Cover of And The Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould

Updated

I'm told by the author herself that the book is not actually related to her New York Times Magazine cover story or Gawker/blogging so I changed this post to reflect that, but is in fact a memoir of her teens and twenties. I'm looking forward to reading it either way and will surely be posting and hopefully interviewing her about it for some publication or other, so stay tuned.

Emily Gould's And The Heart Says Whatever, is on my list of 2010 Books I Want To Read (which is incomplete, but I'm making my way through it). The cover just got posted on Amazon, with a blurb by Curtis Sittenfeld. (I tried to book her for In The Flesh but no luck, alas.)

The week's obligatory blog post

I don't have much to say about Emily Gould's article, other than to say that by Sunday, it'll be so over, with this much attention already, and that while there are valid criticisms of the piece, the umpteen NYT commenters seem to think there is something inherently wrong with writing about oneself. Don't read memoirs much, do they? Granted, they are different types of writing, and a book gives you room even a 7,000+ word article doesn't, but still. As for why they published it, if that's not obvious (readers!), then those people don't really get publishing do they? Also, it should be noted that even though she wrote a very personal piece, Gould also wrote an obituary for personal blogs.

This was my favorite part:

Knowing that the worst of my online oversharing is still publicly accessible doesn’t thrill me, but it doesn’t scare me anymore either. I might hate my former self, but I don’t want to destroy her, and in a way, I want to respect her decision to show the world her vulnerability.

Okay, second favorite (as in, ones I most related to):

I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone.

So far this post from Shoot the Blog has been the most interesting and original:

When I went to read the piece (which will run in the magazine this weekend) I was struck by how Elinor Carucci those images were! Of course, they turned out to be by Elinor Carucci. But really, here is a photographer who delivers editorial imagery that is barely distinguishable from her own work. She and Gould even look alike. This pairing is kind of amazing:


photograph by Elinor Carucci for The New York Times




Elinor Carucci, from her series Closer, 2000