For the shallowest of reasons, actually. I saw the author, Choire (pronounced "Corey") Sicha, on Chris Hayes's show as part of his book tour, and I thought he was cute and funny. So I bought the book, and I started reading this nice fable about gay men in a city not identified as New York but very CLEARLY New York, which I thought was nice because I really don't know how things work for guys just out of college any more, and then I hit a "diary me" passage, and I finished the book and did some research and now I can write about it.
The "diary me" passage first, then the author, and then the criticism. Here's what told me "finish the book so you can write about it.":
John went out to Metropolitan, his favorite cozy little bar, particularly in the cold months. John met this guy, this great-looking guy, and they spent the night together. It was a crazy, energizing emotional experience, that thrill you get when you meet somebody great and appealing, a kind of magic that was rare ["Dude can write," I thought.]
And apparently the guy really liked John too, because John read about it on the Internet on the guy's personal diary the next day. "Met this amazing guy last night," that sort of thing, and then it went into more really quite personal detail.
The thing is, John had been reading this guy's writing online for months--but when they met, he didn't connect the person to the persona. He actually read this stuff because he liked to make fun of it. This guy had not only a boyfriend, but also an unending series of sex partners, sometimes for cash as well. He had amazing stories too. Soimetimes John and his friends would read these stories together out loud. And then suddenly, the shock of intruding unexpectedly into the narrative, guest-starring in this Internet tale was sort of like--what was it even like, having your activities of the night before published, with your name, in public? A little like opening the newspaper and reading a long and overwrought review of your own private diary, as recounted by someone who doesn't know at all the most important things there are to know about you.
Later on, the guy wrote about how upset and mystified he was that he never heard from John again.
Well, okay. I guess that could actually happen nowadays, the stuff that you never wanted to hear gossiped about out there in print Actually, this is sort of a
mea culpa on Sicha's part, although if you don't know anything about his biography you wouldn't know that.
About the author: Here's a pic.
So I like scruffy guys. So what?
What's remarkable about Sicha is that his recent past is VERY VERY public. After all, he was the editor of Gawker twice before he founded the Awl, a website that GQ describes as
the irreverent, all-purpose, media/culture/politics/think-piece/bear-video clusterfuck of a Web site edited by Choire Sicha and Alex Balk that's probably the closest thing on the Internet to the much-imitated Spy magazine of the '80s and '90s.
Spy! THERE was a magazine. It couldn't last. Its editors didn't really age well either. The GQ interview is pretentious and mannered as it attempts to be playful, but he gets away with it. His biography at Amazon is longer than the one his publisher, Harper Collins, uses:
I co-own a website called The Awl, which is for smart people who like fun things. Maybe you are one of those people: please join us! Before that, I did a lot of other things. I was a paralegal, I worked in homeless shelters, I ran an art gallery, and for a while I worked for universities interviewing teenage research subjects about their sex lives, which was really weird and more than a little awkward. Also I was the editor of Gawker (twice), and I wrote a bunch for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and also for a suspiciously large number of magazines exactly one time. Right now, I live in Brooklyn with two cats, which is the right number of cats. (With just one cat, the cat thinks it's a person; with three cats, they all start to plot against you. Two cats, however, is just right.)
Very 2010, absolutely.
And then there's the column David Carr wrote about Sicha and The Awl (The Awl has a wikipedia page; Mr. Sicha doesn't) when it started to make money in the New York Times. You can read it. The "About" statement from the Awl website is maybe more interesting. Established in 2009, it's pretty much us here at the Great Orange Satan only focused on New York City and minus the focus on political aims:
We believe that there is a great big Internet out there on which we all live, and that too often the curios and oddities of that Internet are ignored in favor of the most obvious and easy stories. We believe that there is an audience of intelligent readers who are poorly served by being delivered those same stories in numbing repetition to the detriment of their reading diet. We believe that there is no topic unworthy of scrutiny, so long that it is approached from an intelligent angle, but that there are many topics worthy of scrutiny that lack coverage because of commercial factors. We believe that the longform essay has a home on the Internet, and that the idea of "too long; didn't read" is exactly as shortsighted as its TL;DR acronym.
This does not mean that we eschew frivolity; far from it. Who doesn't enjoy a funny video, a current meme, or anything about bears? We love bears. And Science!
In the end, however, we return most frequently to New York City and its self-centered, all-consuming industries: media and publishing, finance and real estate, politics and capitalism and gamesmanship.
Where he grew up? Where he went to college. Probably some of you can answer those questions. The web can't, or won't.
Interview Magazine tells us he's 41. It's a detail.
The book, and its reception
Not reviewed in the usual outlets. The review in the New York Observer is all about how the BOOK is about working at the Observer. Alice Gregory at The New Yorker thinks it's an anti-blog -- doesn't exactly explain WHY -- but likes it a lot.
What Sicha has written is exultant in a way no mere clever premise can be. It suggests that there are epic forces at work, tacit collective story lines, systemic but secret reasons why we live the way we do. This, it should be said, is exactly what he’s been doing in a serialized way all these years. Only in retrospect is it obvious.
Other reviews found it inert, and a lot of them looked at the title, which says "an entirely factual account" even though the book is patently fiction based very closely on real life, like, say F. Scott Fitzgerald's
Tender is the Night, and had snit fits (it's FICTION, no matter what they say) over that.
I had fun with it. Yes, gay life has migrated to the internet, but there are still bars in New York and there are still sex clubs in New York, and, if anything, the men Sicha describes are less hung up about everything that I remember people like the men Sicha describes who were in their 20s in the 1970s were. I don't know if I'd want to be 30 again now.