Emily Gould – Exposed
Ever since the news broke that former Gawker editor Emily Gould would be writing the cover story for this weekend’s New York Times magazine, everybody in media has been sharpening their knives. Filmoculous weighed in with a “ridiculous amount of nonsense” andSalon’s Broadsheet had this to say:
“I loved Emily Gould’s story. Is it “self-indulgent melodrama,” as one of the (nearly 1,000, as of this writing) commenters on the NYT site sneered? Absolutely. (By the way, I adore self-indulgent melodrama. My favorite movie is “Magnolia.”) Should it have been cut, by at least a thousand words? Yup. Is she annoying, an exhibitionist, a narcissist? She is. But I still found the story compulsively readable, an absorbing sketch of a certain female confessionalist — the brazen, foolish insistence that everything in her life is fair game, the craving for the spotlight and the withering in its glare. Gould captures the weird love-hate relationship that develops between online writers and their commenters (“They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations,” she writes. “They were the voices in my head”) and the eerie modern phenomenon of being a complete shut-in who is conversing online with people all day. By the time she started having panic attacks on the floor of the Gawker bathroom, I was hooked. Dang but I love a good narrative striptease.”
