Even now, I am always in love-or else I am getting over the last person or getting started with the next one. “For a while after my first book came out, I went home with a different man every night and did heroin every day-which showed my good sense, because the rest of the time I was completely out of control. read this paragraph and come to your own conclusions:

the rest of the Internet wasn’t much nicer and 2. If you think my characterization was a bit much: 1. It is sad.”Īs if on cue, New York magazine published several hundred stylishly rendered but barely coherent and astonishingly irrelevant words four days later, under the headline “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts her One-Night Stand of a Life”. It is the most small-minded interpretation of “journalism” there is. There is nothing more painful to watch than a writer desperately grasping at ever less-important aspects of their own lives in order to make word counts, until they must simultaneously eat lunch and be writing about eating that lunch at the same time. By plundering your own life for material, you are not investing in yourself as a writer you’re spending the principal. Writing about yourself can be part of a balanced journalism diet, but it sure ain’t a whole fucking meal. And sure, you can get some of them published. Sure, you can extract some thoughtful stories of humiliation from a college class. Most people who decide to base their writing careers on stories about themselves end up like bands that used their entire lifetime’s worth of good material in their first album, and then sputtered uselessly when it came time for the follow-up. Certainly, simple math will tell you that a 20 year-old has only a limited store of really compelling personal stories to tell. “Left unsaid in most discussions of this sort of writing is the fact that most people’s lives are not that interesting. After getting the requisite Gawker-esque snark out of his system, Nolan offers some common-sense correctives, based upon this simple premise: “Journalism Is Not Narcissism” railled against advising aspiring journalists to make too much of a habit of mining their young lives for meaty stories as a way to start gaining career traction (so much, I guess, for the old bromide “write about something you know”). It began promptly on the 2nd, with Hamilton Nolan’s takedown in Gawker. January 2013 will be remembered for, among other portentous events, the bashing of the genre known as memoir.

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