Update

Cancer Bitch is afraid she will get her blogger award stripped from her because she hasn't blogged in ever so long. She is working hard revising the manuscript based on this blog. It's due at University of Iowa Press June 1 and she is ever so anxious about it. She has had a lump in her throat for about 10 days and takes Ativan for it from time to time and then gets anxious she will become addicted. She is also in the midst of buying a house and quakes at the prospect of actually living full-time with her husband. Right now they live together most of the time in her condo, where 95 percent of the furniture and Stuff is hers. He has half a (big) closet and two dressers and half the bathroom. The rest is in his house in Gary, which he'll sell next spring. But he dislikes most of her furniture and pictures and she doesn't like his pictures so much and she thinks he hangs them too close to the floor anyway. Everything is overwhelming though she knows that in the grand scheme of things these problems are but fly specks. She wonders if any of her readers have anything to say about the New York Times magazine story about blogging and becoming Known. She understands the author's tendency to "overshare" and her feeling that her life is public and private at the same time. But didn't Jennifer Weiner mine some of this same territory in Good in Bed? The NYT story is very thin on cultural history, or any history not the narrator's own. There are no references to other tell-alls, except one that unfolded right as hers did: "For a few hours, my personal dramas took a backseat — sort of — to news that a Pulitzer-winning author had described his wife’s affair with a media mogul in a crazy e-mail message to his graduate students." But what do you expect from a piece that begins "Back in 2006..."?

Is C. Bitch being too harsh? Perhaps. It may be too much to expect a confession to provide cultural and political perspective about a phenomenon while the author is in the middle of it. Mostly, she is amazed at how quickly someone can become famous. But in this day and age, she shouldn't be surprised.