Because Champion should know, Middling Millennials don’t want to read more than 700 words at a time.
Ed Champion wrote and published an eleven thousand word essay spewing rage against women writers, particularly Emily Gould, but we edited his work for clarity.
“A NEW group of writers, armed with a 24/7 presence on social media has emerged to drive vibrant, risk-taking, literary lights that read like old Sassy articles. Quite commendable; the most hearted engagement really.
It is a cultural variant supported by marketing people, a coterie of booksellers and digital evangelists who show appropriate authenticity, careful grace, painstaking acquired erudition, and the refinement to go the distance. The results are lovely, tantalizing tomes, almost coquettish, and a relentlessly challenging group of fine young minds, and respectable hustlers who have all proven to be promising, and remarkably committed to something new and constructive.
They weigh and confront the anguish that burns inside their hearts, express their complicated feelings, unconventional thought, and importantly, move units.
One such mind, Emily Gould, hatched in Silver Spring, Maryland on October 13, 1981, the bouncing daughter of a public relations man and a self-employed lawyer and mediator, did not take long to develop a worldview of worthwhile self-examination.
Like many young ambitious types, she moved to New York, where her “extraordinary” manner, astonishing knowledge, and notorious ass, landed her a job at Hyperion Books as an editor, where she co-wrote a YA novel called Hex Education.
It was ultimately Gould’s blog, Emily Magazine that got her writing for Gawker, where, she quickly made a name for herself in the media industry and the sunshine.
“I don’t even really want to be a writer,” said Gould in an October 2007 article, “but I feel like I don’t have a choice. It’s all I’ve ever known how to do.”
Like many bright young things who move to New York, this bulb, one of the kindest and hardest working people in publishing I have ever known, was professional, pertinent, and on her merry way to anything she wanted.
On November 30, 2007 firmly aligned with the n+1 club, Gould resigned from Gawker, as n+1 and one of its co-editors Keith Gessen represented a way out– a step towards legitimacy, the beginnings of mainstream acceptance, and the furthering of autonomy.
This was the beginning of the “Emily Gould Reborn/Reinvented” narrative. Gould had shifted from being some malleable tool into a figure reformed. Gould had the congregation, and Gould’s candor and commitment to the literary is reflected in her curatorial instincts at her online bookstore, Emily Books, and new novel, Friendship.
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A real writer sits in front of the computer and does the work. Every day. Or close to it. It does not matter if the writer is published or not. It does not matter if the audience is three, three thousand, or three million. A real writer is free and imaginative enough to take risks. A real writer writes when the chips are down. A real writer writes when she is hungry or when she is at her lowest point. A real writer doesn’t even need an Internet connection. So long as there are pens, paper, electricity somewhere, functional computers, dictionaries, and grammar books, there are no reasons other than your own laziness not to write. Fifteen minutes, twelve hours, whatever you can spare each day.
Gould is a real writer.
Gould managed to write a novel, a very good one, in large part because Gould has imagination.
Friendship tells the story of Beverly Tunney and Amy Schein, two women both over the cusp of thirty. It’s a vivid chronicle of their friendship, and the creation of a young and self-reflective voice, one that could curb the selfishness and the neuroses of the current youthful struggle.
Gould’s habit of imbuing meaningless objects with language is chunky, quavering, and, above all, the work of someone who rushes to words; a strong sign that fiction writing is Gould’s true calling.”
