In Which Gawker Infiltrates Candace Bushnell's New Novel
Sex and the City author and former Observer columnist Candace Bushnell has a new novel coming out, called One Fifth Avenue. It concerns the various doyennes and bratty socials who live at One Fifth Avenue—the most important Manhattan apartment building of our time. (It has "thick, pre-war walls"!) Gawker.com is mentioned by name throughout the book, as one of its writers makes life hell for its residents:
"Thayer Core was a blogger on one of those vicious new websites that had popped up in the last few years, displaying a hatred and vitriol that was unprecedented in civilized New York. The things the bloggers wrote made no sense [to Philip]. The comments made no sense to him. None of it appeared to be written by humans, at least not humans as he knew them. This was the problem with the Internet: The more the world opened up, the more unpleasant people appeared to be.
...Thayer Core was a bully, and like most bullies, he lacked courage. He was far too fearful to take physical action, striking out at the world instead from behind the safety of his computer."
Writers always get thin-skinned once they've had a taste of success. We'll be so audacious as to say that if Candace Bushnell came of age in the early aughts, she'd be holed up in her apartment with a laptop, gleefully throwing e-bricks like the rest of us. (As they say, if you want to be famous, throw a brick at someone famous.) Nothing personal, just business.