• "Paul": A 43 year-old "academic who specializes in antiquities," Paul's "partner" (gay) is a law firm partner, and together they bring in more than $2 mil a year, no thanks to academia. They have houses in Hong Kong, NYC, and the Hamptons—and they've poured $1 million into a renovation of the Hamptons place. "There's a perilous, exciting feeling to having zigged when other people zagged," he explains. He's referring to spending lots and lots of money, there.
• "Jon": A 30 year-old commercial real estate broker in NYC, Jon's income has fallen during the recession, but he can't stand to regress from $10,000 watches and $2,000 suits. It's hard not to spend, you see: "Then you go to the pool, and it's another $300 for a cabana-and you want the good cabana, not the one on the second floor where no one can see you."

High school was bad enough when I was a teenager. But reading Wiseman's new book—which expands on the original by discussing technology and why "Mean Girl" culture has filtered down to younger girls—I realized how much trickier being a teenager is today. When I was in high school, if I got in a fight with someone, maybe we'd exchange a couple of bitchy notes. There would definitely be some behind-the-back gossip. But I never had to worry that someone was going to set up a fake Facebook account in my name or trash me on MySpace or unearth naked photos of me on their cell phone.

Still, there are some things that seem to be universal. There will always be Queen Bees, the Regina Georges of the world, who are, as Wiseman so excellently puts it, "a combination of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and Barbie." For adult women, learning how to navigate the Queen Bee isn't just an exercise in nostalgia; unfortunately, many adult relationships still seem to hew all too closely to the lines drawn in high school (or earlier).

On her website, Wiseman answers questions from teenagers and parents every day. But she's agreed to answer questions from Jezebel readers who might need advice about how to deal with the bully at work, or the friend who's mad at them but won't say why. Leave your questions in the comments or email them to Doree if you want to stay anonymous. We'll publish her answers in a separate post next week.

Why did you feel like you needed to write a new edition of Queen Bees and Wannabees?
As soon as I'm done with something I always think of things I forgot to put in. I've done that already with the new book. But definitely, about two years ago, I realized that the only thing in the book about technology was email. That is just not acceptable. I started feeling guilty that girls and moms and dads were reading it, and I do feel a very strong sense of obligation to these people. I'm constantly trying to take the things that I see and put them forward and think, what can we do about it. Specifically the things I wanted to change the most about were about technology and some of the more leading questions that I get—people always say, everything that's happening is happening so much younger. I wanted to answer that question.

How do you answer that question?
Okay, yes, girls at younger ages are acting more "teenage-like" and exhibiting mean girl behavior. But it's because we're not teaching our kids to be more mature, we're teaching them to be older. Older meaning getting to sort of typical adolescent behavior earlier, like dressing as teenagers, having them listen to teen music, laughing when they're "precocious," going with moms to get a manicure and pedicure, when they go to dance recitals dressed in hip-hop outfits. All these things we think are "cute."

What do you see on the ground, in terms of how things have changed since you wrote the first edition?
Every day I teach kids between kindergarten and college. And then the kids reach out to me all the time. Every day I get emails from kids, boys and girls. There is no part of their lives that is not connected to technology. But I don't teach on cyberbullying. I think it's complete waste of time, because it's completely integrated into everything that they do. I started out doing stuff on cyberbullying and six months into it I was like, this is ridiculous. We need to integrate it into everything that they do. All this social aggression, dominance stuff. It's exactly why they come to me about it—they say, I have a problem with this person and part of it is how I'm being attacked online.

What do you tell kids to say in that case?
I have a whole sort of system of how you deal. For example—you are hooking up with, hanging out with, however you want to call it, a guy. He used to hang out with/hook up with another girl. You're like, a junior in high school. You start going to parties where every time she sees you, she will start screaming something. It's not your name, but everybody knows it's you. She's screaming firecrotch. Or slut, or whatever. You know it's directed at you. Your boyfriend won't do anything about it. Then you find out she's completely trashing you on Facebook. So how do you handle it? I was giving a talk in Houston, for high school kids. I gave them three options. One, you say nothing and hope it goes away. Two, you talk to your boyfriend and him have to talk to her. Or you start your own Facebook war. All the kids in Houston were yelling, "Three! Three!" And I said, "That's acting like you're 12." Instead, you send one email to this person. You say exactly what you don't like. You admit you cannot control her behavior, but the drama stops here. I always give kids scripts that they can start with, but then they can put it into their own words.

How are adult women affected by Mean Girl behavior?
Some of them have never let go of their being ruled-over personas, never being able to say that they're angry with people. Women need to know how to take seriously their own feelings of conflict and of anger, and then know how to communicate that to people—because what that is is an underlying belief that someone will not take you seriously. Forget the Queen Bees—that's a minority of women. It's just that they have disproportionate power. It's this issue of not being able to express your anger because you don't take yourself seriously. Women say, I can't be the complaining bitch. They don't want to be seen as uptight. You don't know which battles to choose and so you choose none of them. It's also women knowing how to give apologies and accept apologies. If that was addressed we would have substantially less work to do.

This is the reason I prefer working with adolescents. If they're saying sort of crappy stuff to me, I know it's a rationalization of crappy behavior. I can say to them you're full of it, you think I believe that? And they're going to laugh and say, yeah, I was just trying to see how stupid you were. But that's not the way it is with adults. They get really angry with you and get really self righteous. You can't have that really honest exchange.

Is it fair to say women undermine themselves in the workplace?
I wish so much that women would take the risk to take themselves and their feelings seriously. And that means acknowledging your feelings and taking them seriously, and taking the time to think strategically through how to express that to someone. That is a way of being an authentic person of integrity. Of course this relates to relationships. This relates to intimate relationships and relationships in the workplace.

Is that why women bully other women in workplace?
When you're in a position of power and authority, it's so comfortable to you that you don't often know where or what you're doing. I just sat in a meeting with a CEO—and she texted during the entire meeting. She was acting like she was 12. She was texting during the meeting and everyone was deferring to her. It was very much like a clique. That's not the only time I've seen that. It's why I work so much with girls and boys in positions of leadership. What does leadership really mean? It doesn't mean how you perceive yourself. It's how others perceive you. It's, I get to do this and you don't. I get to dismiss people's opinions but nobody else does. It's not just women—I've certainly seen that with men. I think it's an issue of power and authority and how one uses it. And it's exactly the same if you're a 12-year-old girl or a CEO.

How do parents deal with their kids' bullying or being bullied?
I'm a parent. So I can say true stories about my own mistakes. Even to my best of intentions, I find myself doing the things that I tell people not to do. Recently, in a video chat on my website, this parent says, I'm the parent of a fourth grader, and nobody wants to be friends with my daughter. The parent says, my daughter has no friends because she's imaginative, fun and creative. I say, you love your daughter so much but I doubt that people aren't hanging out with your kid because she's imaginative, fun and creative. We define the reason they're being rejected in positive ways. My job is to say to parents, in a way they can hear, you love your child and it's so difficult to hear negative social stuff. If we can do this step by step, we can get your kid to be in a better place. It's taken me a very long time to know how to talk to parents. I bombed when the Queen Bee moms book came out. It was just a disaster. I didn't know how to present the information in a way the parents can hear.

Do Queen Bee girls have Queen Bee moms?
I get that question all the time. But there are lots of kids who have Queen Bee moms who are the opposite. And I know why people say, I know why she's this way. But nobody says that about any other role. Nobody says, oh, she's a complete wannabe or rollover. There are lots of girls who look to their mothers as anti-mentors. Like women who try really hard with plastic surgery, who look like they're 18 when they're 45. Some of their daughters are like, that's awful. It's too easy of an answer for me, though certainly there are girls like that. I guess what you need [for a Queen Bee] is a girl who has a high degree of social skills and also ruminates a lot. She holds grudges and ruminates. Then, you have her mom showing role modeling, that the path to power is based on how you look, where you come from, fitting into that box you talk about so much—and the mom saying, I'm not going to hold you accountable for crappy behavior.

How do you advise people to deal with their Queen Bee daughters?
It's easy for me to get reactive. But it's my responsibility—I've chosen this as my path. I'm trying to get information to all different kinds of people. I've worked really hard to really reach out. I think they're hiding a lot. If you talk to them about being effortlessly perfect—everybody wants to be heard, including Queen Bee moms. There's a couple different variations on Queen Bee moms. They feel like they can really speak for other people. I'm speaking on behalf of all the mothers. The worst is when Queen Bee moms have gone after me—it's usually when a woman feels like she's not being taken seriously in other areas of her life. But it doesn't excuse the behavior. Really, you can see it. They don't feel taken seriously in other areas of their life.

What kind of mom are you?
The barely getting through mom. My boys are six and a half and eight and a half. I really try and aspire to be the person I write about—the loving hard-ass mom. But there are really moments when I'm so tired when I'm like, go ahead and do it. Right now, at this moment, my sister's staying with us. My sons went into her bedroom and opened her computer to try and get on computer games. So their punishment is, they're allowed to watch TV, but they have a trade-in system for good behavior, and they're not allowed to play a game on a phone. Also, I'm teaching them how to fold their own laundry. They drop it everywhere. Socks are like a calling card around the house. Now they're doing their own laundry, but it's tough. I want them to fold it, and instead they leave it in an enormous pile in their closet. It drives me crazy but I have to let it go. They are washing and drying and taking into their room, so the idea of having it in perfect stacks is ridiculous and I have to let it go.

Have you ever had to deal with a bullying situation with your own kids?
I had a really tough time with my older child. He was acting out in school and getting into trouble. I was freaked out. It was completely bad. It turns out he was being bullied really badly by five kids and I didn't see the signs. I didn't pay attention to anything I talked about. There was someone at the school who I had trained, just by happenstance. At the time I trained her my children weren't even attending that school. But she has just been a lifeline for him. Sometimes as a mother you really aren't the person who can fix the problem. Your anxiety is so high. You can't think straight. It was a pretty life changing moment for my family and for me. I was like, oh shit, I can't see the signs of my kids being bullied. There was a lot of social aggression. Boys saying they were going to beat him up at recess. It was quite similar to girl dynamics. My kids are getting in trouble all the time—it's not an infrequent experience.

Are you going to be doing any work at Millburn High School [the high school in New Jersey where the senior girls write a "slut list" of freshmen every year]?
I got an email from the head of the PTO there and I wrote her back and I haven't heard back.

What do you do about something like the Millburn High School slut list? The girls were defending it, saying that it was something that people wanted to be on. How do you teach them that it's actually not okay to make a "slut list"?
I think you talk about it very straightforwardly. You talk about the reasons why a ninth grade girl would want to be on the list. And just because you've done it forever doesn't make it right. Just because people have been treating each other like shit forever, doesn't make it right. You don't just get a pass. That's one of those tricky things about tradition. As soon as you say it's tradition you don't question it. But that should be when you do question it. When i talk to the girls about it, I'm really straight up about it. The senior girls are like, it's so pathetic, she wants to be on it. You really have to put a mirror up to the senior girls. They can be so cold and unforgiving about a position that they were in very shortly before. I do a lot of work when I work with high school kids about that dynamic. I say straight up, some girls will want to be on it desperately. Let's talk about why. There are girls who don't want to be on it. There are girls who will lie about being on it because they're so desperate for attention. I just talk really straight up with them about what's going on. I'm like, if I'm completely wrong, you think I'm insane, you need to back it up.

The principal's reaction to the list seemed, at first, to be very ambivalent—he didn't want to search for the perpetrators because he said no one would come forward and it wasn't fair to punish the whole class.
People feel like, oh, we have a policy about that stuff—but very few people know how to implement a policy in real life. They get co-opted by the system like everybody else. It takes a really gifted administrator to know how to deal with that. It takes a tremendous amount of thought in the midst of a tremendous amount of drama. It's always really disappointing. I was speaking at a conference of superintendents. I was like, look, here's the deal. You can continue to say, if it's done outside of school grounds then we have no jurisdiction. But there is no separation with technology between outside of school and school. Now, I think that administrators are going in that direction.

But what I think is more compelling in a way, is why would girls in a perfect, high achieving school want to do this. Girls haze for social power. In my experience, what I've seen with girls who do that, is those girls are not doing well. They're not excelling in other areas. You have to excel in a school like that in something. You take what you can get. Girls haze. They always haze to dominate socially. It also shows the lack of power that some girls have, if this is the only power they can get. Their capacity is limited in other areas. It sort of goes to the heart of everything we're talking about. In Chicago, girls completely beat the crap out of each other at a powder puff game. That was exactly the same thing.

You have a YA book coming out soon too—Boys, Girls, and Other Hazardous Materials.
I'm psyched about the YA book. I'm relieved about Queen Bees, but I'm so nervous about the YA book. I try to do my best to talk about these issues in a way that's more subtle and more graceful. But what's really cool is to look at these YA bloggers. I'm watching these young women write about this stuff and it's amazing to me to watch this. The book comes out in January. It would have been really easy to write something about a really rich kid—but I'm really hopeful that this just reflects all these issues that we're talking about. I just hope this gives people more answers.

Anything else you'd like to add?
I feel so strongly the reason why I'm successful is because of women supporting me, laughing with me, buying me a drink when I needed it, sometimes being hard on me, but working with me. For girls to not have that is just unacceptable. I want girls to have that. I want to be able to talk about the ugly stuff so we can get to the good stuff.

Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and the New Realities of Girl World [Amazon]
Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads: Dealing with the Parents, Teachers, Coaches and Counselors Who Can Make—or Break—Your Child's Future [Amazon]
Boys, Girls, and Other Hazardous Materials [Amazon]
Rosalind Wiseman: Creating Cultures of Dignity [Rosalind Wiseman]
A Rite of Hazing, Now Out in the Open [NYT]

How did you come up with Stupid Pet Tricks?

Oh, jeez. Well, we're talking about the 1300s. People were rioting in the streets and there was blood and the black plague and stuff. We were hanging out and trying to come up with things because we were gonna do a morning show. We actually came up with it on Dave's morning show, which was a live, daily thing. It took place at like 9 o'clock in the morning live in New York. We had to come up with stuff that you could do repeatedly because, as it was explained to me by Jimmy Breslin, who we met sort of around the same time, it's kind of the way it is with newspapers; you have to keep refilling things or else you're facing an infinity of blanks every single day all of which have to be created from scratch. So we were trying to find refillable categories.

When I was in college I had some friends who had a Great Dane, and we were broke and so forth, and when we would get together we would drink beer and we would put socks on the dog. And that would be hours and hours of laughter. Seems a little sad now. But it occurred to me that pretty much everybody I knew had at least one thing like that that they do with their dogs or other animals. So we gave that a try; we just ran an ad. And very briefly Chris Elliot was the doofus who had to go around and gather the data.

Oh, really?

Yeah, because he was a 19-year-old who was just giving tours at 30 Rock at the time. We were his first job.

He was Kenneth the Page.

He was, basically. He was always hilarious. You know, he was always just smart and funny the second you laid eyes on him. So in that sense he wasn't exactly Kenneth the Page. But yeah, he was in charge of Stupid Pet Tricks until he could weasel his way out of it.

And you had met Letterman at The Comedy Store.

Yeah. We were both doing standup. The way I always think of it is he was sort of a graduating senior and I was kind of an incoming freshman. I was green and he was one of the two or three big men on campus. And the big man on campus at that time was, or a pretty big man on campus now too, was Jay Leno. It was also where I met Jay's wife, who's become a good friend of mine, Mavis Leno. She was around with him at that same time. And Richard Lewis. And there were these certain people who were the big guys and Dave was one of them.

The way you sort of describe it in your bio is that you almost accidentally started writing comedy. Or you had been writing it in your apartment and then it just kind of got picked up.

I think that people pretty much play the hand they're dealt. And if you're born the prettiest girl on the block, you end up finding that that's a tool you can use. And at some point if you've got the ability to sling wit, you just start doing that early on and you get a response and you just stick with it. It's just an adjustment to tackling life that you sort of make very early. I mean, I can remember making jokes in first or second grade. So at some point I was doing that even when I was an art teacher.

I actually didn't intend to be a writer, because I had a mother who meant to be a writer and she was sort of a frustrated, serious person. So she was kind of pushing me in that direction and I never considered it for even one second and I went into art. I was teaching art and then somehow I switched over and was able to get work as a writer much more quickly than I was able to get another job as an art teacher.

So all the sort of backhanded training from Mom kind of worked I guess, even though I didn't really take any writing in college. But comedy was just sort of the voice I had. I knew how to write comedy more than I could've ever written anything else.

What was it like being a woman writing comedy in the ‘70s? It seems like it was a very male-dominated world.

It's really way less male now. It's way, way better for women now. And the ‘70s — actually, I was at the way tail end of the ‘70s. I'm still friendly with Elayne Boosler, and she and I are in — there's a comedy issue of the L.A. Weekly right now, comedy horror stories. I was reading her story, which was about her initial audition at The Tonight Show.

You know, she was huge at that time. The big issue at the time for women who were doing stand up was that all the precedents in female comedy were very self-deprecating. It was all, "My boobs are so flat. My husband thinks when he looks at me and I take off my clothes, he throws up. Everyone hates me." So she actually just sort of bypassed all that and started doing political humor and sort of observational stuff about people, and so forth, and that was really considered astonishing. Anyway, when I was reading her horror story in the L.A. Weekly, I had forgotten the word they used to use about her at the time – this was the derogatory term and I heard it used repeatedly about her and I'd forgotten completely about it, except for, it used to color the way I saw myself and make me nervous about what I could and couldn't do – they used to call her "threatening." You really don't hear that word used about women doing standup now, but they kept saying, "She's so threatening. She's too threatening." And you think, "Threatening? She's a woman standing on stage telling jokes." But it was such a sort of a delicate dance you were theoretically doing, that it was crazy, the idea that that would be threatening. And she couldn't actually get on The Tonight Show at the time because she was so threatening. Whereas somebody saying, "My boobs are so little that I take off my clothes my husband throws up," weren't threatening.

Right. Because it was sort of safely within the women's realm of comedy.

Well, that was the theoretically figured-out women's realm at the time. It's so much better now. There's a virtual ton of women now doing whatever they damn well please. It's still not as easy for a woman, I don't think, to get launched in the biggest possible way the way that it is a guy, but it's certainly not the same. I remember thinking when I was doing standup back in those days, I kept hearing that word "threatening," and I kept trying to figure out how to defang myself, and what did I need to be to be not threatening and yet… it was a lot of weird calculating going on for people that I don't think is necessary anymore. It's still not so easy to get in front of a group and get laughs. That's another dilemma entirely, but it's not so much about are you threatening. Look at Lisa Lampanelli for crying out loud. "Threatening" isn't really the issue anymore. Did that answer the question?

Yeah, it does. Do you have any sort of war stories about yourself-say, in the writers' room, for example?

I actually never have had any trouble hanging out or getting on with guys that way, I don't think, although I don't think it was a smart thing for me to put work and love together. I think that's a battlefield a lot of people can get killed on, and do. And I would say that was a mistake that I really would try not to make again, although I don't know if you can not make it. When it's there and it's compelling, then there it is.

What I love is funny people, whether it's hanging out with guys or women, if they're really funny, it's like another language you all speak. I'm not the sort who would get offended by, you know like that one woman who was suing the guys at Friends because they were making dick jokes. There's a lot of sex jokes going on in any big group of guys, probably more than a big group of women, but if they're funny at least, you know, to me…

But were they funny dick jokes?

Well that's really what it is. If it's a bunch of funny people making them, then they're funny, and if it's a bunch of people just making dick jokes and they're not very funny, then it's intolerable, then you just wanna just kill yourself. But it would be the case no matter what the topic. I'm mean, I'm not the biggest fan in the world of dick jokes, I'll just go right ahead and say that, but at least if it's really funny guys, then they're funny guys.

I was always working with guys on the Letterman show. A lot of them are still my friends. They were so hilarious and sweet, such really hilarious guys, and also I was in charge.

What's your relationship now with David Letterman?

I sort of don't have one at the moment. I mean, I was on his show a few times and it was a weird experience in all ways, but I haven't spoken to him in years. You know, he's married and has a kid. And I live with someone. I don't have an ongoing relationship [with Letterman]. I'm not the sort who really stays chummy with exes. In fact, that's why I'm not on Facebook. I don't really want everyone I ever met to just go ahead and friend me.

So talk about the inspiration for The Pyscho Ex Game, since we were just talking about exes.

The inspiration for that was that I met the man I wrote it with who now lives with me, by the by. Andy. And he had a musical that I went to see a bunch of times, which was remarkable. And he and I started e-mailing, and it was a very compelling e-mail relationship, and the reason it got so compelling is we started playing a game. When we were e-mailing, I barely knew him, so I was just sort doing defensive, jokey bantering with him, because that's what I do with people I don't know. And he made some kind of remark, and I made some sort of a challenge to him, about yeah, well, whatever happened to you, I can drink you under the table three times, that kind of a "yadda yadda yadda," because I get very brave when I'm being banter-y.

And we started playing the game of who'd had the more horrible previous love life for points. And it was really, really hilarious. It got really hilarious really fast. So then I thought, "Well, this is such a great idea for a book," because we were writing the stories so kind of specifically. But it really wasn't obvious how to make it into a book. Also, two people writing a book was hard enough, but we were also using all this disparate sort of information about all these various people, and so forth. And there was no way to really turn it into a book without really reconceiving it all together –I thought it would just be, "Oh, we'll just take these and we'll just make them a book." Making that into a book was, I would say, the single hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

The other thing that was nice about it is we were trading chapters back and forth and we were each allowed to just take whatever the other person and just move it on. I would get my chapter back from him and he would have moved it to some place that I never dreamt of in a million years, but I'd think, "Wow, that's so much better for the plot than the actual thing that I had written." So it kind of went like that. But it was, I still think, a very funny and interesting idea for a book.

Actually, the book was an evaluation of narcissistic personality disorder that I was learning about. It's kind of a narcissistic personality disorder bible in my opinion, because we had both been with a lot of people, having grown up in certain situations. I don't want to tip any details, but we'd both been with a lot of people who were extremely narcissistic. Which is a thing I know a lot about. I had a piece about that in Real Simple about it. It's up on my website. Real Simple asked me to write one of these things called a Life Lesson, and so every other life lesson was, you know, an amazing little homily Mom told me at the kitchen table and so forth, and I thought, well, my big life lesson was understanding what Narcissistic Personality Disorder is. I read like 20 books on it. So I explained it. And I had a very narcissistic mother, and therefore went on to meet a lot of very narcissistic people and think of them as family.

How can you know that you're in a relationship with someone who is narcissistic? What are the warning signs?

How can you know? You know, it really has to do… the "you" in this really has to be taken under consideration, because how can you know? Maybe you're the narcissist. I mean, I can't really just say who and what it is. But there's a great book I read that I always recommend to people called Why Is It Always About You? If you're in a relationship where everything you do seems to be the instigation for a fight and you didn't even think you were getting in [a fight], you don't know why you're fighting and you didn't really mean for it to be a fight, you didn't really know it was gonna be a fight, that's a pretty big indication: that you feel continuously attacked when all you were doing is sort of being banal.

That was my relationship with my mother. Pretty much everything I said created a fight, and I couldn't figure out how not to be in a fight with her. And then finally you find out that there's a category of person who's just looking for a fight. And it's generally a narcissist, because they are sitting on a wellspring of rage and humiliation that comes from when they were three and they're untreated, and usually narcissists are not the kind of people who go to therapy. They instead just look for targets for rage. And if you're raised by one, you pretty much already know what that dynamic is, and you're likely to fall back into it with many another person. Think of it as comfort.

I don't think I'm in a relationship with a narcissist.

Well, I bet you aren't then.

But I've probably dated them in the past.

Well, it sounds like you have a nice relationship with your mother, and that's usually an indication of whether you're going to fall into the trap.

People who have weird relationships with their moms—you can't make a blanket statement, but it's often a red flag.

It's a dilemma. In fact, I'm writing a new book, another collection of short pieces, and one of the pieces is called "In Praise of Crazy Moms." And I'm holding moms responsible for the invention of comedy by having produced people who have no choice but to defend themselves all the time. The funny ones cause comedy.

Can you talk a little bit more about the book and when it's coming out?

Well, I have been writing novels. I have a newish novel out now called Nose Down Eyes Up.

The talking dog?

Yes, the talking dogs. I love the talking dogs. It's written in the voice of a guy, and it was the first time I'd done that, which I had to do a lot of research for, because I'd gotten really comfortable writing my own voice, which I sort of came upon post-Letterman show by writing columns. And I was sort of happy to have stumbled upon my own voice after a lot of years of collaborating and becoming somebody else's voice. You find yourself sort of hungry for, who am I outside of this person?

But in this book I wrote in the voice actually of a guy who works for me, who I have spent almost as much time with as I have with Andy, but in a different kind way. He's my handyman, he works for me. But in order to write in the voice of a guy, I was very busy color-correcting it with all the men I know because I was very worried I would girl-ify it and make it wussy and so forth. So hopefully I didn't do that. The new book I'm writing is gonna be another collection of short pieces, which is actually the thing I like writing best. I like writing short, funny stuff. It's an area of comfort I have as far as writing goes, if there is an area of comfort in writing. As you may know yourself, it's just the hugest pain in the ass.

And the mother stuff is in one of the pieces?

Yeah, that's one of the pieces I'm working on, "In Praise of Crazy Mothers." I'm holding them responsible for the invention of standup comedy. I documented it. Lots and lots of standup comedians have crazy mothers. It's a big, big definition of crazy. It's not clinically incarcerated in a mental institution; it's just an impossible kind of a person. Difficult and hard to get along with and so forth. The red flags of which you were speaking.

Right. Another reason why not to date a standup comic.

Standup comics—very, very difficult group of human beings. They have an upside, but they're a difficult bunch.

Have you encountered a lot of age discrimination in Hollywood?

There's a lot. It's very much easier to get a job in the entertainment industry if you're between 25 and 35, I would say. And after that, everybody starts getting paranoid. Although, there are some really good examples of older people, you know, like the guy who did The Sopranos, who did well for themselves at ages where you're not supposed to be permitted to participate. But they were able to just have an opportunity and hit it out of the park. If you at that age and have an opportunity and don't hit it out of the park, I don't think you get another opportunity. It's very youth-oriented.

Is that partly why you started writing novels?

Yeah. You know, it was partly why. When I was working on the Letterman show, I had an opportunity to write a column. And I kind of got overwhelmed by how astonishing it was to be responsible for your own work fully. You don't get that much opportunity to do that when you write television. It is a massive collaboration and it has other things that really are going for it, like a giant paycheck and the fun of collaboration, and so forth. But there's not of that, "I did this and it's by me" kind of a feeling. And I started out in art and I kind of missed that. So when I started writing things by myself it like, wow, so that's what it's like when I do things by myself. A lot of people go into creative stuff thinking that they would like particular credit for something, and you can't really get it when you're in a massive collaboration. You can get it in other ways, but you know, the battles of directors trying to get a cut and having it taken away from them or writers being rewritten by 25 other writers are, you know, well documented. It's very hard to be the initial writer on something and make it through to the end as the writer still. It's more common that you get rewritten and they take it away from you. And for the artist, that's frustrating and crazy.

When I first started writing print, and especially publishing, and I would turn in something and I'd go, "Well, do you have notes for me?," I would expect them to say, "Well, ok, we want you to just throw out the beginning, and start here and add a black child," you know, whatever kind of crazy shit they come up with when you have notes given to you in the entertainment industry. But in publishing, they don't do that at all. The editor I had at Random House used to write "G.W.F." on certain sections of what I wrote, and that would mean "goes without saying." Like I was overstating the obvious. And I was doing that sort of not because I wanted to overstate the obvious but because when you do standup and write for television, there's no such thing as overstating the obvious, you're supposed to state it two and three ways in different ways in order to make sure that the stupidest person available understood that you said something.

I mean, that's certainly the training. And the idea that you could just say something smart and leave it alone and let the person ponder it was sort of beyond delightful. Because when you write print, it's not going anywhere, it's just sitting there. Of course, with TiVo now, it could just sit there too, you could play it back and play it back. There wasn't TiVo when I started doing that. So anyway I just thought that was amazing, that the editors I was working with in publishing were trying to make me sound more like myself and not like an entirely different person, which is what the tendency tends to be in Hollywood. There's layers of executives that you give you notes when you write TV and movies. The first layer and then the second layer and then the next layer, and you just have to deal with it somehow. Some people get in big acrimonious fights and some people just give in. And it's very obvious when you watch a movie and there's just mysterious things happening that a committee got involved. When I watch movies, I always think, "Well, this had to be a committee decision, you can't tell me anybody came up with that plot point on their own" in an early draft.

That sounds really annoying.

Well, it drives a lot of people crazy, from F. Scott Fitzgerald on, you know. And then there are those people that are the beacons that the rest of us think, "Why can't I get that?" Like, nobody's saying that to Judd Apatow. He fought his way through and somehow is a franchise of his own design now. You think, "Maybe that could happen to me." Or the guy that did The Sopranos. I don't think anybody was giving him notes that he had to pay any attention to. Or the people that do The Simpsons. From what I understand, they don't really get network notes. But that's not the case for the next show that comes on that's like The Simpsons. They will give them a million notes. But once you've got a really proven success, they back off. They don't want to mess with success. But really proven success is not an easy thing to just stumble into.

One of your scripts has been on the infuriating verge of being produced for the last 20 years.

I've got a piece in that L.A. Weekly I was talking about that's about that, that's about the 25 years of this one script. It started in 1986 and it went through countless rewrites and it went into "turn around" and "turn around" and "turn around." And it was at Paramount, and then it was at Lorimar, and then various principles who backed it died, and it had Nora Ephron attached to it for a while, and it just went on and on and on and on. And every time you get your hopes up it just crashes and burns again. I would tell you the story, but I wrote it.

Oh, here it is: "Lather, Rinse, Repeat: My Hollywood Horror Story."

That's it. Exactly. And I finally – it ends with me getting called by Fox who apparently has it is their basement now. It's not in development, but they tried to stop publication of my book Walking in Circles Before Lying Down because it was a talking dog movie and I wanted, at some point, it was like 24 years in and I thought, "You know, I haven't really written this talking dog thing and, I mean, no one's ever going to see this damn thing. I'm gonna use the premise of a talking dog and a girl and advice and stuff and redo it entirely so it has no conflict with the script just because it's still an area that I like and I'm gonna write it into a book, because I would like before I die to have certain things…" So I did that, and the book is doing really well; it just went into a 24th printing yesterday. But before it came out, Fox tried to stop publication of it, even though it's a different plot, it's a different girl, it's a different dog. It's a different everything. I wrote all different stuff. My joke that I make in that article is that William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth and Richard III and nobody told him that they were the same play because they both had blood and talking kings in them.

But also it's like, they're not making the movie!

No. They're not making the movie and they have no plans to ever make the movie, because they thought it was a conflict with Marley and Me, even though Marley and Me is nothing like the movie that I wrote. But the movie's clearly never – if it were ever going to get made, it's when Nora was attached. And it didn't. And at that point the reason it didn't get made was is, we actually got to a table reading with Lisa Kudrow and Matthew Perry and Ed Norton and others reading, and Matthew Perry couldn't get through a whole sentence without starting over, was the astonishing thing to me. And I thought to myself actually, "How did they get him to do Friends? He obviously can't read. Did they give him line readings, or…?" And then about a day later he was put in rehab. Remember, there was a big mess with the rehab situation that was very all over the tabloids about a day after my reading, and I'm sure he doesn't still have that problem, and maybe he didn't have it before that. I caught him at the cusp of it. I honestly couldn't figure out how they were filming Friends the way that I was watching him at that point.

Couldn't they have gotten someone else?

Well, who knew? He didn't look weird. He looked like a regular person. I don't know what the substance issue was particularly, but it was being the top-notch actor that we know and love at that moment in time. I mean, he did go into rehab for a very long time right after that. Like I say, a day later. So I caught him at the worst of it. That was the last time I saw that movie on its way to being made. I actually thought there was a pretty good shot at that point.

When was all of that, the late ‘90s?

That was at the cusp of the new century. Because I remember writing a draft of it that said, "Me and my boy! All new for the 21st century." It was only 14 or 16 years into it at that point. Now we're a full 20-…well, we're going for the 21st year soon. But it's not in development so it's not really a real 21st year. So, fake. But I was happy I wrote Walking in Circles About Lying Down. I'm a big, big, big, big dog lover. I spend all my days surrounded by dogs staring at me, like I'm gonna do something good. They all are continuously let down by me, but I honestly felt like I had a lot to say about it, so I'm glad I wrote that book. And then I wrote a follow-up, which is Nose Down, Eyes Up.

So your dogs are kind of…

My muses. I feel like we're in a conversation all day.

I know. It's nice. I feel like I'm in a conversation all day with my dog.

Well, you are, actually. They're not saying anything about the war in Afghanistan or anything, but they have their things to say.

It's true. But maybe if I had four dogs, I'd be more inspired.

Well, it makes me really laugh. I find dogs hilarious. I love that we're sharing our living space and our mental space with a totally other species. I love that it's just another species. To me, it's sort of like having exchange students from Neptune. They share our furniture, but you wonder exactly how much they share of what we are sharing with them, what they comprehend, what they don't comprehend, what they think we're doing. To me, that's just amusing. It's kind of like talking to someone from another country. You know, that's what I like to write about. I just never understand what they think I'm doing. What do they think I do for a living, for instance? What do they think I'm doing while I'm sitting here, besides not giving them enough walks?

Right, exactly. Like, they're just waiting… — like you just exist to give them walks and feed them and then pick up their poop, and in between that, you know…

Yeah, I like writing about that. I just wrote a piece for this new book I'm writing where I'm explaining the idea of selfishness to them. Because it would be such a complete anathema, the idea that you could have a concept of selfishness. So I like the idea of trying to go back and forth of what I image the dogs would say to that concept. What inspired me is that in the morning, I still get the paper, because I still like to read the paper, and they stand on it. And they always stand on it, usually it's right before they decide that it's now or never for breakfast, they're just all standing on it, and they're ripping it and they're ruining it and I'm, "No! Get off! Get off!" So I was writing this whole piece where I explain that it's very selfish of them to ruin what I'm doing just because they're hungry, and the answers which are uncomprehending and also "huh?". Well, I don't want to try to paraphrase it, because I'm actually just only writing it now. That's what I like writing about, is just the idea that there'd be anything that they could comprehend, what it is they get about what we're all doing.

Oh, totally. I mean, I don't think they can comprehend their own existence, though, right?

I think they do comprehend. Well, I don't think they are worried about their mortality.

But they have survival instincts.

This is the second group of four that I've had. I had four other ones who just all died of old age, and they have four distinct personalities and they have a pack order. It's completely hilarious to watch them juggle all this stuff all day. These four – the last four I had reminded me of four people I met on an elevator who were now forced to hang out together – these four are just more like a pack. Some of them have shared interests. There are two ball fetchers. There's one – two of my dogs, I got from my vet when he was trying to place them because their dad went to prison for Ponzi schemes – so they came as a couple. I was gonna take just one but I'm glad I took them both because they're sort of like a married couple. He's always humping her and she's kind of like, you know, looking for a cigarette or something to read, and she just sort of puts up with him humping her. So they kind of sleep together, so they have a relationship. And she's one of the ball fetchers, so she has a relationship with the older dog in the pack, who insists on being the alpha even though the other three don't care. Every single day he takes I.D.'s from them and it's like he's going, "Alright, everybody, everybody remember. I'm in charge here!" And the other three are like, "Yeah, we know you're in charge, we don't care. Be in charge. We don't care who's in charge." So they all just really make me laugh. This is going on all day long. Luckily nobody else cares who's in charge, so that guy's not getting in a fight with the other three.

There you go.

And one of them has got that rescue dog personality of "Don't kill me, don't kill me, don't kill me," which is, "No one's killing you! I don't know what happened to you before I met you, but I have never done anything to you, why are you acting like I'm going to kill you?"

Like, "Don't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me."

Yeah. I wrote her into Nose Down, Eyes Up. She's one of the dogs in that. It's a funny thing to have a dog presume that you're a violent offender when you have done nothing but kiss her and give her treats for the whole six years you've had her. It's a good argument for what happens in early childhood, the way that it affects everybody.

Oh, totally. Yeah, I don't know what happened to my dog before I had her, but I'm sure it affects her personality.

It's the same as with human beings. The stuff that happens in early childhood, before you're three years old, you know, that's who you're dealing with when you're dealing with petulant adults, is somebody wasn't smart enough with their three-year-old. And who really knows how to get everything right with a three-year-old? So, you know, that's the history of violence and insanity in the world at large: mothers who can't really comprehend what they're doing to a three-year-old. And why would they be able to? Probably people not getting more sane anytime soon.

Probably. Is there anything else you're working on that you want to mention?

I've been making a bunch of short movies.

Oh, cool.

I just love doing that. I don't have a job doing that. But I got a really, really cool camera. I just upgraded my camera stuff. I learned how to edit on Final Cut. I taught art at U.S.C. for a year, and I was taking a lot of film classes while I was there because I could, because I was faculty. And I got really excited about the idea of making films—it was sort of the transition in between doing comedy and doing art. And in those days, you couldn't do all the stuff that… — you'd have to rent [equipment], get an editor, there used to have to be cameras that you'd have to change reels of tape in the cameras or film and get film processing and all this stuff that you can do it all just in your office now. I can't get over how completely great that is. Including color-correct it yourself in Final Cut. I love editing. As difficult as writing is is as much as I love editing. I think it's the most fun. I used to sit for hours and hours with editors when they were editing giving them timecodes and waiting for them to do all this stuff and it would just be the most endless waiting task to see something assembled.

Do you think you ever want to work in TV again?

Yeah, I would. You know, it was something that I believed in. I come up with stuff and try and sell it. And then I tried last year again and didn't succeed in selling something. My friend Laura Kightlinger and I were trying to come up with some ideas recently. It gets less easy all the time, since reality TV took over, you really have to get the right angle. With reality TV, it's harder to get that other stuff launched. I tried to get kind of a standard funny half-hour show and they looked at me like I had all the pieces in place and then it fell apart. That's the way that really tends to work a lot. So I keep writing books. One of the things I instantly liked about books is that they go forward. When you're writing other stuff, a lot of times you wind up with giant page counts and no one sees it, you know. You can have the end of a really a lucrative and very satisfying career without anyone having seen your work. I know people who have written dozens and dozens of screenplays that didn't get made. At least when you write print, it comes out. At least somebody sees it. Whether they like it or not, whether it does well or not, that's a separate problem entirely.

Presumably, if you get a book contract, you will have your book published, whereas you can get something optioned or get a screenplay deal and it will never see the light of day.

Yeah, and you can always – if you write the thing in print first, at some point maybe it can become a screenplay, but at least it also existed at some point if the screenplay never sees the light of day. The other stuff, it goes into this weird vortex of the unseen that… I should write something about that. All those creative things that are sitting in that giant vortex here in Los Angeles and in New York too that have never been seen.

It's a very big vortex. I suppose that's why it's a vortex.

It would be a scary vortex to enter by the way if you think about all the violence and the misconstrued comedy and the weird people.

Seriously.

I should write a graphic novel about it.

You should write a screenplay about the vortex of screenplays.

I know, I was just thinking that's a pretty good idea.

It'd be very meta. It'd be very Being John Malkovich

This whole business is getting weirder and weirder. Getting things on the air becomes stranger and stranger and stranger. It used to be that, like when they would just shoot a show like The Osbornes, they would fact-gather forever. They would shoot and shoot and shoot – I used to shoot a ton of what would be reality TV for the Letterman show, I would do all the remote pieces in addition to whatever else I was doing. And I would shoot hours and hours and hours and then put together a four-minute piece. I would just cull it down to the very best, most hilarious four minutes. And that was the kind of percentages that it took. That was what they did when they first started doing reality TV. It's like when they shoot a documentary, you shoot forever. And then you get the best stuff boiled down to an hour. Now they insist on doing an episode of a reality TV show in three, four days. And nothing really happens in three or four days necessarily. Also, they now just have to construct plots out of it. They just make stuff up. They give people lines. It really no longer is what it is, really reality TV, it really is just forcing a plot on people who aren't actors in their own home situation.

I would say that at some point that's gotta implode. That's the wrong direction to be going in with it. That's like a terrible sitcom. I can't imagine that it's going to be able to sustain at that level without some amount of reality being the core. The fascination was, these are real people doing stuff.

What do you think of the recent firings of Michaela Watkins and Casey Wilson from Saturday Night Live?
The workings of SNL have always been pretty mysterious to me. A lot of friends of mine have had a run through that system and emerged pretty frustrated. It seems to work for some people and not for others and I can't pretend to get it. I do know that it is incredibly painful to get fired, but also that Julia Sweeney, one of the most hilarious, most literate comedians I have ever known, emerged from SNL pretty much known only for Pat. Which was funny but if you ever saw "God Said Ha" or any of her other monologue work you know how much of Julia Sweeney never made it on to the SNL stage. So..I would tell those girls to just start writing a bunch of new material for themselves and keep on going. The rejection doesn't say anything much about their talent.

Merrill Markoe [Merrill Markoe]

There were the sudden job changes, the crazy stories about the famous people he'd met, his total estrangement from his family. But it wasn't until she was in college and discovered that he'd opened several credit cards in her name, running up thousands of dollars in debt and ruining her credit, that she realized that her father's deceptions might run deeper than a few tall tales.

(Images from 'The Impostor's Daughter'; click any image to enlarge.)

The story of how Laurie unraveled her father's lifetime of lies is the basis of her new, amazing graphic novel, The Impostor's Daughter, in which she weaves together the story of her childhood, the discovery of her father's lies, her journalism career and her issues with men, which culminated in a stay at a rehab center recommended to her by one of her interview subjects, Ashley Judd. I couldn't put down her book, so when I met up with Laurie at a cafe in Brooklyn (we coincidentally live in the same neighborhood), I had lots of questions-about her book, about her dad, and about her career interviewing celebrities.

[Doree will be interviewing interesting women every week for us. If you have a suggestion, email her.]

Why did you want to do it as a graphic novel?
I did it first as a memoir. I wrote a 350-page memoir. And that was my original intention-it started originally as an essay for Esquire, which I published anonymously in 2003. But that essay ended on all of these questions. I ended it saying, I don't know who he is or what he does, is it this, is it this, is it this? I felt that as much as a writer, I felt as a daughter that I had to get to the truth, to the bottom of things. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I went to writers' colonies, and I think the story was unfolding as I wrote. It made it difficult to have the proper perspective. It made it difficult to have the emotional truths and that was why I turned back to cartooning, because I'd always cartooned about my dad, and I discovered this box of childhood cartoons.

I'm going to put more of them up on my website. I have hundreds. I looked at those cartoons and realized how fearless they were. I realized I wasn't being that fearless in the memoir, and so I decided to try it as a graphic novel. And it was almost easy for me emotionally to talk about him that way.

I know it's hard to think about this in retrospect, but do you think even at that time you felt like there was something off about your dad?
Oh, yeah. My childhood cartoons were so observant. I knew every single thing that was going on in my house, and my father knew I knew every single thing that was going on in my house because I gave them to him as gifts, and he loved them. In a way he loved that I knew.

It fed his ego in some way.
Yeah. It fed his ego, exactly. I think it was very exciting for him that I sort of saw what he was doing.

In some ways your book reminded me of David Carr's memoir Night of the Gun-
I haven't read it but I really want to.

Because he uses his training as a journalist to go back and recreate these years he basically lost because he was a drug addict, but he's using his tools as a journalist to do it. I thought that was really interesting how you kind of interplay what you're doing as a journalist with your discovery of what your dad was doing. It did seem like it was all related.
Absolutely. My mother constantly bemoans, like, why did I have to have a daughter who's a writer? My mother just very much wanted to keep the family intact and the story a secret, even to herself. I became a writer for this very reason. I didn't set out to become a writer. My father created a writer. He created a digger.

You have that bit in the book where you find out about the credit cards and you write what you wanted to say to him, and you wonder, if you had confronted him at that time, what would have happened.

It was the first real piece of physical evidence really. There were little bits and pieces, little hints. It was the first, direct-not affront, but direct betrayal. And I tell you, even now, 38 years old, I've written a published a book about this, and I still am afraid of my father, I'm afraid of him hurting me, I'm afraid of him hurting himself, and I'm still afraid of losing his love even though I've already lost it. And that stuff is so potent, as a daughter.

He seems really lonely.
He is. He's a total lone wolf. And always has been. No connection to his family at all. Very, very few friends. But the thing is, I feel like if my father were to say something like, I made some mistakes, I own it.

It seemed like he always had some excuse or some rationalization. It was always the other person that was crazy, or he was misunderstood.
Exactly. In a way I wonder if this period of time, to some extent, I wonder if he's enjoying it. He's getting a lot of attention. My sisters and my mother are really sort of rallying around him. So that would be in keeping with his, I hate to say it, with his narcissistic makeup.

You write that this whole experience with your father made you a better interviewer-somehow more empathic with people. How did you discover that?
I think it was my very first in-person cover interview. My very first interview was a telephone interview with Penelope Cruz. That was my first cover story. My first in-person interview was Ashley Judd. And I was really floundering and I didn't know what I was doing, and I was a little bit starstruck at the time. It was a fashion story, and I could tell immediately she had no interest in fashion. She kept trying to flip the interview back to her charity work. I wasn't, at the time, a seasoned interviewer and I didn't know what to do. I had 40 questions about fashion and I just kind of threw away my questions and I just started to talk about my dad, and she was just so drawn in by the story, and I just started a correspondence with her after that. It wasn't like I deliberately said, aha, I'm going to use this, but it became very quickly clear to me that I had always kind of in a way bonded with people over this story. So it was no different in a way than what I had been doing all along, except it was with celebrities.

You come into a celebrity interview with a preconceived concept of who this person is, that's been put together by the press. There's no way to get around that. And there's this whole thing of projection going on with celebrities. And that goes on with my father. I definitely say he was my first celebrity. He was this larger-than-life, shape-shifting, identity-shifting person, and that's what celebrities are. So as much as I got starstruck by them as much as I got starstruck by my father, I also felt at ease in their company. I can do this, that was sort of the feeling.

It was almost like, no one could intimidate you as much as your father could intimidate you.
Exactly. No one could intimidate me as much as my father had intimidated me. I'll repeat that so you can use it in my words. That's really good.

Do you ever feel like you have to tell a certain story at Glamour?
Well, they have certain themes that they're interested in. It's very different doing a Q&A format from a running text story. If I were doing a running text celebrity interview, I would have lots of observations that I would make that I don't have the chance to make in a Glamour interview. On the other hand, you get to hear their voice and it's their voice. Yeah, the Glamour audience has certain interests so I try to stick to those interests, but obviously Glamour's also interested in breaking news and scoops and so I try to do that too.

It's hard with a monthly.
Yeah. It's very hard with a monthly to do that kind of thing. But what I've learned is that celebrities are so media savvy. They're more media savvy than anyone you can imagine. So if there's going to be breaking news, it's breaking news they're going to give you, essentially. The Ashley Judd thing-the rehab story, which was one of our biggest selling issues ever-she decided to tell me.

Because she felt like she had this relationship with you?
I think it was because she felt like she had a relationship with me, and because she decided that she wanted that story in Glamour. A lot of celebrities will decide, I want this story in Vanity Fair. They're very media savvy. It's not like I'm going to crack them. Once in awhile I guess it can happen.

I feel like especially with actors-I feel like when people claim they're getting the "real" Reese Witherspoon-it's like, she's an actress.
And she's a very good actress, on top of that.

Yeah.
I actually try very hard in my celebrity interviews to in a way throw out my questions. The skill that I learned from my father literally is the only time I've ever gotten anything new or interesting from a celebrity-when I just talk to them and they like me as a person. If they like me as a person, and I'm not saying they're going to tell me about how their heart was broken that you don't know about-it's not that. It's just that what they talk about is going to be more authentic and interesting and you'll hear something new. If you just sort of stick to the typical celebrity interview format, you're going to get a pat and boring celebrity interview.

Why are people so fascinated with who celebrities are dating?
Every celebrity I interview asks me the same question.

On a fundamental level, it's gossip. In high school, you gossip about, Oh, Laurie broke up with Dan, oh my God.
I think it's because we mistakenly believe that we know them and we mistakenly believe they're one of our friends. I think we really do believe they're part of our circle in our minds. So they're part of our circle to discuss and pick apart and to bring them down and to have them be human like us.

Or we think, like, we could be friends. Like if it just so happened that I met Taylor Swift at the mall, she'd probably like me and we'd be friends.
Exactly. It's totally true. And even I've had that starstruck moment with certain celebrities. I wouldn't say I'm starstruck, like nervous, to meet any of them, but there are certain celebrities that for whatever reason-like Sarah Jessica Parker-who I just have a girlcrush on. So when I interviewed her, I thought that we were going to get along, and maybe we'll be friends. And I met her and she was completely unlike anything that I had imagined. Very reserved and not like her persona.

You expect her to be Carrie Bradshaw.
I did. I kind of did. Which is ridiculous. I mean, I should know better after all these years of doing these interviews.

But also, because she always plays that character.
She always plays that. She projects that in every film, in every character. So I was like, I'm going to like this woman, I know who she is. And she was very kind of reserved, and sort of serious, and so I walked away feeling like I really admired her, really respected her, really liked her, but there was no pretension that we were going to be friends. And really it would be part of my job to not be friends with the people I interview.

You do have this sort of bond with Ashley Judd.
Yeah. It went above and beyond the interview. She recommended the rehab center.

She saved your life.
Yes, you could say that, absolutely.

Has she seen the book?
To be honest, I didn't want to just use her name if I didn't have her permission for the book. So I sent her the text. She hasn't seen the drawings yet. She read the text and she approved it. I was actually surprised-she didn't make any changes, she was fine with it.

Ben. Or "Ben." [Laurie's ex-boyfriend, whose name is changed in her book.] Has he seen the book?
I actually sent him the entire manuscript. Like Ashley Judd, I sent him the entire manuscript and gave him the option to change his name. Because originally I didn't change his name. And I also changed a couple of details about him to make him less recognizable and he said yes, please change my name.

Is he a well-known person?
Yes. He is not famous, but he's known. He's a director, which I say in the book. I asked if he wanted me to change that detail, but he said no.

Is he with anyone now?
I have no idea. He didn't want to be friends. I would have been friends but he didn't want to. He wrote a film about me and I don't know what's going on with that. I have nothing bad to say about him, but for whatever reason I wasn't in love with him.

Do you think you can be in love?
With anyone? No. I was in love, but with the worst people. So can I be in love? No. I mean I'd like to say that's not true because I've done lots of therapy and I'm very much at a point in my life where I very much want the real thing. I'd like to find a stable relationship. But I so far have not been capable of being in love. I was thinking about my next book potentially being called Commitmentphobe, about female commitmentphobia. It's amazing to me because just like the next person, I want it as much as the next person does, but once I'm in it, I feel like I'm in a claustrophobic elevator and can't breathe. Look at the father I had. It's very hard to overcome that. It kind of sucks. I got at least a great career out of my dad, out of growing up that way, but it's completely been a problem in my love life.

And how are you doing with all the stuff you went to rehab for?

Sober for three years. So that stuff has been great. I'd kind of like to be able to have a glass of wine. I didn't go there for alcohol but there's this concept of cross-addiction and when you're an addict, you're an addict. Plus I think to get through all this stuff about my dad and have a healthy relationship at some point I think it would be good for me not to turn to the chemicals.

What about the religion stuff you talk about in the book?
It's funny-a couple people have said, oh, you became religious. No, I did not become religious. I am not religious. I opened myself to the possibility of spirituality and God. I've been a lifelong atheist. So I'm sort of saying, I would like to believe in God, but inside I'm sort of like, come on. It's very hard for me to accept that concept. The thing that I mentioned in my book that I think is true is that my father was really God to me. And once I sort of removed him from the equation, at the very least I'm able to open my mind and say, you know what, maybe I'm more agnostic than atheist, and I'm able to maybe say I don't know what's out there, and maybe there is and maybe there isn't. So not religious and would marry a non-Jewish guy and all of that, but I'm definitely into the idea of spirituality with a pinch of God.

The Impostor's Daughter [Amazon]

The Daily Show's Rob Corddry owned his creepiness.

The SFAppeal's Eve Batey rose above petty jealousy.

Amazon.com mailed former Observer hand Doree Shafrir a thinly-veiled serenity test.

The Daily Show's Miles Kahn was determined to make the Iran situation somehow funny.

Vice's Nick Douglas found inspiration in the DirecTV program guide.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Doree was nice enough to stay seated at her computer long enough to stop counting the fat stacks of scrilla her and Love, Mom co-author Jessica Grose are raking in to help me with my mommy issues.

Okay. So: I totally flaked on sending my mom a present. Without plugging your book too hard, WTF DO I DO?! She's Jewish, and she's going to guilt me unless I come up with something solid.
well, the most important thing is to call.

Okay. And I shouldn't call collect, right?
that would be a no.

i was discussing this with my mom this morning in fact

because, even though i have now written a book that is of course the best possible present for mother's day, the irony (i think it's irony?) is that my mom was never a huge mother's day mom

she was like, when you were growing up i seem to remember you guys bringing me breakfast in bed

"but since your dad couldn't care less about father's day i felt like i couldn't make a big deal about it"

(my dad is israeli and doesn't really go in for these newfangled american consumerist holidays)

she was like, i'm fine with just some good wishes.

Okay, so, better question: how do I get my Mom to not care about Mother's Day? Enlist her in the IDF?
hmm, well it also helps for her to have a birthday that's really close to mother's day, like my mom does.

because then it's like kids whose birthdays are really close to christmas

you get a combined gift anyway

True. But let's say, uh, theoretically, I only did so-so with the birthday present.
since your mom neither has a birthday close to mother's day, nor is she married to an israeli, you might be out of luck.

In which case, I call and make a case for myself as a decent son. How do I do that?

then you are a bad son and all you can do is promise to atone for all your misdeeds on yom kippur.

but re: your question

i would call to wish her a happy mother's day and say something to the effect of, now that you're older and wiser you feel like you can really appreciate what a great mom she is, even if you were a little shit when you were younger.

etc.

flatter her

moms love flattery!

esp flattery about their mothering skills!

But I turned out like me.

So I should basically just lie to her?

yes.

Doree Shafrir's book, Love Mom, will make her money and your mom happy if you buy it for her.

So, yeah, I love the Vice magazine angle on this story. Did you know you can score a job — a legit job, in a recession! — at a popular magazine by just being cute and charming? That's some tangible real-world lesson shit for the kids right there. If you're in the market, you might want to lose the paper printouts and get your résumé tattooed on your chest! Cooooool.

So I sent some of the Vice editorial staff a blind email on the matter, but no response (probably too busy doing background checks on the rest of their staff, understandable). But I did hear from former heart-and-soul of Vice, co-founder Gavin McInnes. He shared his unique perspective:

I realize hindsight is 20/20 but how awesome would it be if you knew a chick was a hipster grifter but didn't let on and dated her anyways? She'd fake cry during intercourse and tell you she wants to have your babies and you'd be all, "I know Kari. I've never loved anyone this much." How intensely dark and fucking weird would that be!?

You'd have to constantly avoid situations where you give her cash and you'd have to sleep with your credit cards up your ass but, as we've learned from seducing strippers, the more dough you put out the more you're seen as a dolt. She'd actually appreciate the challenge. Oh what a heavy thrill it would be watching her out of the corner of your eye, trying to predict her next hustle. Anyone with a junkie roommate knows how challenging this can be. You'd have to keep your laptop at work and all your CDs would need to go into storage but cheating a cheater must make you feel like God. I bet your hands would shake at the end of every encounter.

If you don't find this kind of idea exciting, you are precisely the sort of pussy hipster grifters prey on – and you deserve it.

Gavin McInnes founded Vice Magazine in 1994 but recently left to start Street Carnage with another assimilated negro.

Ha. Yeah, that's right you labia-lobotomized hipsters. Suck it.

Well after being enlightened to the edgy alternative universe perspective, I wanted to get grounded again in the reality of what's happening on the streets. So I talked to Doree, the journalist who broke the story, AND former Gawkette:

TAN: Will you be staying on top of the Grifter beat for the New York Observer? This story brings to mind Season 5 of The Wire, when they "surrounded" the homeless story once it got sensational enough. There's probably an entire subculture of grifters and aspiring-grifters out there waiting to be exposed?

Since the story ran I've heard tales of other grifters people have had the unfortunate experience of coming into contact with. They're certainly an intriguing group of people, but you just feel like at some point it starts just being sad more than anything else—the grifters themselves seem to have some serious mental health issues and the people they target are so emotionally and often financially drained from the experience. My (armchair) analysis is that it's partly the need to feel loved and taken care of (see Kari's constant hospitalizations under questionable circumstances) but taken to an unhealthy level. Connected to that is wanting to have power over people (Kari's suicide attempts and "pregnancy" scares, tellingly, seemed to come when it seemed like a guy was about to leave her, or when he was on tour with his band—she would make it so that he "couldn't" leave her). I think people with these kinds of issues are also deeply, deeply lonely; in one of my follow-ups to the original story I told about how she made up intricate lies to get someone to go to a concert with her. Many of her victims also said that she always seemed to have something to offer people, and I would bet that she did that because she was nervous about being alone.

But I think there's also the thrill of getting away with it all; knowing they have the power to manipulate people to such a degree must give grifters a kind of high. Kari knows she comes off as friendly and personable, which is why she's able to manipulate people so skillfully.

True that. Well here's hoping Kari reaches out to Doree, it'd be nice if they could work together on giving us this full story.

Finally, after those updates I'm thinking business now. And if you're a blogger, that means book deal. Many of the commenteratti think there are some big-time royalties to be earned on this story. Are they right? I asked a big-time book editor if they're hot on the meme:

As we say in the business, "there's no there there." Girl meet boy, girl dupes boy. Girl has bitchin' tats and boy possibly has Asian fetish. Boy loses girl, money and self-respect. The End.

Sounds kinda like an Ethan Hawke novel, now that I think about it. Which is the first sign publishers should stay far, far away.

And who would write the thing anyway? Kari? Yeah, because she's exactly the kind of person you can trust to honor a contract and a cash advance. So...no. Not gonna happen.

It's also worth pointing out that there have been a bunch of juicy stories that have gotten major play in the NY media fishbowl recently that have yielded exactly ZERO book deals. Anyone remember the DABA girls? They managed to dupe the NY Times into writing a serious trend piece and then released a statement saying "Oh, it was satire! Totes jk, y'all." But of course, right after they were "exposed" a story appeared in Fashionista saying they had a book deal—and sites like Jezebel jumped all over the book deal story. Now, no book deal was ever made—it was a classic case of getting a little notoriety and then planting some leads in the hopes that a publisher would bite. No one did. The agent still has not sold that b.s., nor will she. Ultimately there was no there there, and while someone might have taken a flyer 5 years ago when we were more flush, these days, publishers are a lot more wary about throwing real money around. Kari will just have to find some other sucker to fund her hipsterness. And really, I have complete confidence she will.

A senior book editor who prefers anonymity considering the sensational nature of this story

image: via

Erstwhile checkout-line tastemaker Bonnie Fuller found someone who made her seem less loathsome by comparison.

Time writer Karen Tumulty ended up on the wrong side of Texas.

WebMediaBrands mogul Alan Meckler touted his company's stock.

CNET social-media beat reporter Caroline McCarthy subverted the dominant media paradigm.

Bay Area exile Alex Blagg advised Gawker alumna Doree Shafrir, in San Francisco for a book reading, on his former haunts.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

(Warning: I would say this story signifies Nothing, but it probably signifies Nothing-1!)

Once upon the early aughts I lived in Philadelphia with two other soon to-to-be bloggers and a sad young literary journal editor.* When we lived in Philadelphia we were gainfully employed but also bored, so we — well, chiefly Pressler, who had a "gossip" column in the local alternative newsweekly, but also the other three of us, who committed various acts of "journalism" — unconsciously went to work constructing our own memory palace of microcelebrities, proving that a microcelebrity economy can exist even in a city with a crippling five percent wage tax and a severe (SEVEEERE) case of "brain drain"! The key was simply to 1. Zero in on someone trying to get attention and 2. Write about them in such a way that captures/wryly acknowledges/satirizes the absurdity of their endeavor to get your attention. Among them were:

1. A party promoter who was sort of like our Julia Allison named Rachel Furman. Pressler liked to call her "Hotel heiress Rachel Furman" but she eventually started a business not promoting parties but just showing up to them and the business, and eventually she, were called "Rachel Inc."
2. Restaurateur Stephen Starr, who owned all the restaurants in town and dated a much younger woman named January, and another restaurateur Neil Stein, who was a huge cokehead and pillhead and owned nothing but he used to write Pressler from prison, where he had to go on charges of tax evasion and being a big pillhead I think. I believe we pretended they had a "feud" although Neil Stein was too much of a drug addict to really feud with people and Stephen Starr's actual feud was with Jeffrey Chodorow, but Chodorow did not live in Philadelphia so we acted like he did not exist, even though he was actually important.
3. A crew of ambitious publicists who traveled in packs, stole one anothers' clients and marketed themselves by dressing like Julia Allison and sending out Christmas cards with pictures of themselves in Sex & The City poses. At the time we thought they were kind of pathetically trashy but at that time The Hills did not exist, much less The Real Housewives of New York. They all feuded all the time! Then we found out one of them was bisexual and had an "open relationship" with her husband and that was fun too.
4. And speaking of Christmas cards: a prodigiously obnoxious "blueberry heir" named Anthony DiMeo who became a sort of John Fitzgerald Page-cum-Tucker Max sort of character for us. Girls in his apartment building emailed us constantly to attest to his terrible woeful obnoxiousness. Pressler scanned his Christmas card for one of her columns, and DiMeo sued her. Fun times!
5. Gervase. Of Survivor I fame. (Obviously!)
6. A state senator named Vince Fumo who supposedly bought fake tits for his bartender girlfriend and had really amazing hair transplants.
7. An assortment of deejays, because hipsters were very important back then, the most — oh who am I kidding with the "most" -0 notable of whom was Diplo.*

See, it was not too unlike Gawker! Except we sort of hated Gawker in those days, because we read it and assumed the people it covered were somehow less pathetic and more special than the people we covered, which was actually not true. (Also this guy named A.J. who was from Philly but living the awesome New York used to try and get us to move because Philly was so pathetic.) But somehow Jessica convinced everyone that Philadelphia was the "Sixth Borough" and around that time Gawker even noticed us! Then somehow Doree and I ended up working here and Jessica meanwhile got a job working with former Gawker editor Jessica Coen at New York's Daily Intel. And A.J. — following a stint back in Philadelphia! — is also working for Gawker Media. And last I heard:

1. Rachel Furman had some sort of existential crisis wherein she went off the internet and drove cross country to get a nose job.
2. Stephen Starr owns a bunch of restaurants in New York now and he no longer returns our flirtatious text messages.
3. One of those publicist girls told everyone she was a millionaire.
4. Some guys made the TV show we always wished we had made about the whole scene but, who are we kidding, we don't know how to do that.
5. Diplo stopped dating M.I.A. and is still nowhere near as annoying as any of the Misshapes!
6. Vince Fumo was charged in a 139-count, 267-page corruption indictment. (I guess we could have paid attention to that!)
7. Anthony DiMeo sued Tucker Max.***

Anyway, today the same shit keeps happening with a whole new cast of new people! Every time we sit down to devote ourselves to trying to write something a little more pointful, it's…Mary Rambin! Raffaelo Follieri! Tao Lin! Jared Paul St…ill?! See, but it never lets up! Eventually "our Gessen" — he lives here now too! — wrote a highly thoughtful think piece on the subject for the Times Magazine. Perhaps we might direct you to the line:

This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

And trust us, "out there" does not only mean New York. It is like Staphylococcus Aureus…it's actually everywhere, but it's not going to emerge as the bombastic plague of pointlessness until you start cultivating it in the ego-advancing agar of your wholly unwarranted attention!! (It's the microbiology of microcelebrity, doncha know!) (I know! It doesn't ever stop though.) And to that end I will leave you with two quotes from a seventeenth century philosopher I learned about from this N+1 guy:

If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.

It's universal! But… this

To establish oneself in the world, one has to do all one can to appear established.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and establish! Perhaps I can interest you in Tumbling your endeavors? We'll be most gracious followers.

*One was former Gawker editor Doree Shafrir, another was New York magazine Daily Intel blogger Jessica Pressler, and the literary journal editor — "our Gessen," as Doree calls him fondly — was a guy named Matt "Mattathias" Schwartz. (Everyone was intimidated/repelled by Schwartz's highminded seriousness at first! But I ended up dating him and he turned out to be high-mindedly serious in a good way.
**Philadelphia deejays have a long history of local prominence: we often found ourselves writing about the antics of this one, who is now 67 years old.
***Though alas, Tucker Max won the great douche-off.

Bonfire of Inanities [Eye Weekly]

It selectively mentions websites that aren't really blogs; ignores actual blogs that contradict its thesis; fails to do original reporting to check basic facts about people and comes to an easy, trite conclusion. Which is outrageous, because that sort of intellectually dishonest pontificating belongs to us bloggers, Doree's mom excluded. Seriously, Newsweek, stop it. There are only so many book deals left.

[Doree, Newsweek]

For your benefit, I took all of Doree's hard research and remapped it, including only the attractive writers. The addresses of these writers are estimates, but it so happens that Fort Greene is starting to have the literary cachet of Paris's Left Bank.

(sic throughout, obvs).

http://moms.alltop.com/
I beg you to link to my blog as I try to understand the future of blogging.
How Ann Coulter, Liz Smith and Mommy Bloggers can co-exist.
And my question is, will is still be... Gawker?
Will you give me feedback on my blog? maybe mention these topics in a post?
www.CoolWebMoms.com
Do you have any advice for cool web moms like the ones below?
Im dying to here and will tell every mom I know.