Ok, so I must comment on Emily Gould’s recent NYTimes piece, Exposed, in part because I really enjoyed it and in part because people keep sending it to me.

I read the piece expecting to hate it — as some of you know, I have a knee-jerk frustration response to the microcosm of media in New York. I just get irked that someone can pee in a jar and drink it in New York and suddenly it’s world news with a six figure book deal and a reality show and we’re all fascinated because did you see that? Someone in New York peed in a jar and drank it!, while meanwhile you can have an entire small town of collective urine drinkers in, say, Michigan and no one notices or cares. I’m talking about things like the Save Karyn book here.

Despite going in with this bitter perspective, ready to hate Emily Gould for all her New York media myopia, I actually came out of the article with deep sense of compassion and empathy for her. I related to many portions of the article, for instance her relationship with Gawker commenters:

It wasn’t quite friendship. It was almost something deeper. They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations. They were the voices in my head. They could be ignored sometimes. Or, if I let them, they could become my whole world.

I also had complete deja vu around trying to explain to a therapist the weird kind of microcelebrity that blogging can provide:

“It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity,” [my therapist] told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I obviously wasn’t “famous” in the way that a movie star or even a local newscaster or politician is famous … but I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it.

Andreas has been with me many times when people have walked up to me on the street and talked to me about my blog or my job or my book or whatever, and I asked him to read the article. “It might help you understand me and my weirdnesses better,” I said.

After reading it, he looked at me and shrugged. “I guess I understand why you relate to it,” he said. “But the woman who wrote it is completely insane. You are not insane.”

I had to explain that no, Emily Gould is not crazy. She just got hit with the whole blog fame thing way more suddenly, on a much larger scale, and when she was younger than me. I started blogging when I was 25, and it was a much smaller blogosphere back in 2000. I was able to make my mistakes in oversharing, overexposure, and unmitigated egotism in a smaller pond, without the entire New York media world and Jimmy Kimmel staring at me. In some ways, blogging and I grew up together, so by the time I was doing national television, I’d already had lots of media training … a luxury Emily Gould didn’t seem to have. I also developed some personal boundaries before I had thousands of daily readers, a luxury Emily Gould also didn’t have.

But Andreas isn’t alone in his response. It seems like only a certain kind of blogger has enjoyed the article (my blogger/media compatriot Brittney Gilbert commented “This mirrors my own experience in so many ways that it is frightening”) while many others see Emily Gould as crazy or sad. My author friend Michelle was like, “Does it seem pathetic and weird to you? All those Gen Yers wanted to be web-lebrities?”

I had to answer that, uh, nope: didn’t seem pathetic and weird at all. Or rather, maybe it was pathetic and weird, but I totally related. I guess that’s the thing: if Emily Gould comes off as crazy, then you haven’t experienced the weird mind-fuck that is the neurosis soup of blogging, privacy, exposure, and the intoxicating feedback loop of online commenting. Is it sad that so much of a fragile ego can be built on comments from strangers on the Internet? Probably, but I dare you to ignore dozens (or hundreds!) of people telling you every day how awesome or awful you are.

Anyway, the article is well worth reading, to see which side of the fence you come down on. Do you relate?