Emily

Of all the thousands of webposts, NYTimes.com comments and gawker.com attempts to suck pageviews out of Emily Gould, this one was the most memorable to me:

David Williams Says: May 22nd, 2008 at 1:46
pm
I must tell you that I’m a 68-year-old man who has never read a blog before or posted a comment on one. But I just read your piece in the New York Times magazine, and it left me with such a storm of feelings I have been moved to seek you out.
First, the piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting
magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since. For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it.
At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits. As a minor example, it was so satisfying to get to know a young woman with tattoos; I’ve wondered for years who these people are, what do tattoos, which in my generation labelled the resentful and disaffected, mean to this generation, what would an attractive young woman with tattoos be like? And as someone who loves the art of writing, your hyper-insightful, wonderfully written piece gives me hope that that art has not been smothered to death by the embrace of the academy.
And, to get personal (as befits a blog, I guess), you also broke my heart. Three years ago I left New York after living for 37 years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, spending several summers on Fire Island, and your voice spoke to me of that world, that life, in a way that so beautifully evoked not only the City but its best inhabitants — the young, curious, eager persons I knew when I was young there. It probably is not irrelevant that your photo reminds me very much of the love of my life, a very smart, very talented, funny and rambunctious young woman, a resident of the Village, in those days still the place for those with literary and other artistic ambitions. To be reminded of all that was painful, and sad, but, still, to have those feelings in relation to the world you live in makes the world I lived in come alive again in my mind.
Thanks for the memories.

From Emily's personal blog