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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.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Eugene Briody
reviewed And the Heart Says Whatever on June 27, 2010
And the Heart Says Whatever
For some reason I've long felt a kinship with Emily Gould. Maybe it's because I love that she has big tattoos on her arms and yet still manages to look a bit like she belongs in a church choir. Maybe it's because I enjoyed reading her stuff on Gawker. Maybe it's because I read some of the comments made about her essay for the New York Times Magazine, and I felt protective of her as a result. Who knows why?
This nebulous sense of camaraderie led me to buy a copy of her book, making it the latest addition to my shelf of memoirs written by young women who live in New York City. (Seriously, I can't believe how many of these books are published each year. Surely there are people living in cities other than New York whose foibles would make for good books?) And as I read it, I became distinctly aware of something. See, I am not the pickiest person in the world when it comes to books. I have three criteria by which I gauge a book's success: did it make me think, did it make me feel, did it entertain me? If a book manages to do one of these things, I will like it. If it does two, I will adore it, and if it does all three, I will canonize the person who wrote it.
Gould's book managed to do none of these things. By page 120, I was bored, regularly flipping to the end of the book to see how many pages I had left to slog through. I would have thought a book about the life of a young writer in the big city, especially one that relies so heavily on TMI, would have been perfect for me, but instead I spent much of the time I was reading it trying to figure out why exactly I was reading it. There was not enough narrative cohesiveness to sustain my interest, not even when I tried to view the book as a collection of essays. Instead it was just vignette after vignette about cheating on boyfriends and not caring about much of anything and working as a waitress and blah blah blah snore.
I will give the book this, which is that it finally succeeded in making me feel something: anger at myself for bothering to finish it. I am not sure that's what Gould had in mind. But honestly, "And The Heart Says Whatever"? More like "And The Reader Says Whatever."
Recommended for nobody, except maybe masochists. And I feel bad about that, because I don't like to pile on, but it's the truth.
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Add And the Heart Says Whatever, 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 barten, And the Heart Says Whatever to your collection on WonderClub |
