Emily Gould: And The Heart Says Whatever
Tags: emily gould, gawker, and the heart says whatever
Perhaps your idea of a riveting coming of age memoir is one filled to the brim with episodes of Augusten Burroughs-style, pulling-down-the-ceiling craziness – the sort that are inevitably revealed as half-true, at best -- in which case Emily Gould’s new book of youthful remembrances And The Heart Says Whatever might not be for you. Neither a catalogue of childhood horrors or the Letters to a Young Blogger tract that some were anticipating from the ex-Gawker gamine, Whatever is rather a 28 year-old writer’s diaristic self-examination of how she got from there (living out Chrissie Hynde songs as a suburban Ohio co-ed) to here (balancing a Brooklyn-based life as a yoga instructor with a burgeoning writing career). That turns out to be enough, as it’s in the skillful telling that Gould succeeds, gliding effortlessly and fatalistically through a blizzard of potentially formative events ranging from her deflowering, at 17, of a younger virgin, to her stint as an ass-busting blues bar waitress, to her disastrous attempt at integrating a new puppy into her life, all while studiously avoiding fashionable self-deprecation and moments of can’t-you-just-see-Zooey-Deschanel-for-this manufactured whimsy.
In the way it suggests Gould’s impressive recall of events both large and inconsequential, and demonstrates her facility for turning each memory over as if in her hands for inspection, Whatever more than justifies its existence, achieving a measure of authorial gravitas that turns an inner journey into a relatable read. It will also, however, leave some readers blue-balled due to the author’s refusal to turn her scalpel onto the media empire that birthed her as a public persona or the failings of the crumbling-before-our-eyes Manhattan publishing world. The zeitgeist of mid-aughts media is conspicuously absent from Gould’s account. Her infamous face-off with Jimmy Kimmel on live TV over Gawker’s “Stalker Map” in 2007, dramatic departure from her editorial perch at Gawker over ethical concerns soon after, subsequent 8,000-word soul-baring essay “Exposed” for the New York Times magazine in summer 2008, and eventual targeting by Gawker itself in a half-witted effort at hoisting-by-petard – it all gets short shrift, perhaps because Gould perceives that the only thing more fleeting than Internet fame is Internet disaccord.
Gould also likes cooking – a lot. In addition to her long-running primary blog Emily Magazine, she now operates a Tumblr called Things I Ate That I Love in which she lends consideration to her various cooking and eating experiences in addition to indulging ephemeral fixations on, say, Megan Fox or the meaning of a friend’s new tattoo. She’s also currently hard at work on a regularly recurring Internet show called Cooking the Books, on which she casually interviews selected authors about their upcoming titles while preparing a dish (usually in montage form) with an attempted thematic tie-in and during which no gaffe, self-inflicted or otherwise, will fail to register on the hostess’s noticeably fluid face. SuicideGirls recently called up Gould in Brooklyn to discuss her new book, the evolution of the cooking show and its place in her future, her expanding canvas of body art, and how she’s putting the past to bed.
Ryan Stewart: What are you working on today?
Emily Gould: Oh, God. I have this thing I’m working on. I’m not usually this terrible and flakey with deadlines, but it was originally due at the beginning of May -- at the end of the first week of May -- and then I got an extension to June 1st. Now I’m blowing that deadline, too. It sucks, because I handed in one draft of the piece and then I got back revisions and I became so daunted by them that I just had to hide from the piece for a while. I think there are two personality types for this kind of stuff: One is like the kid who got the test back from the teacher as a child and really studied the test and was like ‘What did I get wrong? How can I do better next time?’ But I’m the kid who stuffs the graded test down into the bottom of the backpack and tries to forget it ever happened. I’m more like ‘B plus? Okay, great, fine!’ It does make the whole editorial process kind of excruciating.
RS:
Is the next cooking show coming up soon?
EG:
I think we’re going to have it done this week. It’s Julie Klausner. I just saw the rough cut yesterday and I’m really excited about it. We try to keep things pretty brief, because it’s, you know, the Internet? [laughs] We really think the ideal thing is for it to be, like, five minutes long, and I think even that is kind of long for the Internet. But Julie’s is all good and it’s so funny. It was really hard to figure out what to cut, because she’s amazingly funny all the time and everything she says is golden. I think we might actually experiment with a slightly longer episode for this one, cause it’s awesome.
RS:
I heard you’re having Will Leitch on soon, for his book. I worked with him once at a little magazine called Venture Reporter.
EG:
Oh, cool. Was that a long time ago?
RS:
Yeah, it was around 2001-2002. Mostly what I remember about him is that the ladies seemed to love him.
EG:
As a lady who loves him, I feel qualified on that. He’s always in a relationship, so you feel, like, safe around him. He’s never gonna hit on you and be inappropriate, so you can get super-drunk with him – not that I’ve ever done that. Also, he just has these non-threatening good looks, the boyishly handsome thing, where you’re like ‘Oh, it’s just Will, it’s just Will!’ and then you have a sex dream about him, and you’re like, ‘What the fuck? Do I want to have sex with Will?’ It’s horribly jarring, and then you have to have your friends show you a video he made for the Internet a million years ago that features him several pounds heavier than he is now and topless in the shower and then you’re like ‘Okay, cured.’ [laughs] We actually go back, weirdly, to way before I worked at Gawker. We had the same editor of our young adult novels and we’ve had all these other weird career similarities. Astrology is bullshit, but I totally believe in it. Our birthdays are one day apart, so maybe we have some kind of astrological similarity. We’ve also both been humiliated by blowhards on national TV, we both worked at Gawker Media, and our books just came out on the same day too.
RS:
Since you brought it up, do you feel like Jimmy Kimmel got the best of you in that confrontation?
EG:
Oh, yeah. I come off as such an asshole in that interview. I completely sympathize with everyone who makes fun of me. Maybe I wasn’t wrong about what I was saying, but I was saying it in the most obnoxious way possible. I had also been put in the super-awkward position of defending this thing that I didn’t create. It was just part of my job to make sure the interns were doing a good job of maintaining it, so it was hard for me to defend it, really. Yeah, that hugely sucked. Also, usually when you do a remote, like with the Larry King people, there’s usually a monitor set up so that you can see the other people who you’re having a conversation with and they didn’t have that for me -- on purpose, I think. It was really hard to tell by the tone of Jimmy Kimmel’s voice whether he was fucking with me, and you can see if you watch the video – which I’m not enough of a masochist to do – the moment when I realize that he’s not fucking with me, he’s not kidding. It’s kind of hilarious, because you can see it in my eyes. I’m like ‘Oh shit, he’s serious.’ To me it was inherently ridiculous that someone who had a TV show predicated on the idea that both he and his whole audience were drunk would get upset. That was what The Man Show was, and then he got upset because someone said that they saw him drunk walking down the street? You really feel like you have this pristine public image that has been punctured somehow by a random sighting of you? Give me a fucking break. But, I don’t know, it’s not my job to defend what Gawker does anymore. I don’t have to say that they were, like, on the side of truth and justice and the truth must out, thank you! I just think it’s pretty ridiculous when people who get paid millions of dollars complain about their privacy being violated.
RS:
I’ve always approached you as sort of a humorist, whether on Gawker or other platforms you’ve written on.
EG:
Well, I hope that I’m funny. I think my sense of humor is pretty dry and sarcastic. I do have a problem a lot of the time where people will interpret something that I’ve said or written as being very serious or earnest, when I was actually totally kidding. And it’s hard because you can’t really say ‘Oh, you don’t get it, I was just kidding’ without sounding like a pompous jackass. What you’re basically saying is ‘Oh, my God, I’m so sorry that you were too stupid to understand what I was trying to say.’
RS:
I love that moment in the Kathryn Borel episode of Cooking the Books where she sort of casually says “You know, I killed a man once,” and your reaction to that.
EG:
[laughs] We had trouble editing that, because we felt like we had to introduce this information about her book. It’s an important aspect of the book, but it is hard to go from “Killed a man” to “Here’s how to make Hollandaise.” It’s hard for me to watch the cooking show sometimes because I’m super-annoyed by my facial expressions. I really wish I didn’t have such a spastic, hyper-mobile face, but oh well, that’s just how my face is. And my laugh? Oh, Jesus Christ. It’s been hard going around doing all of these interviews, because I feel obligated to watch them and listen to them, but it doesn’t give me a narcissistic thrill. It’s not fun.
RS:
Did you create the show just as a way of keeping a foothold in the literary community, or does it figure into the big plan?
EG:
Oh, my grand scheme? Actually, this is a great example of how something that’s an Internet idea can become something real. I think I tweeted something about how I wished there was a Reading Rainbow for adults. I wished that there was a show about books that made books actually seem fun and interesting, because it really doesn’t exist at all. And my friend Val, who was just finishing up film school and was kind of casting around for a project, saw the tweet and wrote to me to say ‘Hey, we could do that, we could do something like that, we’d just have to figure out what it would be.’ And I thought ‘Okay, great!’ and we probably shot the first episode maybe two weeks after that happened. So, it was sort of a natural thing. I love cooking and I live in New York where all of these writers either live or hang out or visit because they’re on tour promoting their books, so it’s like, why not? Insofar as how it fits into my career scheme, it’s just hard to be by yourself all day, hunched over your computer. It’s not the most fun sometimes, and to sort of have a project that’s collaborative and actually be part of a team with Andrew and Val and work on the show is a really nice counterpoint to pretty much everything else that I do.
RS:
Given your history at Hyperion, it’s kind of surprising that you haven’t found your way back into the editorial side of publishing.
EG:
I don’t think they would have me, even if I wanted to be in book publishing right now. It’s kind of a bummer, it really seems like everyone I know – with the exception of my super-talented Free Press editor Amber Qureshi – who is a great, young, up and coming publishing person is bailing. They’re either leaving the industry all-together or they’re doing some sort of Internet venture that has to do with publishing, or they’re going over into the magazine world. I don’t see myself being in editorial ever again. I had a lot of fun working on the books that I worked on at Hyperion, but I don’t actually think that I’m the world’s best editor. I did the thing that bad editors do, actually, which is I would take writing and make it sound more like me. A good editor takes a piece of writing and makes the writer sound more like themselves.
RS:
Do you think Gawker narrowed your career options? In the book you talk a little about the feeling that bridges were being burned during that period.
EG:
I say that I felt unemployed and unemployable. I was pretty down. It isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. As you get older you go further down one path and other doors close to you, and that’s just part of the deal. It would be really hard for me to imagine going to work again at a big corporate blog. I don’t think I’ll ever have a job-job again. Right now I teach yoga. If I ever have an office-y, you-have-to-wear-non-spandex-clothes job again, it would probably be a teaching job. I’m loathe to acknowledge this, but Gawker is kind of the ultimate as far as working for the Internet goes, and I don’t see why any print publication would hire me. I have zero print experience. I could go back and do something that reaches fewer people, but it would feel like taking a step back. So, yeah, that sucks for me! [laughs] God, Ryan, I’ve never really thought of my career in such a holistic way before.
RS:
Gawker is actually directly mentioned only infrequently in the book, but when it is you express regret for the meanness of some of your barbs. Do you see a qualitative difference in the Gawker-style put-downs you created back then and what you still do on your blog?
EG:
Well, humor can be really nasty, and one of the surest routes to Funnyville is via super-duper meanness. During my time at Gawker I was not really too quick on the uptake. I should have noticed that this was happening way before I actually did -- and to my credit, when I did notice that it was happening I quit -- but Gawker used to be less powerful than the people it was making fun of. Then it started to become more powerful than the people it was making fun of, and that’s just not as funny. The first rule of comedy is that you can make fun of anyone as long as you’re not bullying or beating up on someone who’s obviously weaker than you. It’s not funny to be, like, “Hey guys, look at that homeless drunk guy – he’s retarded!” It’s like “O-kay…” And that’s the position that Gawker was in. It was a gradual shift, it happened over the course of many months, but it definitely happened. It’s never been…..I’m good at being mean. It comes naturally to me. It’s like, yay, I’m so good at it! But it doesn’t make me happy to make other people unhappy. I’m not a sadist. And once you realize that about yourself there’s really no place for you in the realm of making other people unhappy.
RS:
On your blog you recently commented on Lynn Hirschberg seemingly setting up M.I.A. with those truffle fries. Did you notice that Hirschberg also used truffles in her Megan Fox profile?
EG:
Oh, no. Poor Megan Fox! But I also feel like, okay, lady, you’re sitting down with Lynn Hirschberg. I mean, don’t you have access to Google? You have to know what you’re getting into a little bit. Maybe it’s your publicist or whoever saying “It’s the Times Magazine, you have to do this!” Did she literally do the same thing?
RS:
As I recall it was similarly put to the reader as an observation, like “Megan is having some truffle French fries in the hotel restaurant…”
EG:
She probably just takes them all to that same restaurant. I know that when I’m interviewing people it’s like, you know your places where you can go and it’s quiet and the people know you and they’ll give you some corner booth. It’s probably less nefarious than, like, fallaciously getting them to eat something, but yeah, I do feel weirdly defensive of M.I.A. and people in that situation. For people who like to talk about themselves, it’s so dangerous to just let yourself babble on and on about every thought in your head. It’s so fun, it’s so great, someone’s finally asking you about yourself -- then you read the profile later and you’re like ‘Oh, my God.’ It’s very easy to focus on someone’s worst asset. It takes a lot of restraint to not just do that over and over again, and it’s hard to write a great celebrity profile. I’ve never done it.
RS:
Some interviewers try to compensate by going overboard with the crafty editing afterwards, shaping things.
EG:
That’s just shady. The really crafty interviewers are the ones who are just silent and make you feel so awkward that you’ll appreciate anything just to fill the holes in the conversation. I love her, but this is what Vanessa Grigoriadis does, and it works! She gets amazing stuff, because people are just sitting there and total silence has fallen over the table and they’re just picking at their sushi, so they say something. You’re put in the position of making the interviewer feel less awkward, and of course they’re completely playing you. It’s actually real easy. See, this is why I’m not a brilliant, Janet Malcolm type of investigative reporter. I don’t have that much game.
RS:
Do you have any thoughts about the recent news of Megan Fox being booted off Transformers 3 because she wouldn’t get a tan and put on weight?
EG:
I haven’t really formed an opinion about that, until you just mentioned it. But it’s funny, I just posted a photo of Megan Fox from US Weekly on my Tumblr today to illustrate a quote from this early 80s Martin Amis book that I just happened to be reading for whatever reason. The narrator of the book is this caricature of an over-the-top horrible alcoholic misogynist, he’s a kind of very obvious stand-in for the author’s worst impulses and the quote says “You know, I’ve been told that I don’t like women. It’s not true, I love women. I think chicks are cool. And people have also told me that men don’t like women, period. Oh yeah? But if they don’t, who does? I’ll tell you who doesn’t like women. Women don’t like women.” And I think Megan Fox is a good example of how women don’t like women.
RS:
Have you always been alert to the dangers of being pigeonholed as one kind of woman? In the book you recall that even your feminist-minded short story teacher at the New School was trying to put every girl in her own little box.
EG:
Well, as a writer everyone is put in that kind of box. It’s what makes your work marketable and shelvable, you know? It has to be classified and categorized somehow, it’s just that the categories are so inherently problematic. It’s just the idea that something is Chick Lit if it’s by a woman and it concerns itself with love and romance, and if a man writes a similar book then it’s not that, it’s just a novel, a coming of age novel. I think of people like Nell Freudenberger and Nicole Krauss, who early in their careers took a lot of shit. It was like ‘Oh, look at this author photo, she’s clearly trying to trade on her looks and her sexual attractiveness as a woman.’ You don’t have a choice about that stuff, you know? They had to take a picture of her, so what is she supposed to do, splash acid on her face? Then she’ll be taken seriously? Now both of the writers I just mentioned are in their early 30s, they have children, and people do take them more seriously. I think our culture doesn’t really know what to do with women who are past the stage of being dewy ingénues who you can project anything you want onto, because she clearly doesn’t have her own agency or thoughts at all. You can just make up what she’s thinking and project it onto her. Then there are mommies and wise crones who the culture can revere, like Patti Smith or something. But if you’re in an in-between mode then you’re really scary, because they don’t know what to do with you. There’s no label for you, no box for you.
RS:
Is part of the reason why you decided to get conspicuous tattoos to sort of force people to lend a few more seconds of consideration to you up front than they otherwise might have?
EG:
My God. What a question! It’s interesting. I think everyone who gets tattoos gets them for a whole lot of different reasons. There’s never one primary reason. And there are some reasons that you only realize in retrospect, like ‘Oh, this might have been why I got tattooed.’ But I’ll just give you an example. My rule for comments on my personal blog, Emily Magazine, is that I will approve all comments as long as they don’t insult other people. It’s fine to insult me, but you’re not allowed to insult other people. And recently that rule put me in the position of approving this comment. I’m just gonna read it to you, if I can find it. I have to log into the site. Here we go. It’s someone named Jonathan. [in creepy Penthouse letters voice] “As cute as you are, Em, shame about the tats, though. Iiiikk! I’ve got to say that the content here just doesn’t make the grade, nor does your participation help anything along. My advice is to get on with your life. Fulfill your biological function, and leave the Internet to those that actually have something clever to say.”
RS:
Oh my.
EG:
It just goes down the line and hits all the notes. It’s like, you’re worthless, except for bearing children, and leave the Internet to those that have something clever to say? Yeah, cause that’s what the Internet’s for! [laughs] So, yeah, that guy is skeeved by tattoos. Too bad! I really wish I hadn’t gotten my tattoos now because my whole self-worth is dependent on whether he thinks I’m attractive! They are kind of a good screening process. I would never want to have a job where they wouldn’t want to hire me if I had tattoos. I’d never want to date someone who wouldn’t date someone who had tattoos, you know? So, yeah, it is definitely a way to filter out a certain kind of attention.
RS:
Do you involve yourself in any kind of tattoo subculture? I think you’re sort of in the SuicideGirls demographic.
EG:
Oh yeah? I think I’m a few body mods away from being viable for actual SuicideGirlness. No piercings, except for my ears. Although I did have my holes stretched for a while, but I let them get back to normal size so that I could just wear normal earrings again. No, I guess? I mean, I do really love tattoos. I think they’re inherently beautiful and interesting, otherwise I wouldn’t have so many of them. But I don’t go to conventions or read Inked or anything, although I probably should because Inked seems to have had an editorial makeover and gotten a lot cooler recently. But no, I’m just a person who happens to have tattoos. Unless I leave New York and go to another city or country that isn’t Asheville or Berkeley or L.A., I’m usually surrounded by people who have tattoos all the time.
RS:
Did I read correctly on your Tumblr that you have a quote from Videodrome tattooed across your stomach? I love that movie.
EG:
That’s my friend Val. Yeah, Tumblr is confusing. That’s Val, who does Cooking the Books with me. She has the best tattoos of anyone I know. She has a full scene from Barbarella, which is amazing. She has the Videodrome quote. She’s one of those people who, for a long time, never had one tattoo and over the course of a couple of years really made up for lost time in a serious way. But I love it, I think it’s awesome. It really suits her; she’s becoming more and more herself with every tattoo.
RS:
In other media you’ve been asked why you chose to write a memoir that largely recounts interpersonal relationships and mostly shies away from media critique or telling The Gawker Story. Your position is that you just don’t find that as interesting.
EG:
Well, I didn’t even work there for a year. And my friend Moe, who worked at Jezebel during part of the time that I worked at Gawker, we were talking about this the other day and she uses this great word to describe her time at Jezebel -- she says that the days were “textureless.” Everything just kind of blurred together. Honestly, when I was working there I would often actually fall asleep and dream about checking my email. I would dream about having instant message conversations. There was so little actual, physical life being lived during that time. It was so boring. It was so fraught with intensity and that go-go drive that enables you to assimilate so much information so quickly and then shut it all out again. But in terms of my actual life – I describe this in the introduction to my book -- my decisions were like ‘Okay, I can only have one more glass of wine, I have to get at least five and half hours of sleep, otherwise’…every day was like running a marathon. It was just not interesting! [laughs]
RS:
I remember also reading an interesting post on your Tumblr where you begin a dissection of the millennial generation, the late-Gen Ys, and you sort of concede that your perception has diverged from theirs and that you’re not the one to carry that torch anymore.
EG:
I think it’s up to someone from that younger generation. You and I – you’re like, 32 or so? – the Internet is kind of a second language to us. And for people who have never really had any other kind of lives – social lives – besides ones that have been heavily mediated by social media, I think they have a way better handle on this stuff. They’ve always had to deal with it. They’ve never had to adapt to dealing with it the way that we did. I’d be really interested to hear a first-person take on that. I mean, I can write about it in a certain way because we noticed it happening because it was near us. But I’d like to hear about what it’s like to have always had this stuff in your life. So, yeah, I’m probably not the person, which is fine. I’m not the spokesperson for anyone besides myself. It’s not a job that I applied for or one that I’m really interested in.
RS:
Still, I think it would be interesting to hear any criticisms that you have of the younger Gawker writers, the new generation.
EG:
I don’t know enough about the new Gawker generation, because I don’t read Gawker and I haven’t in a couple of years, to weigh in on it in an informed way. And it’s hard to make a sweeping generalization about a generation of people – how do you delimit that? But I have generally positive feelings about younger people. The people who come to my book readings tend to be in their late teens or early twenties, and they’re the ones that seem to be having a really strong connection to the book. There are also people who are forty that have had a strong connection to it -- it doesn’t mean they can’t -- but from my perspective that seems to be what’s happening. So, of course right now I’m having a surge of ‘The kids are allright! Everything’s gonna be fine!’
RS:
Do you think that, as a writer, you’ll eventually move away from a first-person perspective and start to do more third-person writing?
EG:
I would love to get away from writing about myself, and I really hope that I can. It’s my most cherished dream, to not write about myself, but we’ll have to see how it goes. I feel like I still have some work to do. I have to figure out why I do the crazy shit that I do before I turn my attention to why other people do the crazy shit that they do, but I am interested in that and always have been. Maybe that’s where I’ll go next.
RS:
Some people have commented that this book wasn’t as salacious a read as they were expecting.
EG:
[laughs] There are definitely times that I mercifully pan over to the fireplace. My mom would love to hear you say that my book is not salacious. I’ve had so many conversations with members of my family where they basically, in the sweetest, nicest, most supportive and gentle way possible tell me that I’m basically a whore. I think I’m really frank and blunt about not just sex, but also the social and emotional experiences that surround sex, what it’s like to go over to someone’s house and awkwardly watch Curb Your Enthusiasm with their roommate for a perfunctory half-hour before you do what you obviously came there to do. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m interested in. Sex in and of itself is not really my.…I’m not an erotica writer. In fact, I had to take an erotica class in college as a graduation requirement for my concentration in writing, and I did really badly in the class. I was a total failure at writing anything remotely hot, because I would always try to be funny. Being funny is a huge enemy of writing something that someone could actually masturbate to. Those are two totally opposing impulses.
RS:
Is there anything in particular we should take from that Belladonna song? “The heart says danger, and the heart says whatever.” What wisdom is Stevie trying to impart to us?
EG:
She is very profound. I think the other sort of graphic element besides the title on the cover of my book is a picture of one of my tattoos, and I think that if you were to ask anyone why they got a certain tattoo they’d probably have a really hard time telling you. There are probably twenty or thirty different things that it means or has meant to them. And the title of my book is like that, too. It has a lot of different meanings besides the obvious, but I guess the obvious one would be a sense of romantic surrender, the sense that the heart wants what it wants. It’s giving in to impulse. But as anyone who has ever given into impulse will tell you, it’s always a little bit more complicated than you think. In times that you think you’re ceding control you’re sometimes grasping control, and when you think you’re grasping control it’s likely that you’re actually giving control up. So, yeah, it’s like the Janet Jackson album.
And The Heart Says Whatever is available in bookstores now.
And The Heart Says Whatever is available in bookstores now.
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