"And The Heart Says Whatever" (2010) is written by journalist, author/editor Emily Gould. This is a memoir collection of eleven engaging personal essays, mainly about young adulthood, and forging ahead in life/love beginning in the service industry, working in writing/publishing, and landing a top notch job as an editor at Gawker.com which at the time covered the Manhattan gossip/social scene.
"Like many people, I had come to NYC with the idea I was somehow extraordinary". Gould explained, after transferring her academic progression from Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) to Eugene Lang College, NYC where she earned her BA degree. In "Memoir class" thinstructor asked the students to write about victimhood, the subject matter evolved in a direction Gould never identified with. As the students critiqued each other's stories/dramatic writing, Gould, accepting, open minded, couldn't help but wonder what stories were fact or fiction.
Each one of the essays were detailed and interesting, especially of her waitressing job at at the "World of Blues"; Gould's recollection of the service work, co-workers, and elderly bluesman Sumpter Pickins, an "embalmed looking" heroin addict (common among some aged area musicians), were exceptionally done.
Gould offered an insider view of a small indie publishing company, learning a great deal from Jim, her supervisor/managing editor. Celebrity Memoir bestsellers carried the better written lesser known titles in profitability sales. Authors were all "vain" according to Jim, and only wanted to hear how much their books were loved by readers. Gould would also read/review stacks of books, many earning 3* star ratings-- not at all bad for a first time author. It was around this time Gould sought therapy/counseling for a reoccurring wave of anxiety/panic attacks, that happened while on her way to work or using public transportation. In overcrowded urban settings, this might seem fairly common.
Gould's writing is blended with a confessional lyrically styled prose, originating from her keen sense of self awareness and observation where she records the intimate emotional experience/terrain of herself and others. Its real. Its genuine. It invites controversy. This has become her origional trademark. Many examples are related to: Gould's adolescent romance with a 14 year old boy (she was 17), the return of "Hopey" to the breeder after Gould failed to bond with the puppy, the significant change in her relationship with her partner Joseph. Finally, her need for additional therapy/counseling to deal with the fallout after leaving Gawker. A friend cautioned her not to mention her daily habit of smoking pot, as her therapist would focus on it as being a problem/issue, instead of the circumstances or situation at hand.
"And the Heart Says Whatever.." seems like a sigh, or saying written into an inspirational quote. "Friendship" is Gould's debut novel, due for publication soon. Gould is also the founding editor/publisher of Emily Books, that she co-edits with Ruth Curry, she lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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And the Heart Says Whatever Paperback – May 4, 2010
by
Emily Gould
(Author)
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Essays by former editor of Gawker.com—and the new female voice of her generation. In And the Heart Says Whatever, Emily Gould tells the truth about becoming an adult in New York City in the first decade of the twenty-first century, alongside bartenders, bounty hunters, bloggers, bohemians, socialites, and bankers. These are essays about failing at pet parenthood, suspending lust during the long moment in which a dude selects the perfect soundtrack from his iTunes library, and leaving one life behind to begin a new one (but still taking the G train back to visit the old one sometimes).
For everyone who has ever had a job she wishes she didn't, felt inchoate ambition sour into resentment, ended a relationship, regretted a decision, or told a secret to exactly the wrong person, these stories will be achingly familiar. At once a road map of what not to do and a document of what's possible, this book heralds the arrival of a writer who decodes the new challenges of our post-private lives, and the age-old intricacies of the human heart.
For everyone who has ever had a job she wishes she didn't, felt inchoate ambition sour into resentment, ended a relationship, regretted a decision, or told a secret to exactly the wrong person, these stories will be achingly familiar. At once a road map of what not to do and a document of what's possible, this book heralds the arrival of a writer who decodes the new challenges of our post-private lives, and the age-old intricacies of the human heart.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMay 4, 2010
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-101439123896
- ISBN-13978-1439123898
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
On the strength of an exposé she wrote for the New York Times Magazine two years ago about her experience working at Gawker.com, Gould, hailing from Silver Spring, Md., and now in her late 20s, delivers a series of 11 insipid essays about her uninspired youth and general lack of motivation or talent for various jobs she took after moving to New York City. The writing seems intentionally bland, as if Gould is attempting to be blasé. At age 17, as she describes in Flower, she and her suburban friends listened to Liz Phair because the singer gave us permission to do stupid things and consider them adventures; in Gould's case, she deflowered a 14-year-old boy from the swim team, knowing her boyfriend would hear about it. She doesn't get into the artsiest Ivy as per plan (I was neither smart nor exceptional), but attends her safe (unvisited) choice, Kenyon, from which she drops out and moves to New York. Among other gigs, she works as a waitress for a sad-sack music bar and as a receptionist for a large, commercial publishing house (I felt silly for being shocked by the quality of what made it through). At Gawker, she became practiced at scanning a room or a page and isolating the appropriate things to hate. Desultory anecdotes of breakup and dating ensue, leaving the reader more confounded than moved. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Former Gawker editor Gould turns a sharp eye on her own life in 11 essays about her childhood, brief collegiate career in Ohio, and eventual move to New York. The perceptiveness and instinctive talent for spotting and exploiting weakness that elevated Gould at Gawker and made her so controversial carry the book. In the queasy traditions of eviscerating memoirs and plain old gossip, there is an element of callousness even in the tenderest moments she describes with former lovers and friends, making it impossible not to wonder what their reaction to this collection will be. Gould outs her affair at 17 with a 14-year-old, a few awkward years at Kenyon College, various affairs in New York, and a stint as a shot girl at a seedy bar. Gould also discusses her time at Gawker, describing how she covered parties, scanning the room for someone or something to mock. Readers will expect the book, given Gould’s record and reputation, to be salacious but instead it comes off as rather pedestrian. --Katherine Boyle
Review
''This is not a 'nice' book, but it comes by its anger and melancholy honestly, and it makes sense of much that is puzzling about our cultural moment.''
-- Jonathan Franzen
"In this limpid, poetic elegy to the New York of her twenties, Emily Gould proves a sharp and feeling observer of her generation. Honest, gorgeously rendered, and occasionally brutal, And the Heart Says Whatever is a testament to the pleasures and pains of heightened self- awareness."
-Amy Sohn, author of Prospect Park West
“And the Heart Says Whatever confirms what fans of Emily Gould's previous writing already knew--that she's massively talented, just as good at devastating us with an emotional truth as she is at amusing us with a clever joke. These smart, poignant essays about being young and literary in New York City are like a twenty-first century version of The Bell Jar but with more pot, sex, technology, and (thank goodness) a different ending.”
--Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep and American Wife
"...Gould turns a sharp eye on her own life...The perceptiveness...that...made her so controversial [carries] the book." —Booklist
"Gould's brand of confessional literature isn't new, but [her] unsentimental, unapologetically female tone is powerfully of-the-moment- [she speaks], in our often phoney and cheesy culture, to the truths of women's lives...[Gould makes] good writing look easy."
-- Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Magazine
We think [Amy Sohn’s warm praise of the book] is perfect…Gould, the host of compulsively watchable web TV series Cooking the Books and a blogger of deserved renown, finds her way through the wilds of New York as [an] astute absorber of all that passes before her." —ThirtyDaysNY.com
"[A] collection of essays about what it's like to live the literary life in New York (even better, Brooklyn)...This girl is going to hold on to the bits she cares about, no matter how much glamour and trauma is thrown her way. The great path [to success in publishing] looms like the yellow brick road: surreal, nostalgic." —The Los Angeles Times
"[Flouts] traditions of many women's memoirs...the antithesis of personal growth narraives like Eat, Pray, Love...Gould's account of her early twenties will ring true to many young people who have longed to prove their worth without being totally sure what that worth is....for teenagers and early twentysomethings seeking what Gould calls "permission" to pursue their dreams, a narrative arc may matter less than the simple tesitmoney of someone who's been there, offered without guilt and without apology." —Jezebel
"gut-wrenching and smart and naked and beautifully written. You can read it as a document of a particular techno-era in New York (and of confessional online culture in general), and as a chroncile of the faullout from a very specific moment in Gawker's reign. But the stories Gould tells here are also very personal, and very sad...she captures better than almost anyone the feeling of what it's like to be young(ish), both ambitious and aimless, more watchful and introspective than is good for her, at this particular moment in our culture...she builds on Joan Didion's sense of [New York] rather than just imitating, or playing tribute to her....She's obsessed with the way time passes, and especially with what it means to be young—to feel your youth draining from you in a way that feels like both a punishment and a reward...it feels utterly true. Gould is attuned to the way things around and inside her are shifting and changing, and she can't stop herself from testing certain boundaries, pushing against her surroundings to see if there's any give." —The Rumpus
"Controversial media maven Gould....traces her sentimental education through eleven vignettes of sex, relationships, and unfocused ambition." —Greenpoint Gazette
"I recently devoured...And the Heart Says Whaetver, appreciating her willingness to let her youthful unhappiness lie still, to look unblinkingly at the unpleasantness of her days and often of herself and perhaps recognize that unpleasantness as a stew from which her specific ambitions evolved, but more often to simply describe it as it was: life."—Rebecca Traister, Salon.com
"Weighty...What makes Gould's essays so readable is their utmost honesty." —Washington Post Express
"A valuable social document of a transformative time in journalism and also, thanks to Gould's evocative writing, deliciously readable...the most realistic Manhattan bildungsroman in years. The only shopping stories involve sale racks at H&M." —The Globe & Mail
"Gould [is] more than a blogger. And the Heart Says Whatever proves she's a very talented memoirist...What Gould taps into is the universal freshness of the particular pain that many people only feel as a young adult, when life starts feeling for the first time like it's spinning out of control, and you don't have the experience yet to know if you'll be able to rein it back in. There's a courage and lack of sentimentality in Gould's voice that's engaging and likeable. She's not neurotic. This is the person you'd want as a roommate in your 20s....And she has great stories...it takes a lot of balls to write about this, and only a writer of Gould's talent could pull it off." —Montreal Mirror
"[Gould] may yet prove capable of becoming her generation's Fran Lebowitz." —The Boston Globe
“In her first collection of essays, Gould tackles the tough questions that come with a life lived online.” —More Magazine
"Brutally honest." —Just Books
"Honest and witty...And the Heart Says Whatever will engage you with its entertaining essays." —Hollywood the Write Way
"Pithily written." —The Observer
"Gould...is fearless." —Iowa City Press-Citizen
-- Jonathan Franzen
"In this limpid, poetic elegy to the New York of her twenties, Emily Gould proves a sharp and feeling observer of her generation. Honest, gorgeously rendered, and occasionally brutal, And the Heart Says Whatever is a testament to the pleasures and pains of heightened self- awareness."
-Amy Sohn, author of Prospect Park West
“And the Heart Says Whatever confirms what fans of Emily Gould's previous writing already knew--that she's massively talented, just as good at devastating us with an emotional truth as she is at amusing us with a clever joke. These smart, poignant essays about being young and literary in New York City are like a twenty-first century version of The Bell Jar but with more pot, sex, technology, and (thank goodness) a different ending.”
--Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep and American Wife
"...Gould turns a sharp eye on her own life...The perceptiveness...that...made her so controversial [carries] the book." —Booklist
"Gould's brand of confessional literature isn't new, but [her] unsentimental, unapologetically female tone is powerfully of-the-moment- [she speaks], in our often phoney and cheesy culture, to the truths of women's lives...[Gould makes] good writing look easy."
-- Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Magazine
We think [Amy Sohn’s warm praise of the book] is perfect…Gould, the host of compulsively watchable web TV series Cooking the Books and a blogger of deserved renown, finds her way through the wilds of New York as [an] astute absorber of all that passes before her." —ThirtyDaysNY.com
"[A] collection of essays about what it's like to live the literary life in New York (even better, Brooklyn)...This girl is going to hold on to the bits she cares about, no matter how much glamour and trauma is thrown her way. The great path [to success in publishing] looms like the yellow brick road: surreal, nostalgic." —The Los Angeles Times
"[Flouts] traditions of many women's memoirs...the antithesis of personal growth narraives like Eat, Pray, Love...Gould's account of her early twenties will ring true to many young people who have longed to prove their worth without being totally sure what that worth is....for teenagers and early twentysomethings seeking what Gould calls "permission" to pursue their dreams, a narrative arc may matter less than the simple tesitmoney of someone who's been there, offered without guilt and without apology." —Jezebel
"gut-wrenching and smart and naked and beautifully written. You can read it as a document of a particular techno-era in New York (and of confessional online culture in general), and as a chroncile of the faullout from a very specific moment in Gawker's reign. But the stories Gould tells here are also very personal, and very sad...she captures better than almost anyone the feeling of what it's like to be young(ish), both ambitious and aimless, more watchful and introspective than is good for her, at this particular moment in our culture...she builds on Joan Didion's sense of [New York] rather than just imitating, or playing tribute to her....She's obsessed with the way time passes, and especially with what it means to be young—to feel your youth draining from you in a way that feels like both a punishment and a reward...it feels utterly true. Gould is attuned to the way things around and inside her are shifting and changing, and she can't stop herself from testing certain boundaries, pushing against her surroundings to see if there's any give." —The Rumpus
"Controversial media maven Gould....traces her sentimental education through eleven vignettes of sex, relationships, and unfocused ambition." —Greenpoint Gazette
"I recently devoured...And the Heart Says Whaetver, appreciating her willingness to let her youthful unhappiness lie still, to look unblinkingly at the unpleasantness of her days and often of herself and perhaps recognize that unpleasantness as a stew from which her specific ambitions evolved, but more often to simply describe it as it was: life."—Rebecca Traister, Salon.com
"Weighty...What makes Gould's essays so readable is their utmost honesty." —Washington Post Express
"A valuable social document of a transformative time in journalism and also, thanks to Gould's evocative writing, deliciously readable...the most realistic Manhattan bildungsroman in years. The only shopping stories involve sale racks at H&M." —The Globe & Mail
"Gould [is] more than a blogger. And the Heart Says Whatever proves she's a very talented memoirist...What Gould taps into is the universal freshness of the particular pain that many people only feel as a young adult, when life starts feeling for the first time like it's spinning out of control, and you don't have the experience yet to know if you'll be able to rein it back in. There's a courage and lack of sentimentality in Gould's voice that's engaging and likeable. She's not neurotic. This is the person you'd want as a roommate in your 20s....And she has great stories...it takes a lot of balls to write about this, and only a writer of Gould's talent could pull it off." —Montreal Mirror
"[Gould] may yet prove capable of becoming her generation's Fran Lebowitz." —The Boston Globe
“In her first collection of essays, Gould tackles the tough questions that come with a life lived online.” —More Magazine
"Brutally honest." —Just Books
"Honest and witty...And the Heart Says Whatever will engage you with its entertaining essays." —Hollywood the Write Way
"Pithily written." —The Observer
"Gould...is fearless." —Iowa City Press-Citizen
About the Author
Emily Gould is the author of the novels Perfect Tunes, Friendship, and the essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever. With Ruth Curry, she runs Emily Books, which publishes books by women as an imprint of Coffee House Press. She has written for The New York Times, New York, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and many other publications. She lives in New York City with her family.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
6
Off-Leash
Lee is the first thing I notice when I wake up in the morning, a heavy warmth in the bed next to me, almost like a person. Since I’ve been sleeping next to a person for the last few years, her presence isn’t uncomfortable, except at the moment when I realize she is a dog, not a person. Then it’s like I’m feeling around for the place where pain will be—poking at a blister and finding that the stretched skin is a little bit sore but mostly just tautly menacing, full of the threat of popping.
Lee observes the change in my breathing and immediately gets that I’m awake and starts barking and whining and wagging her tail, begging to be taken to the park. She is a beautiful, endearingly stupid pit bull mix with a brown spot on her yellow back that’s like a button you can press to make her happy. She likes to have the spot gently thumped. I roll out of bed and thump her for a while and then I get dressed. It’s summer, so I don’t have to do much in the way of getting dressed: flip-flops, gym shorts, ponytail. I feel butch and athletic. It’s crazy to think that a few months ago I felt so weak and tired. A few months ago, I had sat on the edge of my bed on weekends, when there was no real reason to get out of bed, and cried, feeling the weakness radiating from the center of my chest all along my limbs. “Is it me? Do you think it’s me?” Joseph had asked me. Later, he told me that this had been my chance to break up with him the right way, the clean, good way: “I asked!”
In the next room, my mom is asleep on the foldout couch. I invited her to the apartment where I’m dogsitting while I wait to move into a new apartment—an apartment where, for the first time, I’ll live alone. My friend Daria lives nominally alone in this apartment with Lee, but a tie rack in the closet is a sign that the arrangement isn’t going to last much longer: Daria’s boyfriend will move in, it’s only a matter of time. Every girl lives with her boyfriend in New York; all of my friends do, at least, because living with your boyfriend means paying hundreds of dollars less per month in rent than you otherwise would. Sharing a one-bedroom is hundreds of dollars a month less expensive than living with a roommate and up to a thousand dollars a month less expensive than living alone, and in a city where a decently livable one-bedroom in anything like an okay neighborhood rents for a minimum of $1,600, you don’t have to be a cheapskate or a cynic to make this calculation. This calculation makes it seem like it’s a good idea to always be in love, or at least looking for love, or pretending to be looking or pretending to be in love.
For a minute, as I stand in the kitchen drinking a glass of orange juice from Daria’s fridge, I let the future unspool in front of me a little bit. I think about how at some point I will want to just sit on the couch and watch TV on a Friday or Saturday night and how all of the people I’d want to do that with will be sitting on their own couches with their boyfriends. Maybe I’ll invite myself over to sit with them and the boyfriends, all watching TV together. Maybe after the TV-watching I’ll invite myself to crawl into bed between them, not for sex, I mean not exactly, just for the warm animal comfort of lying in bed with someone, talking idly about whatever before falling asleep.
Maybe I should get a dog.
My mom is yawning and stretching. “Good morning. Going to the park? Did you sleep well? This foldout couch is more comfortable than I thought it would be. Should I make some coffee, or finish the dishes from last night? I had a couple of strange dreams! You’re up early!”
The nice thing about my mom being around is that it means I’m not alone. Not being alone keeps the blister unpopped. But then there’s every other thing about my mom being around.
“I believe in observing at least a two-hour moratorium on speaking immediately after waking up,” I try.
“Mmhm. Did you want to go to the bookstore today? You’d mentioned something about that. We have the rental car, so this is a good time to run errands! I need to eat something soon for my blood sugar.” My mom is bustling around as she talks, folding the couch back up, running a comb through her pretty, sensibly bobbed hair. “I really did enjoy sleeping on this foldout couch! But I thought, in case we wanted to sit on it, I should fold it up. You might want to think about getting something like this for your new apartment. I think they’re not too expensive.” My mom’s shoes are on now. There is nothing I can do to stop her from coming along to the park, and Lee is barking, circling around the door.
The summer that my parents were twenty-six, they got married. In the snapshots from their wedding, they’re beautiful despite, or maybe because of, their 1977 haircuts and outfits. In an era before wedding-themed reality shows and bridal expos and “wedding photojournalists,” my parents had stared into each others’ eyes and promised to love only each other for the rest of their lives. Implicit in this promise were a series of subpromises: promises to move into an apartment and cook healthy meals together and snap more snapshots and have mutual friends and take beach vacations and have a baby and move into a town-house development and have another baby and move into a real house and work every day and send their children to college and have spats and take ballroom dancing classes and have complicated shared retirement plans.
This summer I am twenty-six and I am living temporarily in the windowless, unventilated attic of a loft in a converted warehouse whose inhabitants call it “the Beast House,” with all my possessions—basically, a computer and some clothes—stuffed in garbage bags on the floor of my room.
When we get back from walking Lee, it’s time to go to my old apartment to feed my and Joseph’s cats, who weren’t allowed to move to the already cat-replete Beast House with me and anyway the custody details haven’t been worked out yet. I assume we’ll end up splitting the cats—there are two, so, perfect—but I’m not sure because I haven’t talked to Joseph since I left. I haven’t been back to the apartment, which he’s now sharing with one of his bandmates, either. His band is playing a show in Boston this weekend, which is why neither he nor the roommate is available to feed the cats.
“What a beautiful day!” says my mom as, behind the wheel of the rental car, she straps on her dorky sunglasses. “Do you want a calcium softchew?” I shake my head. We drive under the BQE and through the Hasidic part of Williamsburg, with my mom talking the entire time about the scenery we’re passing and what kind of people live in what neighborhood and the smell of steak blowing out of the exhaust vents at Peter Luger. She asks a lot of questions, like: Why is that building boarded up? Who would want to live in a fancy glass high-rise next door to a building that’s boarded up? Which direction should she go on Division Street? I don’t have any answers for her. I’m thinking of what the apartment might be like when I get there, and about the last time I’d been in it with Joseph.
It had been a Friday. The previous weekend, Joseph and I had gone to his family’s house in Nantucket to give ourselves a last chance to salvage things after I had confessed to kissing someone else. The relationship-saving weekend had been strange and, like our initial confrontation about the cheating, full of terrible insults and weepy declarations that sounded like bad TV dialogue. “I wouldn’t have told you if I didn’t still want to be with you!” I said, and also, “It’ll never happen again.”
During the week between the relationship-saving weekend and that final Friday, I had continued to kiss someone else, and that afternoon this guy and I had walked through the Union Square Greenmarket and he had bought me a bottle of apple juice which we’d shared, kissing. I had then taken the subway all the way home to Greenpoint and I had gone to the C-Town and bought a Styrofoam package of lamb chops and a rubber-banded bunch of asparagus and a half-pint of heavy cream and angel hair pasta—a nice dinner, all the things Joseph liked, and I had come home and put the bag of groceries down in the kitchen and then I had gone to the living room to sit on the couch and stare into space, paralyzed. Finally Joseph came home. He sat down next to me on the couch and we looked straight into each other’s eyes and, as a result of six years of practice, understood what was going on in each other’s minds, mostly.
“It’s over, isn’t it,” he said, not even bothering to end the sentence with a question mark, and then, yeah, it was.
A month later, here I am at the door of our old building, which is now just Joseph’s building. My body still knows exactly how to twist the key, exactly how much weight to throw toward the door. At the curb, my mom sits in the rented SUV, double-parked, talking animatedly on her hands-free cell phone in a way that makes her look vaguely psycho. I turn back around and walk through the yellow vestibule, smelling the familiar kitcheny smells of the building. I’m numb. When I open the door of the apartment, though, the cats rush to greet me and automatic tears come to my eyes. They seem so happy to see me, even though I smell like dog, even though I’ve left them behind. I kneel to pet them and ask for their forgiveness and tell them how much I love them. The cats forgive me and understand what I’m feeling and they want to comfort me. Or they want food.
The biggest change in the apartment is that it smells like ass now. There are ashtrays overflowing with the crushed butts of American Spirits on every surface, and William has switched to the cheapest brand of kitty litter, the kind that gives small, exhaust fan–less New York apartments their special sad clay smell. The top note in the ass bouquet emanates from the room that looks out on the air shaft, which had been William’s studio before. Now it’s his bedroom, and it smells like his unique brand of pencil-shavings BO, which I have always weirdly loved. Shuddering, I open the windows and turn on the TV to kill the smells and the silence.On the Food Network, Giada De Laurentiis is making exaggerated grimaces of delight as she stirs white wine into bubbling risotto in a soundstage apartment that probably smells like basil and cleaning products. I sit down in the same spot on the worn-out, once-white Ikea couch where I sat for four years, and I let the show completely entrance me for five minutes while a breeze from the street makes the rice-paper blinds I bought in Chinatown three years ago tap from side to side against the window frame. The cats finish eating the food I’ve given them and sidle up to the couch and sit with me and let me pet them, and for those five minutes it’s like everything is back to normal.
In the car, my mom is talking on her hands-free device to Ms. Liu, who is a family therapist, about the moment when she became convinced that she and my dad were going to have to get a divorce. Actually, I don’t know whether this is true, but it’s possible. My parents are moving out of the house I grew up in next weekend and it’s making both of them act crazy. My mom talked a lot about this last night, the idea of a divorce—it’s true that my dad has made the whole move her problem and hasn’t really acknowledged that she’s leaving her job and her friends and her family to move to a totally new state with him. But there’s no way she will ever really divorce him; I can tell when I ask her where she would live if they got divorced and she hasn’t thought about that yet. Even I know that where you’ll live is the first thing you think about, if you’re serious about leaving.
Inside the apartment, one of the cats—the elder cat—starts to convulse. Hork hork hork hork hork. As I watch from the couch, I think about how, if the cat is dying, I’ll have to call Joseph, who will come back from Boston and help me figure out what to do with a cat corpse (cremation?) and who will console me and be pretty fucking bummed himself—he loves the cats; that’s always been one of my favorite things about him, how he says things to them like “Hey, little guy,” which makes it seem like despite his midmorning joint-smoking and dead-end job he might be a good parent someday—and we’ll cry together about the cat and then have consoling mutual-grief life-affirming sex. Or I could call the guy I cheated with. He would also console me and have sex with me—he’s sort of vaguely obligated to—but he would not be bummed if the cat died. He’s maybe allergic.
With a final hork the cat horks up a splattery hair ball and then that’s over with.
My mom and I are back in the rental car, driving back to Daria’s neighborhood. I scratch my arm absently and then I look down and notice that I have big raised bumps with wide white centers on my arm: being in my old apartment has made me break out in hives. The rental car has a pungent new-car smell and I can smell the BO and smoke still clinging to my skin in sharp opposition to it. My mom chatters blithely, either not noticing my discomfort or choosing to ignore it.
To get my mind off the apartment and my ex-boyfriend I start making myself think sexual thoughts, and then as long as I’m thinking about the guy I cheated with, I decide I might as well talk to my mom about him.
“So I started seeing this guy I really like.”
She pauses for a minute and I can tell she’s trying to figure out how to be diplomatic, which makes me resent whatever she’s about to say already.
“Really?” is what she settles on, and of course her tone of voice somehow manages to convey, “Didn’t you break up with your boyfriend who you’d been with for six years about four weeks ago?”
“Yeah and I really feel like it could be more than, like, a rebound thing. He’s so different than anyone I’ve ever been with before. He’s more like me in a way? He reads a lot of books. He likes to cook and he used to be a dancer and he has Cooking for Mr. Latte on his bookshelf. I’m making him sound gay, but he’s actually really macho in this fascinating way?”
We’re at a stoplight, and my mom is consulting the rental car’s GPS, even though we’re going back exactly the way we came. I scratch my arm.
“So what does he do?”
“The same thing I do.”
“Where’d you meet him?”
“At work, Mom. He does the same thing I do.”
We drive on in silence, with little rays of judgment radiating from my mom. Seriously, I can almost see them. Finally, in the same tone that she probably uses with the children whose court cases she represents for a living, she says, “I just think you should be careful right now. You’re making a lot of changes fast and I just don’t want you to get hurt by getting into something intense when you’re just coming out of something intense, and I know that what you’re doing feels good, right now, but . . . well, I’m not going to tell you what is or isn’t a good idea. You have to figure this out for yourself.”
I wish she would just say that she thinks I’m being an idiot and fucking up my life.
Or I wish she would tell me to stop what I’m doing. I wish someone would; I wish someone besides Joseph would care enough, ever, to do anything to prevent me from getting hurt besides saying “I don’t want you to get hurt.” But maybe this is not a realistic thing for an adult person to want.
“I don’t think I’m going to get hurt, Mom,” I say, realizing as I say it that I’m lying. But maybe it just feels like I’m lying because she puts me on the defensive.
On his bookshelves, the books are organized by the color of their spines. Even the air in the stairwell of his Lower East Side apartment building smells scrubbed and slightly plasticky, like coffee or the smell inside Crate & Barrel, and in the apartment it’s colder still. Really, his apartment does seem a lot like a store, but it’s unclear what might be for sale there. He and his roommate split the cost of weekly visits from a Vietnamese cleaning lady. The only other people I know who have a cleaning lady are my parents, and theirs only comes every other week.
He must have gotten up and cracked the door when he heard the buzzer, then returned to his seat at the far end of his long kitchen table. Now he’s sitting there, typing on his laptop. I’m a little bit winded from walking up the stairs,and when I catch my breath my heart is still beating fast. I’m excited to see him, or maybe terrified. My heart won’t slow down. I wish he’d gotten up to greet me. He looks up at me and smiles, closing his laptop. “We should make this quick. I have boxing practice in two hours,” he says.
The cleaning lady hasn’t visited his bedroom lately, from the looks of it. A huge pile of sweaty gym clothes clutters the bed, and he pushes them onto the floor so I can sit. Then he starts kissing me, smelling like good coffee and Kiehl’s products, and it’s what I’ve been thinking about all day but now it feels off. I’m suddenly aware of the bumps on my arm again—they’d been fine for a few hours but now they’re back to itching. My stomach feels full of air. The inside of his mouth tastes scraped, like he’s just flossed—blood and mint and coffee-staleness. But he’s so ardent and pushy, more like a wrestler than a boxer, and he pins me eventually. I’m on the cusp of losing myself in it when suddenly up flashes the image of the older cat trembling and straining as he puked. I brush him aside and sit up. And then nothing works out exactly right.
Afterward, we sit on the fire escape half-naked and smoke a cigarette. Because he spends so much time working out, his smoking seems glamorous—louche and earned, not depressing and desperate like Joseph’s. He passes the cigarette to me and looks away, letting the sunset kiss his profile and make him look like a still from a French movie, which is probably exactly what he’s going for, but it still works. The day has cooled and now the air is the exact same temperature as the blood that’s slowing its race through my veins. I slump against him and feel his body stiffen almost imperceptibly. He has five more minutes and then he really has to leave for boxing, and besides, sex never seems to relax him, nor does anything else.
I look in through the open window back into the room: the rumpled bed, my crumpled sundress. And then I look back at this guy, shirtless and with hardly any chest hair, and I understand suddenly that this is the last time I’ll see him like this because doing this, again, with him would be like if you found a long black hair—not even a hair, a Band-Aid, a fingernail—in your lo mein and picked out the gross bit and kept eating. You’d have to be pretty hungry to do that.
Ten minutes later I’m in a cab headed back to Brooklyn, speeding over the bridge with the warm air rushing through the window, and my hair is whipping around my face, stinging my neck. There’s only a tiny slice of sun left, and then even that slice disappears into East River and it’s getting darker fast.
On our way into the park my mom and I notice a sign that says that dogs can go off-leash after 9 P.M. which it definitely is. We’ve been talking about moving: my new apartment, my parents’ new apartment. These are chances for new starts, my mom says. Also: if my dad plays golf less often, she says, she will probably not divorce him. Lee trots on ahead of us energetically with her tongue hanging out of her mouth, focused, though it’s not clear on what, exactly. Soon, my mom and I lapse into silence and start walking in the same lockstep.
“I wonder what would happen if we let her off the leash,” I say eventually.
I stop walking, and so does Lee. My mom goes over and unclips the leash. Then we all start walking again, Lee a perfect leash-length ahead of us.
“Well, I guess that’s what happens,” I say after a while.
“Look at that,” my mom says to Lee. “You’re a metaphor.”
© 2010 Emily Gould
Off-Leash
Lee is the first thing I notice when I wake up in the morning, a heavy warmth in the bed next to me, almost like a person. Since I’ve been sleeping next to a person for the last few years, her presence isn’t uncomfortable, except at the moment when I realize she is a dog, not a person. Then it’s like I’m feeling around for the place where pain will be—poking at a blister and finding that the stretched skin is a little bit sore but mostly just tautly menacing, full of the threat of popping.
Lee observes the change in my breathing and immediately gets that I’m awake and starts barking and whining and wagging her tail, begging to be taken to the park. She is a beautiful, endearingly stupid pit bull mix with a brown spot on her yellow back that’s like a button you can press to make her happy. She likes to have the spot gently thumped. I roll out of bed and thump her for a while and then I get dressed. It’s summer, so I don’t have to do much in the way of getting dressed: flip-flops, gym shorts, ponytail. I feel butch and athletic. It’s crazy to think that a few months ago I felt so weak and tired. A few months ago, I had sat on the edge of my bed on weekends, when there was no real reason to get out of bed, and cried, feeling the weakness radiating from the center of my chest all along my limbs. “Is it me? Do you think it’s me?” Joseph had asked me. Later, he told me that this had been my chance to break up with him the right way, the clean, good way: “I asked!”
In the next room, my mom is asleep on the foldout couch. I invited her to the apartment where I’m dogsitting while I wait to move into a new apartment—an apartment where, for the first time, I’ll live alone. My friend Daria lives nominally alone in this apartment with Lee, but a tie rack in the closet is a sign that the arrangement isn’t going to last much longer: Daria’s boyfriend will move in, it’s only a matter of time. Every girl lives with her boyfriend in New York; all of my friends do, at least, because living with your boyfriend means paying hundreds of dollars less per month in rent than you otherwise would. Sharing a one-bedroom is hundreds of dollars a month less expensive than living with a roommate and up to a thousand dollars a month less expensive than living alone, and in a city where a decently livable one-bedroom in anything like an okay neighborhood rents for a minimum of $1,600, you don’t have to be a cheapskate or a cynic to make this calculation. This calculation makes it seem like it’s a good idea to always be in love, or at least looking for love, or pretending to be looking or pretending to be in love.
For a minute, as I stand in the kitchen drinking a glass of orange juice from Daria’s fridge, I let the future unspool in front of me a little bit. I think about how at some point I will want to just sit on the couch and watch TV on a Friday or Saturday night and how all of the people I’d want to do that with will be sitting on their own couches with their boyfriends. Maybe I’ll invite myself over to sit with them and the boyfriends, all watching TV together. Maybe after the TV-watching I’ll invite myself to crawl into bed between them, not for sex, I mean not exactly, just for the warm animal comfort of lying in bed with someone, talking idly about whatever before falling asleep.
Maybe I should get a dog.
My mom is yawning and stretching. “Good morning. Going to the park? Did you sleep well? This foldout couch is more comfortable than I thought it would be. Should I make some coffee, or finish the dishes from last night? I had a couple of strange dreams! You’re up early!”
The nice thing about my mom being around is that it means I’m not alone. Not being alone keeps the blister unpopped. But then there’s every other thing about my mom being around.
“I believe in observing at least a two-hour moratorium on speaking immediately after waking up,” I try.
“Mmhm. Did you want to go to the bookstore today? You’d mentioned something about that. We have the rental car, so this is a good time to run errands! I need to eat something soon for my blood sugar.” My mom is bustling around as she talks, folding the couch back up, running a comb through her pretty, sensibly bobbed hair. “I really did enjoy sleeping on this foldout couch! But I thought, in case we wanted to sit on it, I should fold it up. You might want to think about getting something like this for your new apartment. I think they’re not too expensive.” My mom’s shoes are on now. There is nothing I can do to stop her from coming along to the park, and Lee is barking, circling around the door.
The summer that my parents were twenty-six, they got married. In the snapshots from their wedding, they’re beautiful despite, or maybe because of, their 1977 haircuts and outfits. In an era before wedding-themed reality shows and bridal expos and “wedding photojournalists,” my parents had stared into each others’ eyes and promised to love only each other for the rest of their lives. Implicit in this promise were a series of subpromises: promises to move into an apartment and cook healthy meals together and snap more snapshots and have mutual friends and take beach vacations and have a baby and move into a town-house development and have another baby and move into a real house and work every day and send their children to college and have spats and take ballroom dancing classes and have complicated shared retirement plans.
This summer I am twenty-six and I am living temporarily in the windowless, unventilated attic of a loft in a converted warehouse whose inhabitants call it “the Beast House,” with all my possessions—basically, a computer and some clothes—stuffed in garbage bags on the floor of my room.
When we get back from walking Lee, it’s time to go to my old apartment to feed my and Joseph’s cats, who weren’t allowed to move to the already cat-replete Beast House with me and anyway the custody details haven’t been worked out yet. I assume we’ll end up splitting the cats—there are two, so, perfect—but I’m not sure because I haven’t talked to Joseph since I left. I haven’t been back to the apartment, which he’s now sharing with one of his bandmates, either. His band is playing a show in Boston this weekend, which is why neither he nor the roommate is available to feed the cats.
“What a beautiful day!” says my mom as, behind the wheel of the rental car, she straps on her dorky sunglasses. “Do you want a calcium softchew?” I shake my head. We drive under the BQE and through the Hasidic part of Williamsburg, with my mom talking the entire time about the scenery we’re passing and what kind of people live in what neighborhood and the smell of steak blowing out of the exhaust vents at Peter Luger. She asks a lot of questions, like: Why is that building boarded up? Who would want to live in a fancy glass high-rise next door to a building that’s boarded up? Which direction should she go on Division Street? I don’t have any answers for her. I’m thinking of what the apartment might be like when I get there, and about the last time I’d been in it with Joseph.
It had been a Friday. The previous weekend, Joseph and I had gone to his family’s house in Nantucket to give ourselves a last chance to salvage things after I had confessed to kissing someone else. The relationship-saving weekend had been strange and, like our initial confrontation about the cheating, full of terrible insults and weepy declarations that sounded like bad TV dialogue. “I wouldn’t have told you if I didn’t still want to be with you!” I said, and also, “It’ll never happen again.”
During the week between the relationship-saving weekend and that final Friday, I had continued to kiss someone else, and that afternoon this guy and I had walked through the Union Square Greenmarket and he had bought me a bottle of apple juice which we’d shared, kissing. I had then taken the subway all the way home to Greenpoint and I had gone to the C-Town and bought a Styrofoam package of lamb chops and a rubber-banded bunch of asparagus and a half-pint of heavy cream and angel hair pasta—a nice dinner, all the things Joseph liked, and I had come home and put the bag of groceries down in the kitchen and then I had gone to the living room to sit on the couch and stare into space, paralyzed. Finally Joseph came home. He sat down next to me on the couch and we looked straight into each other’s eyes and, as a result of six years of practice, understood what was going on in each other’s minds, mostly.
“It’s over, isn’t it,” he said, not even bothering to end the sentence with a question mark, and then, yeah, it was.
A month later, here I am at the door of our old building, which is now just Joseph’s building. My body still knows exactly how to twist the key, exactly how much weight to throw toward the door. At the curb, my mom sits in the rented SUV, double-parked, talking animatedly on her hands-free cell phone in a way that makes her look vaguely psycho. I turn back around and walk through the yellow vestibule, smelling the familiar kitcheny smells of the building. I’m numb. When I open the door of the apartment, though, the cats rush to greet me and automatic tears come to my eyes. They seem so happy to see me, even though I smell like dog, even though I’ve left them behind. I kneel to pet them and ask for their forgiveness and tell them how much I love them. The cats forgive me and understand what I’m feeling and they want to comfort me. Or they want food.
The biggest change in the apartment is that it smells like ass now. There are ashtrays overflowing with the crushed butts of American Spirits on every surface, and William has switched to the cheapest brand of kitty litter, the kind that gives small, exhaust fan–less New York apartments their special sad clay smell. The top note in the ass bouquet emanates from the room that looks out on the air shaft, which had been William’s studio before. Now it’s his bedroom, and it smells like his unique brand of pencil-shavings BO, which I have always weirdly loved. Shuddering, I open the windows and turn on the TV to kill the smells and the silence.On the Food Network, Giada De Laurentiis is making exaggerated grimaces of delight as she stirs white wine into bubbling risotto in a soundstage apartment that probably smells like basil and cleaning products. I sit down in the same spot on the worn-out, once-white Ikea couch where I sat for four years, and I let the show completely entrance me for five minutes while a breeze from the street makes the rice-paper blinds I bought in Chinatown three years ago tap from side to side against the window frame. The cats finish eating the food I’ve given them and sidle up to the couch and sit with me and let me pet them, and for those five minutes it’s like everything is back to normal.
In the car, my mom is talking on her hands-free device to Ms. Liu, who is a family therapist, about the moment when she became convinced that she and my dad were going to have to get a divorce. Actually, I don’t know whether this is true, but it’s possible. My parents are moving out of the house I grew up in next weekend and it’s making both of them act crazy. My mom talked a lot about this last night, the idea of a divorce—it’s true that my dad has made the whole move her problem and hasn’t really acknowledged that she’s leaving her job and her friends and her family to move to a totally new state with him. But there’s no way she will ever really divorce him; I can tell when I ask her where she would live if they got divorced and she hasn’t thought about that yet. Even I know that where you’ll live is the first thing you think about, if you’re serious about leaving.
Inside the apartment, one of the cats—the elder cat—starts to convulse. Hork hork hork hork hork. As I watch from the couch, I think about how, if the cat is dying, I’ll have to call Joseph, who will come back from Boston and help me figure out what to do with a cat corpse (cremation?) and who will console me and be pretty fucking bummed himself—he loves the cats; that’s always been one of my favorite things about him, how he says things to them like “Hey, little guy,” which makes it seem like despite his midmorning joint-smoking and dead-end job he might be a good parent someday—and we’ll cry together about the cat and then have consoling mutual-grief life-affirming sex. Or I could call the guy I cheated with. He would also console me and have sex with me—he’s sort of vaguely obligated to—but he would not be bummed if the cat died. He’s maybe allergic.
With a final hork the cat horks up a splattery hair ball and then that’s over with.
My mom and I are back in the rental car, driving back to Daria’s neighborhood. I scratch my arm absently and then I look down and notice that I have big raised bumps with wide white centers on my arm: being in my old apartment has made me break out in hives. The rental car has a pungent new-car smell and I can smell the BO and smoke still clinging to my skin in sharp opposition to it. My mom chatters blithely, either not noticing my discomfort or choosing to ignore it.
To get my mind off the apartment and my ex-boyfriend I start making myself think sexual thoughts, and then as long as I’m thinking about the guy I cheated with, I decide I might as well talk to my mom about him.
“So I started seeing this guy I really like.”
She pauses for a minute and I can tell she’s trying to figure out how to be diplomatic, which makes me resent whatever she’s about to say already.
“Really?” is what she settles on, and of course her tone of voice somehow manages to convey, “Didn’t you break up with your boyfriend who you’d been with for six years about four weeks ago?”
“Yeah and I really feel like it could be more than, like, a rebound thing. He’s so different than anyone I’ve ever been with before. He’s more like me in a way? He reads a lot of books. He likes to cook and he used to be a dancer and he has Cooking for Mr. Latte on his bookshelf. I’m making him sound gay, but he’s actually really macho in this fascinating way?”
We’re at a stoplight, and my mom is consulting the rental car’s GPS, even though we’re going back exactly the way we came. I scratch my arm.
“So what does he do?”
“The same thing I do.”
“Where’d you meet him?”
“At work, Mom. He does the same thing I do.”
We drive on in silence, with little rays of judgment radiating from my mom. Seriously, I can almost see them. Finally, in the same tone that she probably uses with the children whose court cases she represents for a living, she says, “I just think you should be careful right now. You’re making a lot of changes fast and I just don’t want you to get hurt by getting into something intense when you’re just coming out of something intense, and I know that what you’re doing feels good, right now, but . . . well, I’m not going to tell you what is or isn’t a good idea. You have to figure this out for yourself.”
I wish she would just say that she thinks I’m being an idiot and fucking up my life.
Or I wish she would tell me to stop what I’m doing. I wish someone would; I wish someone besides Joseph would care enough, ever, to do anything to prevent me from getting hurt besides saying “I don’t want you to get hurt.” But maybe this is not a realistic thing for an adult person to want.
“I don’t think I’m going to get hurt, Mom,” I say, realizing as I say it that I’m lying. But maybe it just feels like I’m lying because she puts me on the defensive.
On his bookshelves, the books are organized by the color of their spines. Even the air in the stairwell of his Lower East Side apartment building smells scrubbed and slightly plasticky, like coffee or the smell inside Crate & Barrel, and in the apartment it’s colder still. Really, his apartment does seem a lot like a store, but it’s unclear what might be for sale there. He and his roommate split the cost of weekly visits from a Vietnamese cleaning lady. The only other people I know who have a cleaning lady are my parents, and theirs only comes every other week.
He must have gotten up and cracked the door when he heard the buzzer, then returned to his seat at the far end of his long kitchen table. Now he’s sitting there, typing on his laptop. I’m a little bit winded from walking up the stairs,and when I catch my breath my heart is still beating fast. I’m excited to see him, or maybe terrified. My heart won’t slow down. I wish he’d gotten up to greet me. He looks up at me and smiles, closing his laptop. “We should make this quick. I have boxing practice in two hours,” he says.
The cleaning lady hasn’t visited his bedroom lately, from the looks of it. A huge pile of sweaty gym clothes clutters the bed, and he pushes them onto the floor so I can sit. Then he starts kissing me, smelling like good coffee and Kiehl’s products, and it’s what I’ve been thinking about all day but now it feels off. I’m suddenly aware of the bumps on my arm again—they’d been fine for a few hours but now they’re back to itching. My stomach feels full of air. The inside of his mouth tastes scraped, like he’s just flossed—blood and mint and coffee-staleness. But he’s so ardent and pushy, more like a wrestler than a boxer, and he pins me eventually. I’m on the cusp of losing myself in it when suddenly up flashes the image of the older cat trembling and straining as he puked. I brush him aside and sit up. And then nothing works out exactly right.
Afterward, we sit on the fire escape half-naked and smoke a cigarette. Because he spends so much time working out, his smoking seems glamorous—louche and earned, not depressing and desperate like Joseph’s. He passes the cigarette to me and looks away, letting the sunset kiss his profile and make him look like a still from a French movie, which is probably exactly what he’s going for, but it still works. The day has cooled and now the air is the exact same temperature as the blood that’s slowing its race through my veins. I slump against him and feel his body stiffen almost imperceptibly. He has five more minutes and then he really has to leave for boxing, and besides, sex never seems to relax him, nor does anything else.
I look in through the open window back into the room: the rumpled bed, my crumpled sundress. And then I look back at this guy, shirtless and with hardly any chest hair, and I understand suddenly that this is the last time I’ll see him like this because doing this, again, with him would be like if you found a long black hair—not even a hair, a Band-Aid, a fingernail—in your lo mein and picked out the gross bit and kept eating. You’d have to be pretty hungry to do that.
Ten minutes later I’m in a cab headed back to Brooklyn, speeding over the bridge with the warm air rushing through the window, and my hair is whipping around my face, stinging my neck. There’s only a tiny slice of sun left, and then even that slice disappears into East River and it’s getting darker fast.
On our way into the park my mom and I notice a sign that says that dogs can go off-leash after 9 P.M. which it definitely is. We’ve been talking about moving: my new apartment, my parents’ new apartment. These are chances for new starts, my mom says. Also: if my dad plays golf less often, she says, she will probably not divorce him. Lee trots on ahead of us energetically with her tongue hanging out of her mouth, focused, though it’s not clear on what, exactly. Soon, my mom and I lapse into silence and start walking in the same lockstep.
“I wonder what would happen if we let her off the leash,” I say eventually.
I stop walking, and so does Lee. My mom goes over and unclips the leash. Then we all start walking again, Lee a perfect leash-length ahead of us.
“Well, I guess that’s what happens,” I say after a while.
“Look at that,” my mom says to Lee. “You’re a metaphor.”
© 2010 Emily Gould
Product details
- Publisher : Free Press; 1st edition (May 4, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1439123896
- ISBN-13 : 978-1439123898
- Item Weight : 7.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,108,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,576 in Humor Essays (Books)
- #3,581 in Love, Sex & Marriage Humor
- #20,994 in Women's Biographies
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Emily Gould is an author, journalist and the co-founder of a feminist publishing startup, Emily Books. She has written extensively for publications including the New York Times, London Review of Books, Guardian, The Economist, Slate and Jezebel, and since 2005 has run a popular blog at emilymagazine.com. She is the author of a collection of essays, And the Heart Says Whatever, and Friendship is her debut novel.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2014
Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2011
The cover of this book alone would have drawn me to it, had I passed by it in my local Barnes and Noble. It's beautiful in its simplicity. However, this was on my List of Books to Read in my Blackberry, so I ordered it without looking into what it was about, trusting my list-making abilities and buying blindly. This turned out to be in my favor.
Emily Gould, who has written for The New York Times, The New York Observer, and Jezebel.com has a voice that I can't closely relate to anyone else's that I have read before. There were times when the sharpness of her words made me think of old books that I have read by authors who are both witty and sad; and this book is sort of dark in its humor and even darker in its reality.
Jonathan Franzen, an American novelist and essayist, writes about Gould's book:
This is not a `nice' book, but it comes by its anger and melancholy honestly, and it makes sense of much that is puzzling about our cultural moment.
I think that this is so true. At times, Emily is painfully honest -- about heartbreak, addiction, and the overall sadness of coming into true adulthood in a city that doesn't care about your failures or achievements. The years of smoking pot, the years of a failing relationship with a man she loved deeply, and the years of moving forward and upward (and sometimes backward) in her career -- it's all here, within these pages.
I wouldn't call this memoir a page-turner. It is, essentially, a group of eleven essays that tell a story of sorts, with pieces here or there that make sense over time. However, even though I didn't feel the push of the pages beckoning me forward, the intense honesty of this book was enough to keep me interested, and the reader really does cheer on Emily Gould as she tells about years of self-discovery -- you want so badly for her to find love, find a place for herself in the world, and find peace. I think that any author who can make you feel such intense love for their main character (in Emily's case, it is herself) deserves all of the success in the world, as books that make you feel something are hard to come by, it seems.
I recommend this book to anyone in the midst of self-discovery. It's not exceptionally encouraging, but it is relatable in its mishaps -- especially in the love department. I wouldn't say that this is much of a summer or beach read; it's more of a taking-a-sick-day read, as I, in particular, enjoyed reading this book on the couch with a blanket covering my legs.
Emily Gould, who has written for The New York Times, The New York Observer, and Jezebel.com has a voice that I can't closely relate to anyone else's that I have read before. There were times when the sharpness of her words made me think of old books that I have read by authors who are both witty and sad; and this book is sort of dark in its humor and even darker in its reality.
Jonathan Franzen, an American novelist and essayist, writes about Gould's book:
This is not a `nice' book, but it comes by its anger and melancholy honestly, and it makes sense of much that is puzzling about our cultural moment.
I think that this is so true. At times, Emily is painfully honest -- about heartbreak, addiction, and the overall sadness of coming into true adulthood in a city that doesn't care about your failures or achievements. The years of smoking pot, the years of a failing relationship with a man she loved deeply, and the years of moving forward and upward (and sometimes backward) in her career -- it's all here, within these pages.
I wouldn't call this memoir a page-turner. It is, essentially, a group of eleven essays that tell a story of sorts, with pieces here or there that make sense over time. However, even though I didn't feel the push of the pages beckoning me forward, the intense honesty of this book was enough to keep me interested, and the reader really does cheer on Emily Gould as she tells about years of self-discovery -- you want so badly for her to find love, find a place for herself in the world, and find peace. I think that any author who can make you feel such intense love for their main character (in Emily's case, it is herself) deserves all of the success in the world, as books that make you feel something are hard to come by, it seems.
I recommend this book to anyone in the midst of self-discovery. It's not exceptionally encouraging, but it is relatable in its mishaps -- especially in the love department. I wouldn't say that this is much of a summer or beach read; it's more of a taking-a-sick-day read, as I, in particular, enjoyed reading this book on the couch with a blanket covering my legs.
Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2010
I liked And the Heart Says Whatever a lot. This 28-year-old Brooklynite's sober, sometimes darkly funny reflections on some of the more cringe-inducing scenes from her teens and early twenties resonated with me. This despite my being a full 16 years older than Gould. I found myself nodding, "yes," at her astute observations about many things: the wincingly unavoidable fallibilities of twentysomethings; relationships - with bosses, friends, your first serious boyfriend whom you might have outgrown; what it's like to come of age in publishing and in New York.
It probably helps that I had some life and career experiences that were similar to Gould's. It also doesn't hurt that I happen to like this sort of personal essay collection: the kind that comes from a writer who doesn't brandish some story of victimization, extreme ailment or oddity, but is instead just a regular person with a gift for perfectly summing up familiar experiences.
I salute Gould for resisting a New School writing instructor's suggestion to, "...look within and ask yourself this question: `How am I a victim?'" along with the common publishing industry dictum to impose an obvious, neatly resolved redemption arc on the collection. I thank her for not presenting another tiresome onslaught of one self-deprecating punch line after another like so many memoirs by women these days. I enjoyed And the Heart Says Whatever in the same way that I enjoyed Michael Greenberg's Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life, another memoir in essays by a writer with a knack for sober summaries that aren't too heavily worked or fussed over.
It probably helps that I had some life and career experiences that were similar to Gould's. It also doesn't hurt that I happen to like this sort of personal essay collection: the kind that comes from a writer who doesn't brandish some story of victimization, extreme ailment or oddity, but is instead just a regular person with a gift for perfectly summing up familiar experiences.
I salute Gould for resisting a New School writing instructor's suggestion to, "...look within and ask yourself this question: `How am I a victim?'" along with the common publishing industry dictum to impose an obvious, neatly resolved redemption arc on the collection. I thank her for not presenting another tiresome onslaught of one self-deprecating punch line after another like so many memoirs by women these days. I enjoyed And the Heart Says Whatever in the same way that I enjoyed Michael Greenberg's Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life, another memoir in essays by a writer with a knack for sober summaries that aren't too heavily worked or fussed over.
Top reviews from other countries
Clarissa
4.0 out of 5 stars
Full of hurt but utterly compelling
Reviewed in Canada on August 7, 2010
Emily Gould writes about her first years in New York. It hurts your heart to read it. Are all young women so vulnerable, so open to pain, so able to stab at others too? Yes. I was a young woman in a big city once and it all rings true.
It is wonderfully written and has phrases that linger in the mind as you ... grow old?
It is wonderfully written and has phrases that linger in the mind as you ... grow old?
Lola
4.0 out of 5 stars
A read for a heart.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 21, 2011
Emily Gould is another young, somewhat emotionally disturbed woman seeing therapist, asking all the right questions, searching for herself in New York City early in the XXI century. After reading Sloane Croasley and Emma Forrest I found myself drawn to these young talented women speaking their mind openly, discussing all sorts of things from relationships and break-ups to having a pet animal and faking having a pet animal, from career and possible career to, ultimately, a search of self in an adult world. "And the heart says whatever..." is written about all of the above things, and more. I loved Emily's book and after reading the last essay I was sad to notice that she has no other books published. Yes, she has blogs and frequently publishes in all the right adult papers and magazines, but I would certainly love to see more of her soul writing, that truly comes from her unspoilt and unselfish heart, no matter how bitchy she could appear in her blog articles.
"And the heart says whatever" is a lovely collection of short essays, after finishing each one of them you want to read some more. The book leaves you feeling positive and hopeful, and I seriously wish that after I'd left this review I could search amazon.co.uk some more and find another wonderful book by Emily Gould. Hopefully, someday.
Great read, with a possible annoyance of constant present of weed in all her stories. But maybe it's just me.
"And the heart says whatever" is a lovely collection of short essays, after finishing each one of them you want to read some more. The book leaves you feeling positive and hopeful, and I seriously wish that after I'd left this review I could search amazon.co.uk some more and find another wonderful book by Emily Gould. Hopefully, someday.
Great read, with a possible annoyance of constant present of weed in all her stories. But maybe it's just me.
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as1892798
1.0 out of 5 stars
Somewhat vapid and self indulgent
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 30, 2013
I'd read such good reviews of this book and since I like confessional, personal type essays I decided to give this a go. Sadly it just felt like someone's rambling anecdotes without any real emotion or feeling behind them at all.
