I read it in one day. Emily Gould's voice is an adrenaline rush, and she hooks you, or at least she hooked me because I could relate to her so well. She had two cats with a boyfriend, and they lived together in Greenpoint for 6 years, and then she got a job while he chased his rock and roll dreams and worked some dead-end schtick and smoked pot on the couch, and she got tired of it but couldn't say it and then she cheated on him with a coworker. But even after all that she still loved the boyfriend and believed they would get back together. Until she wrote something about him and his mom told him to tell her to threaten legal action. And then she made out with young, beautiful Keith Gessen (which eventually turned into nothing but friendship) and lived in a sublet and roach-infested squalor and eventually she got back on her own 2 feet and wrote a book.
(Okay, so that story isn't exactly my story, but it's damn close enough.)
I'm with her in her intent. A lot of reviews and comments on the book jacket say this collection of essays is an elegy to the NYC of her 20's, but for me, this entire book is an elegy to her failed relationship with "Joseph" and a way to explain the guilt that must have nagged at her about publishing the NYTimes Mag story that chronicled their break-up and her quitting Gawker. She's attempting to say she is sorry.
I dont' think this is the way to apologize. But I guess I never had the energy to write that elegy. At least not in book form. But if you go through this blog over the period of May 09-September 09, you might get in the mood to turn on a depressing French movie (say, Making Plans for Lena, which I saw yesterday at IFC).
All that being said, which I guess sums up to the fact that I think I would like Emily Gould if I met her, I couldn't help but think that most chapters in the book stopped short. I remember when my favorite professor told me not to "neatly cap off" the ends of my poems, which is my #1 tendency, and it seems like Gould writes easily, races to the point, and then caps her essay with some weirdly related emphatic sentence or idea. I wish she had been given more time to write this book, to really go over it and put more of herself in it... some self-reflection. She doesn't need to tell us she was gutted by her breakup, but I feel she needs to give us a brief paragraph about her feelings outside of the medical "anxiety attack" analysis.
Maybe it was just too soon. I'm still making sense of the past 3 years after graduation. But I hand it to Gould. It takes guts, along with the undeniable need to write.
