Sep 4, 2008 12:19 PM
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New York, 9:24 AM
Wed Feb 10
56 posts in the last 24 hours
Today, a blog post on Glamour's Smitten talked about how it feels when an ex of yours gets married. Which makes it the second essay writer Joanna Goddard has written about Page Six Mag's Joshua Stein. Add this to the New York Times Magazine article by former Gawker Emily Gould that mentioned her relationship with Stein, which followed his own Page Six Magazine essay about the dangers of blogger love, and you have... well, you have an entertaining media clusterfuck. Why does it seem like he's the most written-about ex in New York? Hey, that's just what happens when writers date. Now that everyone's a writer—armed with their blogs and Tumblogs and lifestreams and the like—the scribes among us should just stop dating each other now. Think of it this way:
Post-breakup, a writer's first instinct it to write or blog it out. This is their nature. It's totally fine if kept confined to a Word doc or a friends-only LiveJournal blog or whatever.
But still, you must work, work—as Chekhov said. Maybe you're freelancing, and you're miserable, and all you can think about is this fucking ex of yours who keeps popping up in the damndest of places—whether it's their byline in a magazine or at the corner deli or at a media party. And hey, why not mine your life for stories? That's what your writing teacher at that night class at the New School told you!
You might even earn some sweet freelance cash from a personal essay—or if you're really good, a Modern Love in the Sunday Times, which is the pinnacle of the breakup essay. You can then use the $500 to buy an awesome dress, which is sort of like an investment in a future relationship. (It's easier to catch flies at media parties with honey!)
And so you write. Whether what you write is good or bad, the fact is that it's published, and it's out there. The written-about ex might form a rebuttal. They might not. They might get a six-figure book deal which allows them to feature you in any damned essay they want, like Ms. Gould! That essay might get leaked and it might contain certain bits about your sex life or your musculature.
Of course, there have been other, more luminary, writer couplings. Sartre and de Beauvoir, Plath and Hughes, the Bloomsbury Group. Do not pay attention to them. They had no high-speed Internet.
And so the vicious cycle continues. But enough about work. You doing anything Saturday night?
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