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"  Emily Gould has delicate, narrow feet and calves, highlighted today by opaque burgundy cotton knee-highs of a lace floral pattern that reveal pinpricks of tawny skin. The personification of the name Emily, in sock form. On the other end of these elegant flippers, resting on the rug of her Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, apartment, are broad, strong suburban-high-school-swim-team shoulders, covered in her trademark lush poppy tattoos. The overall effect is an intriguing, inviting confluence of forthright confidence and demure femininity. It&amp;#039;s also destabilizing, in the way that anything broad balancing on something narrow suggests an inherent vulnerability. And Gould is carrying a great weight on those lithe feet and sturdy shoulders, as are her soon-to-be-published first novel, Friendship (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; out this month), and the fledgling book company, Emily Books, she runs with her best friend, Ruth Curry. In a sense, these projects are carrying the weight of the world\u2014or at least the weight of the new world order as set forth by social media and the Internet. Related: Mona Simpson Transforms Her Rich Personal Life Into Powerful Fiction &amp;quot;My friend once described my place in the wave of pop culture as being here,&amp;quot; Gould says as she draws a picture of a wave in the air, then a circle indicating her head beneath the plume of water. &amp;quot;The wave crashed on top of me.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Who&amp;#039;s surfing it?&amp;quot; I ask. &amp;quot;Lena Dunham. Tavi Gevinson,&amp;quot; she says, naming two fellow confessionalists who came to prominence\u2014and achieved financial success, which has eluded Gould. Related: Meet the Inspiring Women of &amp;#039;A Raisin in the Sun&amp;#039; For those last remaining readers who don&amp;#039;t live on the Internet, or at least didn&amp;#039;t seven or eight years ago, Gould became famous (or, some might say, infamous) for being an early adopter of blogging, and for working at Gawker just as the media-gossip website was becoming a must-read, and then because she dramatically exited said site with a post announcing she had ethical quandaries about continuing to work there. This may sound like an improbable route to renown, but turn your dial to the age before corporate culture became entwined with the Web and social media, before the Internet became a worrisome omnipresence that doubles our workloads. Back then, sneaking online once you&amp;#039;d gotten into the office still had the exotic aura of an escapist treat. And for a swath of would-be writers and media movers and shakers, two of its most delectable offerings were Gould&amp;#039;s blog, Emily Magazine\u2014on which she shared her funny, prematurely world-weary diaries about postcollege existence in New York City when one has writerly ambitions but no trust fund\u2014and then Gawker, where her byline became a brand name. For breakfast at her apartment, Gould offers me grits with a perfectly poached egg nestled on top, before she curls up on the couch and finishes her own bowl without a whiff of girl-diet inhibitions, while also chatting as openly about relying on a low dose of an SSRI to quell panic attacks as she does about her current favorite author, Rebecca Curtis. It&amp;#039;s an instant refresher on why her Gawker writing earned her thousands of page views per post, even when the pieces contained no juicy gossip but were simply vehicles for her unfiltered charisma to shine through: Emily being Emily on, say, The Hills. At that point there may have been a few New York City news makers who didn&amp;#039;t tune in daily\u2014but their assistants sure all did.  Curtis Sittenfeld, the best-selling author of Prep and Sisterland, so adored Gould&amp;#039;s voice that she sent her a fan e-mail. &amp;quot;I always loved her stuff the most,&amp;quot; Sittenfeld tells me over the phone from her house in St. Louis. &amp;quot;You want to keep reading her once you start, which is more unusual and harder than people think.&amp;quot; Just as in her writing, Gould in person is quick, but thoughtfully so, and unguarded. While blowing warningly into the face of her new rescue cat, Swizzle (who&amp;#039;s also on an SSRI, for aggressive antics that have left deep scratches up and down Gould&amp;#039;s forearms), she describes the emotional fallout of a chance meeting she had with Dunham a year ago. Gould had been at a dinner party at the apartment of a friend who lives in the same Brooklyn Heights building as Dunham, and the TV phenom crashed it. &amp;quot;She brought her boyfriend, and they engaged in elaborate PDA,&amp;quot; Gould says. &amp;quot;Lena was very nice and charming, and I was so flattered she even knew who I was.&amp;quot; Dunham invited Gould and the other guests to see her elegant prewar apartment\u2014&amp;quot;Of course we were all like, Yes!&amp;quot;\u2014showing them her shoes, the headboard her Girls set designer had given her. Perhaps in part because Dunham&amp;#039;s one-bedroom was within the realm of realistic aspiration, her life sparked creeper-envy in Gould. &amp;quot;I thought I was fine, and I came home and I was kind of fucked up about it for a week,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d been at the forefront of something\u2014I don&amp;#039;t know what to call it. So then to see those people become prominent and successful in a moment when I&amp;#039;m just temping and trying to finish this novel\u2014and I sold [the book], so I&amp;#039;m okay; I&amp;#039;m getting by. But I, like, sold a bunch of clothes to Buffalo Exchange to buy groceries so I could make dinner for my friends.&amp;quot; We laugh, but getting to that okay place, at 32 years old, the trajectory that is also the theme of her novel, is the result of Gould having spent the past seven years working very hard. She&amp;#039;s put in her time on both the California kind of work (getting to know yourself) and the East Coast variety (showing up every day to fill the blank page and generate creative projects). If carving out a fulfilling sui generis role that&amp;#039;s sustainable, socially \u2028meaningful, and more or less on our own terms is the essential fourth-wave feminist project, Gould&amp;#039;s okayness is a triumph. It wasn&amp;#039;t that Gould thought Dunham was rubbing her success in her face. Gould takes complete responsibility for the funk she fell into: &amp;quot;\u2009&amp;#039;This is what you don&amp;#039;t have; this is what you&amp;#039;ll never be,&amp;#039; that&amp;#039;s on me!&amp;quot; When I rather tactlessly point out that her story is more like that of a character on Girls than like Dunham&amp;#039;s, she says, &amp;quot;Ha fucking ha. Like, HA FUCKING HA.&amp;quot; Unlike a meandering Girls girl, though, Gould does have a distinct plotline to her life. Her apartment is glamorous only insofar as it serves as reassuring evidence that it&amp;#039;s still possible to be a struggling writer in New York City who&amp;#039;s more concerned with words than with art directing her world to post in shelfies. Bed-Stuy is a neighborhood where real estate prices have escalated faster than its state of gentrification, and her apartment is next to a bar named One Last Shag. The furniture looks not &amp;quot;vintage&amp;quot; but straight-up used. The building is prewar, but the version that&amp;#039;s long had its interior moldings torn off during cheap rental renos. The artwork consists of an old illustrated &amp;quot;C is for Cat&amp;quot; poster and, a gift from her paternal grandfather, that classic &amp;#039;70s &amp;quot;Expose Yourself to Art&amp;quot; poster\u2014you know, illustrated by a flasher in front of a sculpture. There are also a few of her maternal grandfather&amp;#039;s photos taken when he went to Uganda on a Fulbright in the &amp;#039;50s. But as with any good writer, her many bookshelves are full of books she&amp;#039;s actually read, and she shares them with a prince of Brooklyn&amp;#039;s literary kingdom, her fianc\u00E9, Keith Gessen, another reason for her reputation, and perhaps the cause of her plotline&amp;#039;s deepest trough. Gessen is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men and a cofounder of n+1, a politico-cultural journal; like Gould, he is almost preternaturally able to generate massive amounts of resentment in others. When the two met, she did what she had always done when a new character entered her life: She blogged and Gawked about it. Gessen wrote for loftier organs (namely The New Yorker), and n+1 smacked of Harvard and entitlement (though the Moscow-born Gessen himself doesn&amp;#039;t come from money). Gould describes Gessen and his cohorts this way: &amp;quot;[They] never thought twice about claiming the enormous privilege of &amp;#039;Hi! I&amp;#039;m a public intellectual.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Shortly before the two got together, Gould quit Gawker, announcing her departure in a post on the site. Her resignation was inspired, she said, by an n+1 article that lambasted Gawker for trading its role as a vehicle for the downtrodden to speak truth to power, albeit with a blas\u00E9 affect, to become itself an instrument of that power. Gould&amp;#039;s middle-finger flip infuriated Gawker&amp;#039;s overlord, Nick Denton, prompting him to write a rebuttal that accused Gould of an act of social climbing: She&amp;#039;d dropped her previous boyfriend for Gessen, an Ivy League graduate. Meanwhile, the comments-section chorus that had once supported Gould&amp;#039;s self-assuredness took a vicious turn. And the ugliest was yet to come. Next, Gould wrote a tell-all about coming-of-age online for The New York Times Magazine, in which she explored the push-pull of hurting boyfriends, parents, and friends by revealing their private lives while wanting to be free to chronicle her own. Swept up in her moment, she also allowed the magazine to run a photo of her on its cover, showing her dreamily disheveled, mane tousled, lying on her bed in a tank top (&amp;quot;I did forbid one that showed my nipples,&amp;quot; she tells me). &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to be too dramatic about what happened to me, but it was really, really hard,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;After that it was just months of &amp;#039;you stupid cunt, you stupid cunt, you stupid cunt,&amp;#039; over and over again.&amp;quot; Some of the criticism was more nuanced but no less painful. An example from a commenter with the handle The Dismal Science: &amp;quot;This article is as craven a lie as Emily&amp;#039;s victimhood, her fragility, and her personal shame. She may feel it, but it&amp;#039;s dull and distant, like vestiges of emotions that she senses strongly should be there but are not.&amp;quot; Helped by the loud response, albeit &amp;quot;so gendered, so condescending,&amp;quot; Gould secured a $200,000 advance for an essay collection. While the sum still feels large to her, the real-life math was harsh: The money went to a roommate-free apartment, her agent&amp;#039;s commission, high-end cups of coffee, and taxes, and to the misguided but understandable purchase of a Marc Jacobs purse (&amp;quot;Still, that was a great bag,&amp;quot; says Curry, while I&amp;#039;m sitting in on an Emily Books meeting. &amp;quot;It was pale pink!&amp;quot; moans Gould). Gould had begun to live far beyond her means by the time And the Heart Says Whatever was published in 2010. The collection covers small but formative events in Gould&amp;#039;s life during high school, college, and those early New York days. She was born in 1981, awkwardly straddling generations X and Y (as evinced by the fact that her daily uniform of vintage Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks T-shirts is worn with only partial irony). She grew up in suburban Maryland in a tight-knit family, with a lawyer mom who represented foster children, a publicist father, and a brother four years her junior. She was a good student at her arts-and-letters magnet school tucked inside a huge public school, but nevertheless she didn&amp;#039;t get into Brown, her first choice; instead, she got into her safe pick, Kenyon, in faraway Ohio. Foreshadowing her blogosphere crash, she suffered through a tempestuous college breakup with a frat boy, with whom she&amp;#039;d been in a sexually intense but emotionally bleak relationship, when he learned of her interest in someone else by reading the journal she kept lying around open. She fled to NYC to finish her BA at the New School. Postgraduation she waitressed at a tourist-magnet blues bar until landing an editorial-assistant job in publishing. And then Gawker hired her at 25 (&amp;quot;a sacrificial virgin,&amp;quot; as she would later write in her Times Magazine piece). Gould&amp;#039;s essays in And the Heart Says Whatever are, in fact, quiet, reflective, and non-self-aggrandizing\u2014a tender examination of that incredibly tumultuous time between ages 20 and 30. It&amp;#039;s a decade that, for women, was once taken up by marriage and procreation but is now an open planet, ours to discover and ours to squander\u2014like any window of opportunity newly broken out of time and space that we have to figure out how to use even as it speeds by. The book deserves to be read on its own terms, though it wasn&amp;#039;t, and couldn&amp;#039;t have been. The hungry maw of the media wanted more from the girl who&amp;#039;d started such flame wars. Instead of using the author photo her publisher provided, Book-forum, the first publication to review her book, ran an old, well-circulated picture of Gould giving the finger at a rooftop photo shoot wearing a red American Apparel maillot. Though she got a full page, the review dismissed Gould as an exemplar of the first Internet generation&amp;#039;s failure to discern the difference between &amp;quot;self dramatization and self analysis.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s something hugely interesting, as well as disturbing, about the generation she represents and its ability to narrate its experiences without understanding them,&amp;quot; wrote Ana Marie Cox, not coincidentally a fellow ex\u2013Gawker Media alumna and novelist. Attempting to grasp the media&amp;#039;s magnification of Gould in the very act of diminishing her is vertiginous\u2014and representative of the confusing allure of fame in the twenty-first century. But her response to the attack was, happily, borrowed from the latter half of her liminal generation\u2014she went riot grrrl. To paraphrase L7, she got mad and she got pissed, she pulled out a pen and she wrote out a list, a shit list. &amp;quot;It was kind of great,&amp;quot; says Choire Sicha, her boss and champion at Gawker. &amp;quot;She just wouldn&amp;#039;t retreat.&amp;quot; She kept her comments section on Emily Magazine open, and pushed back. &amp;quot;She forced people to see there was a human at the receiving end,&amp;quot; Sicha says. She also started a charming YouTube show called Cooking the Books, to which she invited authors she admired (Julie Klausner, Tao Lin, Jennifer Egan), and which allowed her earnest book-loving self to erupt through her generally arch, everything-in-quotes delivery. Though she was tempted at the nadir of her fall\u2014as she was &amp;quot;broke, and everyone hated me, which was not unrelated to my being broke&amp;quot;\u2014to go into &amp;quot;the witness-protection program,&amp;quot; Gould says that would&amp;#039;ve been the &amp;quot;wuss, cop-out move.&amp;quot; She continues: &amp;quot;Like, the really hard thing is every single day making different decisions for as long as it takes until you really are different.&amp;quot; To be different, right now, for Gould, is to be ethical, which her Gawker self wasn&amp;#039;t. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;re working hard at being who everyone wants you to be, you get into situations where you lapse in being able to be good: You know, privileging making someone laugh over keeping a friend&amp;#039;s secret.&amp;quot; Gould has a seven-year theory of resurrection: After that length of time the older generation, wiser about their own young selves, lets bygones be bygones, and the twentysomethings have never heard of your supposed misdeeds. Evidence of that: When I tell my savvy 26-year-old babysitter I&amp;#039;m writing about Gould, she perks up. &amp;quot;You mean, of Emily Books? That&amp;#039;s cool.&amp;quot; She has no idea that Gould once worked at Gawker. Gould&amp;#039;s boldest move to date actually may be starting Emily Books, an e-book enterprise, with Ruth Curry, a fellow writer who by day handles rights and contracts for Oxford University Press. It&amp;#039;s an online, curated book-of-the-month club, and perhaps once again puts Gould at the forefront of a bigger movement. For an annual fee of $159.99, she and Curry will send you 12 books of their choosing over the course of the year. The guidelines for what makes something an Emily Book are intuitive. They don&amp;#039;t have to be written by women, but most are, and they tend to be unrepentant in exposing female abjection, desperation, anger, addiction, self-laceration. Oh, and they&amp;#039;re often funny. Although it&amp;#039;s attracted only about 150 subscribers so far, by trying to turn cultish paperbacks into e-books, and produce original ones as well, the tiny start-up already has been forced to contend with e-commerce behemoth Amazon, particularly its proprietary antipirating software for Kindle. And as is the frustrating situation for all indie bookstores, potential customers can simply use Emily Books&amp;#039; list as an Amazon shopping guide. Nonetheless, Gould and Curry remain fixed on their goal of becoming self-employed by Emily Books by 2015. For Gould, the venture is a healthy and generous evolution of her writerly impulses. She&amp;#039;s no longer insisting that just her experiences are worthy of exposure but that women&amp;#039;s experiences in general are\u2014and she&amp;#039;ll be the midwife for them. Along with her online entrepreneurialism, Gould hosts countless readings and public discussions, bringing together academics and authors to advance her unapologetically feminist agenda: to increase the count of females in the still-male-dominated world of letters and to debunk the early impression that she was the token girl let into Gessen&amp;#039;s n+1 set. (&amp;quot;n+1 is basically run by women now anyway,&amp;quot; Gould says.) &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s a hub,&amp;quot; says Rachel Fershleiser, who heads author outreach at Tumblr and who was previously the director of readings and happenings at the influential nonprofit Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. &amp;quot;Where literature and pop culture and the Internet come together, you&amp;#039;ll find Emily Gould,&amp;quot; she says. Gould&amp;#039;s relationship to the Internet is not unlike her relationship to Swizzle the cat. It scratched her up, but she&amp;#039;ll keep it. She tweets hourly, as well as maintaining her blog and Tumblr (started in the site&amp;#039;s early days, when the NYC literati on it all knew one another IRL). Just as Gould is giving herself a break in this safer, one-step-removed publisher and facilitator role, putting a novel into the mix might seem, frankly, nearly foolhardy\u2014particularly if it&amp;#039;s one that ends with an emoticon (I won&amp;#039;t say which one), as Friendship does. Because if a memoir and blog by a pretty woman offer her up for public consumption, won&amp;#039;t a novel add a layer of potentially delicious literary-aspiration pineapple sauce to the &amp;quot;who does she think she is?&amp;quot; banana split of Internet scorn-porn? But Gould comes by her novel, and her emoticon, honestly. Due to And the Heart Says Whatever&amp;#039;s poor sales (7,000 copies), she was offered a mere $30,000 for it, barely enough to pay off the debt on one credit card. She had to get her first office job in three years, at 29th Street Publishing, which helps content producers go cross-platform. Working at 29th Street is giving Gould a new perspective on the possibilities of solvency and adulthood. She went from being an assistant at a book publisher to a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-blogojourno-pants Gawker, to a below-the-poverty-line freelancer and Iyengar yoga instructor in seven years flat. &amp;quot;I missed a stage of evolution [as a worker] between you do whatever anyone requires you to do and you decide what is required.&amp;quot; So the publishing company, where she&amp;#039;s the editorial director, is serving as a boot camp of sorts for her. &amp;quot;Since I started working full-time in January 2013, I stopped doing the fake-it-&amp;#039;til-you-make-it thing,&amp;quot; she says. You can sense Gould&amp;#039;s relief to no longer be so dependent on her considerable charm. &amp;quot;I know the skills I have. I don&amp;#039;t know how to do everything; I don&amp;#039;t have the answer to every question, but I&amp;#039;m much more okay with admitting that I don&amp;#039;t know something and figuring out how to solve problems. I don&amp;#039;t feel I&amp;#039;m going to be exposed as a fraud anymore.&amp;quot; Friendship follows two women in their early thirties, characters who have some definite similarities to Gould and Curry. Amy is recovering from an onslaught of shaming Internet attention; Bev is temping after a doomed, debt-incurring graduate-school interlude. It&amp;#039;s an unabashedly female coming-of-age story. &amp;quot;I just kind of wanted to make the male characters go away,&amp;quot; Gould says, laughing. &amp;quot;I had one move to another country because it wouldn&amp;#039;t have been realistic to kill him off.&amp;quot; Queried about the final flourish emoticon, one of those symbols that most professional wordsmiths over 38 initially touched with gloved hands, as if at a crime scene where language was the murder victim, she says, &amp;quot;Yeah, no, I wasn&amp;#039;t trying to make a statement with it. That seemed like the only possible way to end it. It was what made me laugh and cry at the same time, which is what all my favorite books do.&amp;quot; Then she adds: &amp;quot;Also, that line in the book about if you don&amp;#039;t respond to my Gchat I assume you&amp;#039;re either on the subway or dead? Yeah, that&amp;#039;s me.&amp;quot; Although Friendship&amp;#039;s happy ending is man-free, the denouement of Gould&amp;#039;s own trials \u2028includes her upcoming marriage to Gessen, scheduled for this summer in upstate New York, where she wrote much of her novel. Her dress, from Stone Fox Bride, New York&amp;#039;s antiweddingy wedding-dress boutique, is a dark champagne medieval frock she got on sale because it was the last one. Gessen&amp;#039;s not getting a new suit. It&amp;#039;s almost hard to believe that in NYC, where the one percent press in on all sides, the prince and princess of the Brooklyn literary scene are self-made, even if we don&amp;#039;t quite know what to make of the self anymore, which may partly be Gould&amp;#039;s fault. &amp;quot;Keith is just good. That&amp;#039;s rare, especially in men,&amp;quot; she says. And Gessen says of her, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m amazed at Emily in all her manifestations. Well, almost all.&amp;quot; Long pause. &amp;quot;I think she tweets \u2028too much.&amp;quot; This article appeared in the July issue of ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a12733/emily-gould-profile/>