And the Heart Says Whatever
On the strength of an exposé she wrote for theNew York Times Magazinetwo 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.