26 May 2008

The Post in Which I Omit a Name

So this morning I woke up at 7:30 to my incessantly buzzing blackberry, which informed me I had five missed calls and 6 emails in the past five minutes. It was a publishing friend asking me if I had seen the cover of the NYT Magazine yet and had I read the TEN PAGE story written by a former co-worker? Now I was interested and already intensely jealous. She’s only 25, how did she get on the COVER of the NYT Mag, let alone inside?! I dragged my laptop from my living room into my bed (not a very far journey) and clicked over to the story. The cover shot looks like an ad for a geek porn magazine. The inside story wasn’t any better: ten pages of what was essentially verbal diarrhea. A soap opera version of a 20-something blogger’s life — and not a well-written one at that. She did a lot of name-dropping of mutual acquaintances, shared her “feelings,” relationship details and other things that besides from being TMI, are definitely not Times-worthy items. In fact, this story and individual are sooo past their 15 minutes of fame, I am starting to wonder about the credibility of the Times. Is there really nothing newsworthy going on?

Sadly, I had just seen this girl at a party last weekend, where she clearly hadn’t grown up in the two years since we’d worked together. At the publishing house, she thought herself to be the “Queen Bee” of our office. When she walked down the hall, it was like high school. People, including our seasoned, intelligent managing editor, were intimidated by her and I never understood why. She wasn’t exceptionally deft at picking books or handling authors, she didn’t prove to have much of a talent for any form of writing besides blogs, and she sized you up in about five minutes, formed her opinion and seemingly there was nothing you could ever do to change it (though some people certainly did try). She thought she had a clear sense of who I was, but when we had to meet about an author just before she was leaving the company, she learned she had misjudged me. It was interesting to see the expression change on her face: from conceited, to slightly humble (?) and a bit rocked. I won’t go so far as to say she had a new-found respect for me, but there was a neutrality that existed in those last few days that left me feeling a little smug.

And, because I’ve grown up since I started writing this quirky post, it’s time I say good for her for getting published the New York Times Magazine. It’s just too bad it wasn’t for writing anything other than a very lengthy blog post.


P.S. It seems there are other bloggers who agree with me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I read that story! I don't know you, or her, but from the writing of the story I was wondering to myself why anybody really cared about other stuff she wrote.

My priest friend read it too, and after I posted about a dinner about her house, she emailed me a note suggesting that this chick was a good cautionary tale about oversharing... it was all very meta.