Emily Gould Introduces Oversharing To New York Times Magazine
"I'm going to try to never write about you," I whispered to the boy whose shoulder my head was on two nights ago. Oops. Emily Gould has made a writing career of her personal life and built a personal life around her writing career, exposing her relationships on a personal site and on Gawker when she was a writer on this site. Now, in a cover story for this coming weekend's New York Times Magazine, she does an accounting. "What I gained-and lost-by revealing my intimate life on the web," goes the cover line-over a sultry photograph of the author sprawled across a bed, a laptop power cord suggestively looping towards her tattooed arm.
This article might have been a reflection of the cost of compulsive indiscretion; I suspect, however, that it will merely broadcast the humiliation of Josh Stein, Leon Neyfakh and other former boyfriends to a larger audience and at greater length. Don't feel too sorry for Stein, however. He already wrote his own piece on "the dangers of blogger love" in Page Six Magazine. Gould and Stein-the web equivalent of the vicious couple of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?-have created a small-scale publishing industry out of mutual abuse. The cover story in the Times Magazine is its biggest hit yet.