I wasn’t surprised at the blowback, the disappointed Facebook fans and Twitter followers who said, either with snark or with sorrow, that they came to me for entertainment, not politics, and that they’d been faithful readers but that they’d never buy my books again. I tried to accept it with equanimity, only occasionally tweeting a snarky “BUT HOW WILL I PAY FOR MY ABORTIONS NOW?” I spoke the truth as I’d lived it, and with the knowledge that simply sending a tweet was a relatively risk-free way to take a stand. Planned Parenthood had been there for me, and for women I loved, and I wanted it to be there for my daughters and their friends and all the girls and women who need birth control, need breast exams, need cervical cancer screenings and free condoms and yes, sometimes, abortions . . . and if that costs me readers, so be it.
Left my yoga mat at Whole Foods and now I can’t go back and get it because clichés.
Tweeted April 2015
This actually happened! It was a nice yoga mat, too.
@jenniferweiner sensing pattern. Little Freud in me thinks you would have liked at least to have had opportunity to sleep way to top
Tweeted by Andrew Goldman, October 2012
The history: Goldman was the New York Times writer who conducted the Sunday magazine’s cheeky Q and A with the famous and sort-of famous. His shtick was to ask provocative, in-your-face questions, and let readers watch his subject squirm on the hook. When he interviewed Whitney Cummings, he inquired, “On those Comedy Central roasts, your fellow comedians liked to joke about how you slept your way to fame. How accurate is that criticism?”
I was offended! I think that Cummings was, too, judging from her answer: “Do you know any example of anyone who’s ever slept with a producer or whatever that has gotten them anywhere?” she retorted. I tweeted something about “Holy shit, in this day and age, are we really implying that successful ladies only got to the top on their backs?” Goldman responded on Twitter that, hey, Comedy Central had made jokes about it and thus it’s fair game. I tweeted back that the Times should have different standards than Comedy Central, insofar as the Times is a respected purveyor of facts and Comedy Central has “Comedy” right in its name. Cummings joined in to theorize that Goldman hadn’t been breast-fed long enough; Goldman tweeted that his mom had died, so there, and everyone went back to their respective corners.
Months later, Goldman did a Q and A with Tippi Hedren, who had just released a memoir describing how Alfred Hitchcock had hit on her, but that she’d found him repulsive. Then Goldman asked her whether there were any directors she would have slept with to further her career. Ugh. Here we go again. I tweeted, “Saturday am. Iced coffee. NYT mag. See which actress Andrew Goldman has accused of sleeping her way to the top. #traditionsicoulddowithout.” Goldman tweeted back about his little Freud, implying that I was sensitive to illusory charges of sleeping-to-the-top because I’d never had the chance to do so myself.
I was, as it happened, once again a single lady at the time. I can tell you exactly where I was when I read that tweet (walking down the hall from the elevator to my boyfriend’s apartment, prepared for a quiet day of writing, with my laptop in my purse). I can tell you exactly what I was wearing (my gray velour overalls and a long-sleeved purple T-shirt). I can tell you how I got dizzy for a minute, how my knees quivered and my hands shook, how I felt like someone had hit me in the gut with a battering ram. I staggered through Bill’s door, skin icy, heart racing, shoved my phone in his hand, and said, The New York Times just told the world that I’m too ugly to fuck. Of course it wasn’t the Times saying this, but it was the Times’ guy, and it did, indeed, feel like the entire institution had risen up to pass judgment on my attractiveness, or lack of same. And how does Andrew Goldman even know what I look like! I railed. My Twitter avatar is a headshot—and it’s a cute one! And his avatar is a rodent in a fedora! And is he so stupid that he doesn’t realize that publishing’s run by women? Does he understand that, in my line of work, I couldn’t sleep my way to the top even if I was interested? And I’ve got two kids! Clearly, someone thought I was fuckable, at least twice!
Bill tried to calm me down. My friends assured me that I looked fine and that Goldman was the one with the problem. None of it helped. I felt deeply ashamed and furious and sick—sick that there were men who thought that way; that there was so much vileness and bile maybe an eighth of an inch beneath a normal-seeming man’s surface; sick that this guy was married with children, kids—maybe even daughters—he was influencing with his noxious views; sick that this was still the way the world operates, where the fastest way to silence a woman is telling her that she’s ugly and thus not worth hearing from . . . and most of all, sick that it had worked.
Goldman spent the day on Twitter digging in his heels, first saying he’d meant his tweet as satire, then taking predictable shots at chick lit and insisting that his question to Hedren hadn’t been sexist. I spent the day writing boldly about how despicable Goldman’s remarks were, and how physical beauty should not be a litmus test about who is and is not allowed to have opinions, and how I would tell my daughters, every day, that it’s who they are, not how they look, that counts. Meanwhile, I was inside, with the door locked and the shades drawn, huddled in a three-sizes-too-big brown cardigan with the hood pulled up. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I didn’t want to see myself.
Things got worse. The editor in chief of Gawker—who, as it turned out, was Goldman’s good friend—published a screed entitled “Andrew Goldman Is Not a Misogynist and Neither Am I,” tweeting about my “bonkers assertion” that Goldman’s questions to Cummings and to Hedren had been sexist in the first place (because, I tweeted back, if a lady isn’t ugly, she must be crazy!), and then asking if, since he couldn’t call me ugly or crazy, he could at least call me stupid, citing my online biography, which referenced my love of reality TV, as proof that I was a big dum-dum.
Good times.
Goldman eventually apologized, saying that his wife told him he was behaving badly. I accepted his apology, figuring that a guy who had a wife, who knew what he’d done was awful and whom he was willing to heed, deserved a second chance.
Initially, it didn’t seem like he’d get in any trouble at all. Goldman’s editor, Hugo Lindgren, slapped his wrist, saying, “My feeling is that he had an unfortunate outburst and that he will learn from it.” The Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, wasn’t as inclined toward leniency. She called Goldman a “highly replaceable freelancer” and faulted his “level of obscenity and hideous misjudgment.” When Goldman e-mailed me to say that, unsurprisingly, in the wake of Sullivan’s column his job was in peril, I wrote to Jill Abramson, who was then the Times’ editor in chief, to say that he’d made a mistake but did not deserve to be fired. I was still deeply rattled by what he’d written, but I wanted to shake it off . . . or at least act as if I could.
Eventually, Goldman was suspended for a month. He did his time and stayed at the paper until the summer of 2013. Interviewing Diane von Furstenberg, he’d asked her about her marriage in a way she found over-the-line offensive. Von Furstenberg complained to Jill Abramson, and Goldman—who, per Gawker, was already on a short leash because of “the Weiner debacle,”III was finally fired. Which just goes to show that maybe there’s nothing you can’t say to, or about, a woman, you just have to be careful to say it to, or about, a woman with less power and fewer connections than you.
I thought then, and think now, that Goldman’s bad behavior was a symptom, that it was connected to institutional sexism in the world in general and at the Times specifically. It was no surprise to watch him go from mocking my looks to mocking my books. Goldman worked at a place where the culture supported different treatment of male and female writers—the former as deserving of respect and attention, the latter not necessarily worth more than mockery. Goldman was only echoing, in much cruder terms, what editors at the paper felt about me, specifically, and writers like me in general—that we were beneath their notice, that our books were jokes, and if our
work isn’t serious, then our bodies and faces are probably laughable, too.
I still have mixed feelings about the Goldman mess—about what he said, about how the tweet led, at least in part, to his losing his job, about how I handled the whole thing. I knew that having my appearance put on blast that way was the equivalent of someone sticking a splinter into the root of an infected tooth. That was my sore spot; it was going to hurt.
I know that people say stupid, hurtful, cruel things in the heat of the moment, and lash out, sometimes inappropriately, when under attack . . . I know that I have, and I’ve regretted it . . . but it bothers me that this was the first place that Goldman’s mind went, that it was, maybe, the first place any man’s mind would go. She’s got a problem with what I wrote? She must be ugly. Or maybe I’ll just say she is and that’ll shut her up. It made me sad and suspicious. It made me wonder, with every guy I’d speak with or meet, whether it was what all men were thinking, deep down, or maybe not so deep down—that any woman with a voice or an opinion or a criticism of their work must be ugly, must be sexually frustrated, must be unattractive and undesirable, and thus unimportant.
Worst of all, it made me quiet. Goldman wanted to shut me up, and for a while, he did. For weeks, I was gun-shy about social media, not to mention the men I’d interact with in real life. I walked around with my head down and brushed my teeth with my eyes closed, which is A) dangerous, and B) no way to live and nothing I want to show my daughters.
In the end, the Times found other writers to fill in for the column, eventually hiring Ana Marie Cox. It turned out that the highly replaceable freelancer was . . . highly replaceable.
In 2014, Goldman wrote an essay for Slate about losing his job, pinning the blame on the “little Freud” tweet and on Sullivan’s column, which, he said, “pretty much did me in at the Times.” He didn’t say that I tried to defend him. He never even mentioned the von Furstenberg mess, or acknowledged that maybe his inability to understand his company’s guidelines about social media, was the real problem—that it’s one thing to perform insult comedy on your interview subjects, but another to do it with your readers. Goldman also wrote that “what made [his] column great” was his “mouthiness,” his willingness to ask those in-your-face questions, to, at his editor’s urging, “draw some blood.” Maybe that’s the saddest part of the story—that Goldman believed that he was a great writer, that asking Glee star Matthew Morrison, “Imagine you had the ability to see the number of a woman’s sexual partners on her forehead. What’s the highest number you could see and still take her seriously?” was speaking truth to power, or that asking Condoleezza Rice what it felt like to be booed at a Broadway show made him a force of righteousness, that he was a tremendous talent muzzled by the Big Bad Feminists, instead of a guy with the same bag of tricks as half the drive-time shock jocks in America who should have read his employee handbook more carefully.
PS: God, give me the self-confidence of a mediocre white man.
If your three-year-old says she “just wants to hold” the bottle of sparkly red nail polish, she is full of shit.
Tweeted April 2011
Still true.
Imagining Saint Peter, greeting new arrivals, gently suggesting that Scalia might be more comfortable at a “slower-track” kind of heaven.
Tweeted an hour after the news of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, February 2016
De mortuis nil nisi bonum, says the Latin—speak nothing but good of the dead.
Except what if the dead said rape victims can’t sue their alleged attackers, thought minorities weren’t smart enough to keep up at top colleges, and claimed that until fifteen years ago, everyone in history “understood” marriage was between a man and a woman?
On the one hand, yes, I get it—even the most terrible people are somebody’s father, somebody’s husband, somebody’s brother or son. Antonin Scalia was survived by nine children, his wife, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who somehow became his dear friend.
But his policies hurt people. Comparing gays to child molesters, calling their “lifestyle” “immoral and destructive,” likening the “moral disapproval of homosexual conduct” to distaste for “murder or polygamy or cruelty to animals” is the kind of language that gives people permission to hate gay men and women, to kick their queer kids out of their houses so that they end up living on the street, to taunt them into suicide, to beat them or kill them.
I thought about it. Then I tweeted it. I got a lot of approval, a lot of “damn, that’s cold,” and a handful of “you have no class” and “show some respect,” and, inevitably, variations on the theme of “too soon.”
On Twitter, it’s always the delicate balance of risk and reward—do I make the funny, provocative, in-your-face quip, then deal with the pearl-clutchers who feel compelled to tell me how awful I am and how they’ll never buy my books again? Or keep quiet and hope someone else says what I’m thinking?
In this case, there were a lot of fans, and a few “you are unbelievably rude.” Of course, the way I’m wired, the “you’re an awful, classless monster” were the comments that stuck, so in retrospect, I think I should have kept my mouth shut.
If I’m Joan Didion’s dog, I’m not liking my chances.
Tweeted November 2011
This one was right on the edge of funny versus awful. Joan Didion is, of course, a magnificent writer and a national treasure who has suffered unimaginable losses and written about them in a way that has brought comfort to thousands of grieving readers.
She’s also someone who, to be completely crass and reductive, is profiting from her loved ones’ deaths. Her husband dies—she writes a book. Her daughter dies—she writes a book. And we all know that, in a post–Marley & Me environment, books about dogs and about the beloved canine’s inevitable demise, are huge bestsellers.
It made me laugh, the image of Didion sitting at her desk, a blank piece of paper before her, bereft of ideas, clad in black, with her Céline shades covering her eyes. The dog wanders into view, wagging its tail hopefully. Didion stares at the dog. Stares at the blank page. Looks at the dog again. The dog whimpers unhappily. Didion looks down at the page again. When she looks up, the dog is cringing by the door.
How about #Franzenfreude?
Tweeted August 2010
When my first book was published, in 2001, I had a modest set of aspirations. I wanted to go on a book tour, even if nobody showed up at my readings. I wanted to see the book for sale in stores, even if the only people who bought it were my friends. And I hoped for a review in the paper I’d read for my entire life, the New York Times.
The Times is the holy grail for most writers.IV Being reviewed in the paper means you’ve really, truly made it—or at least, that’s how it felt to me. But even before I was a writer, back when I was just a reader, I knew that a book like mine wasn’t the paper’s normal fare. Music critics at the paper wrote about opera and Top 40; TV critics covered sitcoms as well as PBS’s twelve-part series on slavery; restaurant critics reviewed Per Se and the under-twenty-five-dollar-a-head ethnic eateries in the boroughs. Every day, in every section, the paper made an effort to be broad and inclusive, to recognize that its readers weren’t all rich or male or even New Yorkers. Then I’d open up the Sunday paper and a version of the Paris Review would land in my lap. The book critics mostly ignored popular fiction and stuck to capital-L Literature . . . unless they were reviewing the popular fiction that men read.
Just as galling as what looked, to me, like straight-up sexism was the paper’s church-and-state separation of its daily and Sunday critics. The daily people weren’t allowed to talk about what they were reviewing with their Book Review counterparts, which meant that you could read a mixed-to-positive review of a literary novel on Thursday, then a mixed-to-positive review of the same book, by a different critic, in the Sunday section.
In previous decades, a writer who disapproved of the Gray Lady’s policies would have had to content herself with muttering imprecati
ons to her spouse, her mom, her friends, her dog. But in the brave new world of social media, that same writer could hit Twitter and broadcast her displeasure to the world.
I’d noticed the gender/genre divide for a while, and for years had blogged about what I’d seen in the Times—how many male writers were getting the hat trick of two reviews and a profile, how many women were seeing their books relegated to the Style section, how dismissive the paper was when it deigned to even mention chick lit, how lucky I felt when Good in Bed earned a few positive words in a Janet Maslin beach-book round-up, and that I was allowed to sneak my book into my wedding announcement. When Twitter came along, it became even easier to give assessments, almost in real time, of what the paper was doing or not doing—how there were three pieces on the new Nicholson Baker book, which would go on to sell fewer than ten thousand copies, but the only mention of the new Terry McMillan, which was in beach bags across the land, came in a snide reference in the Inside the List column, to her divorce; how the paper quoted or mentioned Gary Shteyngart more than eighty times in five years, and no female writer came close.
When the paper joined in the coronation of Jonathan Franzen in 2010, I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Franzen had emerged onto the cultural landscape in 1996, when he wrote an essay in Harper’s bemoaning the lowly position of the literary novelist in the world of ideas. Interspersed with his insistence that writers like him deserved to be more relevant were attacks on the long, long list of things he disliked. Franzen called bestsellers “vapid, predictable and badly written.” He attacked his peers, literary writers who put their e-mail addresses on their book flaps, as embarrassments. He complained that “our presidents, if they read fiction at all, read Louis L’Amour and Walter Mosley,” and even went after his own brother for failing to understand that Franzen’s work was “simply better” than Michael Crichton’s.
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