Emily Gould's "Friendship" as a Result of Universal Hypocrisy

Text: Lisa birger

In early July in New York "Farrar, Straus and Giroux" comes out "Friendship" - the debut book of the writer named Emily Gould. This outstanding bad work with all the signs of the New York debut novel (about Brooklyn, about single girls in the search, about modern families, about success) is remarkable not because of how bad it is written, but rather in the name of the author. Perhaps you have never heard of Emily Gould, however, it is not the first year she flashes in the news feeds - and usually for not very funny occasions.

And this story began, perhaps, so. In April 2007, the editor of the site Gawker Emily Gould went on the air show Larry King. She was wearing a red dress, red lipstick, her neckline was flawlessly ajar, and her hair was beautifully arranged in large waves, like many people have only twice in their lives: at the graduation party and at the wedding party. “You seem like a nice girl,” Jimmy Kimmel, the host of the broadcast, began the conversation. "I am a nice girl ..." - began to answer Emily, but she did not give to finish.

Do you know who Emily Gould is? Would live in New York, perhaps, would know. At the beginning of the 2000s, you would read her blog, Emily Magazine, with long lyrical notes about everything in the world, later overlaid with tags like “feelings”, “feminism” and “what is love?”. Well, all the same, we present what a girl's blog about feelings looks like, where each entry is many times longer than any journal article. It is a sin to laugh at them, because we all once wrote them. Then Gould was the editor of Gawker, wrote caustic and generally funny articles about celebrities. It will be unfair to reproach her for this, because we ourselves are happy to read all this. We all know this headlong feeling of freedom on the Internet, 15 minutes of fame. Beautiful girl puts selfie, witty - tells a joke. In general, Emily Gould has been doing the same thing for a long time, which we all do with varying success: trying to draw attention to ourselves. Until she was crucified for it.

Presenter Jimmy Kimmel, who was still working for Larry King in April 2007, didn’t find anything funny in the articles about thick Kevin Costner illustrated by Jabba from Star Wars. Inviting Emily to his show, he chastised her for Gawker, like a little girl. They say that the hour is not long when any celebrity dies because of your jokes - some psychopath will find and kill her, inspired by the blog. Like, when you go to hell, someone will surely strike a text message at Gawker: "Look who came." Following Kimmel, a crowd of Americans overwhelmed Emily with reports of how disgusting she was. Gould cried. She began to panic attacks. She left work and stopped writing a blog. But this is not the end of the story.

In May 2008, Gould returned with repentance. She washed the makeup off her face and flashed on the evening air with an apology. Everyone was happy to take into their arms repentant blogger. She was photographed on the cover of the Sunday supplement to The New York Times. She wrote a great penitential essay for the whole of modern culture. “There is nothing surprising in the fact that we are ready to believe everyone’s innermost thoughts,” she wrote. “But we are endlessly shown that the shortest way to recognition is public humiliation.” Perhaps she condemns this path, but then she herself came to glory in the same way. She was paid 200 thousand dollars advance payment for the book of memories. She wrote a rather helpless book that barely sold ten thousand copies. Simple arithmetic - $ 20 copyright from one book - proves that for the publisher it was not the best deal. It was probably invested against its will, not even in Emily, but in a new social phenomenon - a repentant blogger.

Now Emily Gould has a boyfriend-writer and her own little business - "Emily's books", an electronic publishing house that revives long-forgotten books by mostly female authors. And in early July, her first novel came out. This is a very diligent, of course, slightly autobiographical book about two girlfriends in New York, moderately critical of the characters, in order to pass at the same time both for criticizing conditional hipstership and for chanting it - rather "Sweet Francis" than "Girls". It is impossible to read it. Boring Gould so wants to look like a good writer, so studently zealously exposes the "vices of society" and just vices, so literally follows the rule "write about what you know", which naturally reduces her cheekbones from her prose.

But this story is not about how the writer you hear about for the first time in your life wrote a bad novel. And not even about the impossibility of being "good" on the Internet. And only a little bit about how cool it is to be “bad”, even if in the end Kevin Costner himself will never forgive you for a photojab (imagination helpfully draws a cob about Nikita Mikhalkov and Kendrick Lamar).

Most likely, this is a story about how Emily Gould, a former clerk of new media, decided to expose modern society, but did not notice its main flaw - an obsession with success. And she herself became another victim of this obsession. Because all this is a brilliant decade, all these hipsters, mobsters, bloggers and gokers, all this is - it is from the impossibility in the twenty-first century "just to be yourself." Even the phenomenon of the normcor came to us with some aplomb: that's what I am, I don't give a damn about fashion. In work, in clothes, in maternity, we are desperately trying to take place. We write sheets of blogs, if only they would pay attention to us. We are proud of our collectible nike. We bring up our babies using the Montessori system and poke their weak fingers into the clay to develop their fine motor skills. We are ready to put ourselves on the Internet as idiots and offend everyone who comes our way just to amuse our little ego. And when it turns out that nobody loves us, we will desperately fit in with the side of good. Were bloggers - it turned out to be shameful to be a blogger - let's become writers? They wrote funny stinging texts about real people - oh, they were offended, - well, we will make fun of the heroines of the fictional. But please do not stop paying attention to us.

This is a story about hypocrisy. The fact that there are so many people on the planet that we begin to believe that we exist only in the light of searchlights. And we write-write-write our bad novels, if only we would notice. Poor we are poor.

The photo: Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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