entirely—it would have been easy and more sensational to build a book around that central essay, but she has other stories to tell. As she recounts her experience of being knocked down in, and by, New York—having her words scrutinized in a creative writing workshop, assuming the guise of a publishing professional, getting caught up in the romance of shoddy apartments—she perhaps unavoidably perpetuates a certain New York mythos, but she builds on Joan Didion’s sense of the place rather than just imitating, or playing tribute to her. In one sense, the whole thing feels like an apology—an extended explanation of how she started out one way and grew into a different person—and a requiem for the six-year relationship that died in the process: “The whole time we were together, it turned out, I had been working on making myself into someone he wouldn’t recognize.”

She’s obsessed with the way time passes, and especially with what it means to be young—to feel your youth draining from you in a way that feels like both a punishment and a reward. Coming from someone so young (she’s 28) this inevitably reads as a little annoying, but it also feels utterly true. Gould is attuned to the way things around and inside her are shifting and changing, and she can’t stop herself from testing certain boundaries, pushing against her surroundings to see if there’s any give—even as she knows this is a cliché. “The future was still unclear, but just unclear enough to be exciting and not so unclear as to be frightening,” she writes in one meaningful distinction. She takes stock of the somehow yawning distance that exists between a man-boy of 23 and her 26-year-old self. Of that 23-year-old, she writes, “He was so young that even after smoking half a pack of cigarettes and staying up all night the inside of his mouth tasted like some mild fruit.” And, reflecting on her inexorable aging:

This is one of the most painful things about getting older, especially getting older in the same place where you were young: the constant realizations that you could have been doing everything better all along, if only you’d known how to read the map more accurately.

Ana Marie Cox

Youth and generation were a focus of Ana Marie Cox’s oddly peeved, finger-wagging early review in Bookforum , in which she scolded Gould for not understanding that actions have consequences. “Gould, in general, does not seem to think much about her future, let alone about how those choices will appear when she looks back,” Cox wrote, as if oblivious to the fact that this is in fact one of Gould’s points.

Differences of opinion aside, Cox’s scattered, strangely savage tone (Gould’s choices, she writes, “seem much less brave to me than they might have when I was her age,”) seemed disproportionate to her subject in ways I wouldn’t have expected of someone who did her own time in the Gawker Media trenches. Cox was the founding editor/blogger of Wonkette; she’s also, despite what you might infer from her review, only 37. Weirdly, Cox is just as unsparing in her assessment of Gould’s entire generation; according to her, we’ve “grown up confusing irony with tragedy, nonchalance with acceptance, a pose with poise, self-dramatization with self-awareness.” That’s painting with pretty broad strokes, and it’s hard to understand why Cox takes it so personally—or why anger and offense are so often the default reactions to Gould’s writing.

Gould’s experiences are all tangled up with looming questions about privacy and self-exposure and technology, but though these personal essays are set in that context, they are not about it. That distinction can be hard to see when our culture is still in the early stages of sorting through this stuff, and when the Internet’s influence on our thoughts and relationships and sense of self still has a whiff of novelty, or indecency. And the Heart raises plenty of interesting questions about the life of its author and her peers, but the idea that Gould represents a distasteful, altogether alien generation, or that her faults, and her honesty about them, somehow gives everyone her age a bad name, just makes her accusers sound petty and overwrought.

“There’s this weird quality of being suspicious and cynical about everything and simultaneously, unwittingly, being utterly open and receptive and gullible that is part of youth, or at least was part of my youth,” Gould writes early in the book. We’d probably all be better off if we aspired to that kind of balance regardless of age. It has certainly informed Gould’s writing here—maybe, despite her scars, she’s younger than she thinks.

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• New York through Jack Kerouac’s Eyes
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• Notable New York: 5/20-5/26

MONDAY 5/10: Granta’s Spring 2010 Party: Sex. Featuring Victor Lavalle. Book Court. 7-9pm.

Kate Gilmore’s Walk the Walk 5-day Performance Piece: Walk the Walk is a Dynamic sculptural and performance-based artwork activated by a group of women walking, stomping, shuffling and marching on the roof of an eight-foot-high cubic structure. The piece draws attention to, and celebrates the vast number of women who work each day in the City. The installation questions notions of work, its limitations and possibilities, especially as they relate to themes of female identity, physical endurance and personal expression. Bryant Park. Avenue of the Americas at 40th St. 8:30am – 6:30pm.

TUESDAY 5/11: The Moth Mainstage: Saints and Sinners. The Moth Mainstage, the original Moth series, began as an informal gathering of storytellers and listeners in the living room of our founder, George Dawes Green, in 1997. Every mainstage show has a theme and features five or six storytellers who tell a ten-minute story. The stories are true stories from the storytellers’ lives and they must be told live, without notes. Each show typically features one or two celebrated writers, actors or artists along with other unique individuals with a story to tell on the given theme. Past storytellers have included an astronaut, a voodoo priestess, and a former pickpocket. Notable headliners have included Margaret Cho, Ethan Hawke, Malcolm Gladwell and Lili Taylor. El Museo del Barrio. 7:30pm.

SLEIGH BELLS, Cults, Sundelles and secret guests… at RIDGEWOOD TEMPLE an amazing old theater/ fantastically creepy masonic lodge; guest djs & surprises. Todd P had us at “Sleigh Bells,” whose LP Treats is out May 11. But he really had us at “creepy masonic lodge.” Enter the building of the fraternity of Freemasons without having to go through all that horrid hazing. And with Cults on the ticket, it’ll be appropriately transcendental. Shouldn’t be hard to find. Just keep a lookout for the square and compass. Ridgewood Temple. 1054 Bushwick Ave., Brooklyn. 8:00pm.

DDR/DDR (Film). DDR/DDR, the latest feature by Amie Siegel, is a multi-layered and disarmingly beautiful essay on the German Democratic Republic and its dissolution, which left many of its former citizens adrift in their newfound freedom. Anthology Film Archives. 6:30pm.

WEDNESDAY 5/12: And the Heart Says Whatever. Comedian/author Julie Klausner (I Don’t Care About Your Band), performance artist/author Mike Albo (The Underminer) and musician/playwright Dan Fishback — and other secret special guests! — will salute musicians like Stevie Nicks and Liz Phair in song, to celebrate the publication of Emily Gould‘s heavily Nicks-inspired essay collection. Rest assured that the feeling will remain even after the glitter fades! Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. 126 Crosby St. 7:00pm.

Chip Kidd discusses Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures 1940-1980 with Dan Nadel. In this engaging and smart volume, Dan Nadel focuses on the lesser-known comic works by celebrated icons of the industry, like H.G. Peter (the artist behind Wonder Woman), John Stanley (the writer and artist for Little Lulu), Harry Lucey (one of the artists behind Archie), Jesse Marsh (the artist for Tarzan), and Bill Everett (best know for his characters Sub Mariner and Dr. Strange). Chip Kidd will join Dan Nadel on the Strand Stage. The Strand Bookstore. 7:00pm.

THURSDAY 5/13: Sebastian Junger: War. The journalist, documentary filmmaker (Restrepo), and bar-owner (Half-King) discusses his latest work and hangs out for a post-event mixer. 92Y. 8:00pm.

THE BLOW perform new work. With Acrylics and Julianna Barwick.  Glasslands Gallery. 8:30pm.

FRIDAY 5/14: The Thing Quarterly presents contributors Starlee Kine, David Lipsky, David Rees and Arthur Jones in celebration of its 10th issue the subject of which is haunted household objects that remain after lovers have broken up. Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. 7:00pm.

SATURDAY 5/15: Resurrectine: Group Exhibition.  Resurrectine is a large-scale group show of more than fifty artists including Eteam, Leon Golub and Hannah Wilke. The selection of artworks embraces the notion of transformation. This is Moby Dick re-enacted via low-budget home video. This is your reflection morphed into that of Andy Warhol. This is escapes from death, apocalypse management and the Chesire Cat. And a visit to the gallery includes the Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum CD, Free. Ronald Feldman Gallery. 31 Mercer St.

The Total Franklin Street Immersion. Brooklyn Based has planned a street fair on Franklin Street to explore one of Greenpoint’s coolest blocks. Head there on Saturday for complimentary Brooklyn Brewery beer and incredible deals at over a dozen shops and restaurants. To join in on the fun, RSVP here to get a special TFSI card that will entitle you to the deals and of course, the beer! The Diamond will be pouring half pints of Brooklyner Weisse; Black Rabbit will serve East India Pale Ale, and t.b.d. will serve Brooklyn Summer Ale (one complimentary glass per person at each).

Maya Deren’s Legacy: Women and Experimental Film. The Deren, Schneemann, Friedrich and Hammer Program of Short Film. Maya Deren (American, 1917–1961) was a visionary of American experimental film in the 1940s and 1950s. This screening includes four short experimental films that explore the interior life of women. Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren is the first in Deren’s legacy. Fuses by Carolee Schneemann explores sexual intimacy and pleasure from a woman’s point of view. Cool Hands, Warm Heart by Su Friedrich echoes Meshes in its focus on ritual and interiority. And I Was/I Am by Barbara Hammer presents Hammer extracting a motorcycle key out of her mouth. MOMA. 11 w. 53rd St. 8:00pm.

SUNDAY 5/16: Metric w/ Bear in Heaven. Terminal 5. 610 W. 56th St. 8:00pm.

ART: Jonathan Horowitz’s “Go Vegan!” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. This installation, which was formerly shown at Greene Naftali in 2002, will be housed in a former butchery in the meatpacking district, LaFreida Meats. It’s a full-scale multi-room environment that will dispaly portraits of celebrity vegans, portraits of animals, footage of commercial animal slaughter and a minimalist tofu sculpture.

***

News about notable happenings in New York can be sent to rozalia-AT-therumpus.net

Original Notable New York Illustration © André da Loba. Other images in order of appearance. The Thing Issue 10; Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time; Image from eteam’s “International Airport Montello”; images from Jonathan Horowitz’s “Go Vegan!”

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September 13, 2009
10:37am – Walking by Book Stands

Tao Lin T-shirts were dangling on hangers at the Melville House booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival. The T-shirts said “Tao Lin: 1983- ????” Across from Melville House was the Ugly Duckling booth. The books were beautiful to touch. I touched A Plate of Chicken by Matthew Rohrer and bought it. It was hot and sunny. I thought, This is the last hot day of summer.

10:41am – A Man

A man looked at the hat I was holding and said, “I like your hat.” “Thanks,” I said. He was familiar. He had talked to me once on the subway. But that time it was night and he had said, “Do you like the opera?”

10:45am – The Legacies of John Updike and David Foster Wallace (Borough Hall Courtroom): Panel of Distinguished Critics

I looked in the courtroom, in the last five minutes of this panel discussion by a group of distinguished critics sitting at the judge’s bench. They were about six feet above everybody else in the room. Because they were critics rather than judges, this height dwarfed rather than heightened the importance of anything that could be said.

11:00am – The Future of Literary Fiction (Borough Hall Community Room): T Cooper, Elizabeth Nunez and Keith Gessen moderated by Richard Nash

“I’m hearing a kind of snobbism… especially from you T” – Emily Gould

The Borough Hall Community Room is a kind of carpeted greenhouse situated within a larger ordinary variety courthouse room. I sat on a dark heavy wood bench. Two large cameras were pointed at the long table and on the other side of the glass there were sound-engineers.

Richard Nash, the former Soft Skull publisher was moderating. T Cooper started. T Cooper had Facebooked friends and asked them what they thought about the future of literary fiction, and said what the other people had said about the future of literary fiction. Like Darin Strauss who said something like “The internet won’t kill the old maiden,” and T Cooper’s agent who said something like “Stop going to the library and buy the fucking new book.” The way to make money these days, T Cooper said, was to co-write a zombie or vampire novel and offered to write one with anyone in the audience.

Elizabeth Nunez said in a soft voice, “America has a major problem.” She said it was because publishers have one idea about black novelists, that a novel written by a black author is a “black writer’s novel.” And though she has been written about favorably for many years, and her last book was an Editor’s Pick at The New York Times Book Review, her books don’t sell. She ended by saying, “The definition of racism is a failure to see yourself in others.” She said black writers used to be more widely read, like Zora Neal Hurston and Richard Wright.

Keith Gessen had a neat haircut, a sport jacket and spoke fast. He said there is a tendency to think that humans will do something stupid with new technology when they get their hands on it. I thought that was insightful. I laughed. He said the advent of platforms like Kindle and Twitter doesn’t necessarily mean the quality of the work presented on those platforms will be degraded. I don’t remember what this was in response to, maybe to Elizabeth Nunez’s statements about black writers only being read by black people but Keith Gessen said that when he was publishing his book All the Sad Young Literary Men, his publisher was afraid to market him as a Russian writer because maybe then only Russian writers would read it. And they talked about the title and thought it might exclude women, and only men would read the book. At one point it seemed like a panel on identity fiction, not on the future of fiction even though T Cooper didn’t say anything about identity and writing. T Cooper is transgender. Richard Nash at one point was talking about T Cooper and said “she he” and looked around the room, which was silent.

Elizabeth Nunez said, “I happen to think I’m an excellent writer.” People in the audience clapped. Ballantine dropped her because her book didn’t sell.

T Cooper said Rick Moody was writing a novel in “morsels” that after editing would eventually be published on Twitter and expressed that there was something about the editing process that made it different than most other material published on the web. “The worst of humans comes out unedited,” said T Cooper.

Elizabeth Nunez said people under forty weren’t reading literary fiction. Both T Cooper and Keith Gessen are under forty.

During the question and answer session, a librarian said to T Cooper, “Don’t fuck the libraries,” or something to that effect, because libraries were some of the biggest supporters of literary fiction and played a big role in bringing fiction to a larger audience.

Emily Gould raised her hand and said “I’m hearing a kind of snobbism… especially from you T.” She was sitting very straight. She asked how fiction was supposed to subsist if authors and publishers refuse to meet an audience where it lives. Everyone looked at Emily Gould. Her hair was in a ponytail. I thought about when Emily Gould was with Gawker and stated in a post about Tao Lin, “You’re maybe perhaps the single most irritating person we’ve ever had to deal with,” and then in another post pardoned him because she liked an essay he had written about the levels of literary greatness and stated, “You’re good in our book for now, Tao Lin! Don’t fuck it up.”

12:05pm – Real Surreal (St. Francis College Reading Room): Tao Lin, Nicholson Baker, Ben Marcus, Yona Zeldis McDonough.

“Copper powder for phonic salting” – Ben Marcus (from The Flame Alphabet)

“I wasn’t thinking about it until you peed outside and I thought about variety” – Tao Lin (from Shoplifting From American Apparel)

Walking to the Tao Lin and Ben Marcus reading I saw Jason. “This is Bart,” he said.

Tao Lin was reading when I walked in. He read into a microphone sitting in his chair at a long table on the platform with the other readers. His legs were crossed at the ankles under the table. He read from Shoplifting From American Apparel. He read one of my favorite parts of the book, when Sam, the protagonist of Shoplifting tells his friend on g-chat that he was in jail for shoplifting. I was glad I got to hear him read that because I like hearing writers read things that I’ve already read and liked to hear how different it is from the way it sounds in my head. He read in a monotone way, more monotone than anyone I have ever heard speak, except for Tao Lin at another reading where he read three lines and left.

Someone asked after he read why he was on this panel about surreal writing if his book wasn’t surreal. Tao Lin said because the narrator, Sam, has a surreal worldview.

Nicholson Baker was reading at the podium when a woman fainted. She was near me and her head dropped back. Nicholson Baker stopped reading. A man with a professional badge went up to her. She lifted her head, opened her eyes and was breathing. Nicholson Baker started to read again. The woman who fainted didn’t leave the room.

Ben Marcus read from his forthcoming novel called The Flame Alphabet, about a world in which language is toxic for people to use, hear and see. What Ben Marcus read was understandable to the ordinary person who would attend a literary reading. Most of the time it was very readable. There were some clauses that some people would call difficult like “copper powder for phonic salting,” “marshal symptom appliance,” and “well-crafted public solitude.” But those didn’t occur as often as I was expecting they would. I wondered what its Fog Index was. Nobody in the audience seemed confused. I thought, Is Ben Marcus courting a wider audience? I then thought I wished I hadn’t thought that.

About the way Tao Lin reads and talks, Al said after the reading, “How much of that do you think is an act?”

1:00pm – Editor as Author (St. Francis College Reading Room): Heidi Julavits, Hannah Tinti, Sarah Rainone

“My inbox has been called the black hole of Calcutta.” – Heidi Julavits

I was missing the Rasskazy panel on the International Stage. (Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia is a new Tin House anthology). Emily Gould would be interviewing Dmitry Danilov and probably saying things to him like “I’m hearing a kind of snobbism.” But Heidi Julavits, one of the editors of The Believer, I knew, would say good things too. And she did, like “My inbox has been called the black hole of Calcutta.” She also said she likes being bugged, but only in a good way.

Donald Breckenridge, who looked like he would have been cozier in a cabin beside a big fire reading all translations of War and Peace side by side than in this bright cafeteria with Vitra chairs, was moderating. The chairs were designed with holes at the back so peoples’ butts could be seen.  First he said, about being an editor and a writer, “Who in their right minds would do both?” Heidi Julavits said she has two brains at work, a generative creative brain, which she uses when writing, and a math brain she uses when editing. Editing is like Pilates for her math brain so it doesn’t get “flabby.” Hannah Tinti, the editor of One Story said she started out working at the Boston Review and then The Atlantic Monthly and that sometimes she would reject a whole pile of submissions she hadn’t read because she was told to. So, writers shouldn’t take rejections personally. It seemed no one knew exactly what Sarah Rainone meant when she said she was a freelance editor. So Heidi Julavits said, “What exactly do you mean?” Sarah Rainone said she gets hired by authors and publishers to give structural and developmental assistance to authors whose non-fiction books are bought on proposal. “Hired gun,” someone said and all the panelists nodded.

Donald Breckenridge asked why they edit at all, and that most novelists would say it is a complete waste of time. Heidi Julavits had already explained why she liked editing earlier, so she just added that it was just a natural part of any writer’s “six-prong career profile,” and just a reflection of “all seventeen sides of the writer coin.” Hannah Tinti said editing helps her come out of her writer shell that she needs to go into to write. Sarah Rainone said she was grateful she “grew up” at Doubleday, but she was happy to be out on her own. This was her first panel. “I’m a lot more comfortable being other people than being myself,” she said. Then they started to say things like “financial reality,” and “I don’t get paid,” and “I don’t get paid either.” I went to the panel on upward mobility.

2:00pm – Movin’ On Up (Borough Hall Community Room): Lewis Lapham, Kathryn Newman and Gloria Browne-Marshall

“We’re about movement, whether you’re moving up or down on the social scale… And it’s the very essence of The New York Post” – Lewis Lapham

I walked by the International Stage, which was empty except for Keith Gessen and Emily Gould who were on the side talking and picking up things. I opened the Rasskazy book at the Tin House booth, which made me think, I have so many books to read. There was loud music playing somewhere.

Back in the room, which looked like a greenhouse, Lewis Lapham’s head was propped up on three fingers strategically placed around the temple of his inclined head, his elbow on the table. His head stayed this way for the hour. Someone told me at a party once that Lewis Lapham didn’t wear socks. “That’s a sign that you’ve reached the pinnacle of the social class in America,” she said. I couldn’t see his feet to look. To his right was Kathryn Newman, and to Kathryn Newman’s right was Gloria Browne-Marshall. This was the panel with the most statistics. It also felt high powered. Kathryn Newman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Urban Studies at the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University. Gloria Browne-Marshall is a Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College. Lewis Lapham was the editor of Harper’s Magazine, and is now the Editor of Lapham’s Quarterly. He also made a musical documentary I like called The American Ruling Class. I’ve been told he practices golf moves sometimes in his office—he has a full set of golf clubs there.

Paul Tough from The New York Times Magazine opened by asking Lewis Lapham to give an historical perspective, because that’s the kind of perspective Lewis Lapham gives, on “one of the founding myths” that goes to the core of our self-conception of ourselves as a nation, the myth of upward mobility. (Tough was careful to say that by myth he didn’t mean to imply it was false). Lewis Lapham said, “We love to tell ourselves that story.” He gave a short history of poor men who had done well: Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton (“the bastard born in the West Indies”), Obama, Clinton, Carnegie, Rockefeller—all started out as poor men. “The idea that you can invent yourself is a fundamental American ideal,” he said. He said, “We’re about movement, whether you’re moving up or down on the social scale.” (I thought, by the time he was my age, my father was a doctor and had two children in schools in New York. I am a writer. I make 99.9% less money than my father made. Did that mean I was sliding down on the scale or that I was at least at the same level on the scale as my father despite making a lot less money). Paul Tough gave some statistics. Black Americans he said were more likely to experience downward mobility than white Americans. Among the “haves” and “have nots,” 40% of white “haves” move down, while 70% of black “haves” move down. I missed when he said what the percentage was for the “have-nots” moving up, but the percentage of white “have-nots” moving up was higher than the black “have-nots” moving up, which was 25%.

With one finger, Lewis Lapham pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose.

Gloria Browne-Marshall said upward mobility was an identity issue. “I know people who will not accept that we have a black president,” she said, “who think if you are below me, how can you have a job title that is above me.” She said there were “artificial obstacles,” like societal expectations that prevent people from moving up.

I had a thought about Lewis Lapham practicing golf moves in his office when the audience clapped louder than any audience had clapped all day. Gloria Browne-Marshall had said something important that I missed.

Lewis Lapham moved his head once to clean his glasses.

Lewis Lapham said that statistics show it’s easier to move up the social hierarchy in Canada, France or Denmark than in the United States.

Kathryn Newman, who followed the progress of a group of children in Harlem, said 1/3 of the children she followed in her study, which she documented in her book Chutes and Ladders, were no longer poor.  The reason was education. She spoke about governments investing in human capital to achieve this end, that early childhood education needed to be free and universally so.

Lewis Lapham said, “Human capital is Jefferson’s theory. It’s right.”

Lewis Lapham said our country has no history of taking care of underprivileged Americans. Our notion of healthcare is “essentially Bismarck’s.”

Lewis Lapham said the word “eleemosynary.” This word has three possible pronunciations: 1) one with a short “o,” 2) one with a long “o,” and 3) one with a short “o” and a “z” sound on the “s.” I believe Lewis Lapham used the first. It is derived from the Latin “eleemosynarius” (alms) and means, according to the OED, “Of or pertaining to alms or almsgiving; charitable.”

Lewis Lapham said, “You’re on your own.”

Lewis Lapham said, “The heroic individual.”

Lewis Lapham said, “Sinner at the hand of an angry god.”

Walking out, I saw Michelle. She said, “Nice hat.”

3:20pm – Talking to Nigel (By the Drawn and Quarterly Booth)

I said, “Did you see the Rasskazy panel. Emily Gould was going to be interviewing Dmitry Danilov. She was at the panel with Keith Gessen and said to T Cooper that she detected a kind of snobbism.”

Nigel said, “No. But I hear Housing Works is having a Rasskazy thing soon. Don’t Emily Gould and Keith Gessen fuck?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s possible.”

Epilogue – 11:50am (St. Francis College Auditorium)

The auditorium was huge and empty when I got there. I sat in a burgundy velvet seat, and looked at the carpet and high ceilings. I imagined Tao Lin and Ben Marcus sitting at the table with that black curtain behind them laughing and talking to each other while drinking from their complimentary bottles of water. I have never seen Tao Lin laugh. I have seen Ben Marcus laugh a few times. About twelve people walked in yelling at each other—or, talking but in a loud, flaunting way. I thought, Whose audience is this? This doesn’t seem like Ben Marcus’s or Tao Lin’s audience. Maybe it’s Nicholson Baker’s audience? I was thinking very hard about audiences. I looked for hipsters. I remember in an interview I read somewhere that sometimes Tao Lin has random thoughts that he will then think about continuously like one time where he thought “my audience is hipsters.” Then I thought in a definitive way that neither Ben Marcus’s nor Tao Lin’s audience would make very much noise and would make an effort to move very little. They would wear skinny jeans and small sneakers without laces. I thought, Is this The Anarchy of Youth panel? I didn’t see Jason or Bart or James or anyone else I knew was coming to this panel. Thurston Moore walked down the aisle in jeans and talked to someone next to me with STAFF written on his shirt. I thought Thurston Moore must be stopping by to say hi to Ben Marcus or Tao Lin since Thurston Moore is sitting on the Poetry Pop and Hip-Hop panel in this building at this time too. Thurston Moore moved to the stage area and I took a picture of him. While taking the picture, I thought, This is Thurston Moore’s audience.

***

Blurry Photo of Thurston Moore taken by me.

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While great things will be happening in several venues throughout the day, and you can see a full listing of the events and locations here, here’s a suggested itinerary (a personal cheat sheet with some Tough Draw Alternates). Enjoy!

10:00am – The Legacies of John Updike and David Foster Wallace – a panel of distinguished critics discuss their work. (Borough Hall Courtroom)

11:00am – The Future of Literary Fiction – Keith Gessen and T. Cooper will discuss, among other things, how digitization impacts the creative process. (Borough Hall Community Room)

12:00pm – Real Surreal – Definitely don’t want to miss Tao Lin and Ben Marcus reading from their latest work. Any rubric that brings together two writers seemingly at opposite ends of the literary spectrum is one worthy of note. (St. Francis College Reading Room)

Tough Draw Alternate 12:00pm – Poetry Pop and Hip-Hop – A panel including Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) and Matthew Zapruder will discuss how poets, songwriters and rappers push language in new and good ways. (St. Francis Auditorium)

1:00pm – Editor as Author – Discipline and Freedom – Heidi Julavits and Hannah Tinti, who tower as both editors and authors, couldn’t be more suited to discuss the roles that editors play in the lives of writers. (St. Francis College Reading Room)

Tough Draw Alternate 1:00pm – Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia - Emily Gould (formerly of Gawker) will interview Rasskazy contributor Dmitry Danilov. Dale Peck and Francine Prose read. (International Stage)

2:00pm – Movin’ On Up – Don’t miss Lewis Lapham, storied editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, discussing the myth and reality of upward mobility. (Borough Hall Community Room)

Alternate 2:00pm – Life Stories - Sarah Manguso and Philip Lopate are among the authors who will be discussing bad breaks and tough choices in writing memoir. (Brooklyn Historical Society)

3:00pm – Literary Masters – Three highly-revered authors read: Paul Auster, Russell Banks and Francine Prose (St. Francis Auditorium)

4:00pm – Faith and Fiction – Chris Adrian, Rene Steinke and Benjamin Anastas discuss reconciling religion and the ambiguities of character. (St. Francis College Reading Room)

5:00pm – Happy Ending Reading Series – End your jaunt with some risk-taking writers  and comedians Jonathan Ames and David Cross with music by Jonathan Coulton (Main Stage)

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