The First-Person Industrial Complex

This article by Laura Bennett originally appeared on Slate on 9/14/15.

The Internet prizes the harrowing personal essay. But sometimes telling your story comes with a price.

A few months ago, Natasha Chenier submitted a piece to Jezebel about her sexual relationship with her dad. She described meeting her biological father for the first time at age 19 and being gradually overtaken by lust for him. She recalled being so wracked by disgust and shame after the second time they had oral sex that she dry-heaved over the toilet in his bathroom. “He lay on his bed looking aloof during those episodes,” she wrote, “spouting empty assurances like, ‘You’ll be fine.’ ”

Writing that essay, she recalls now, was “terrifying.” But in a way, it felt inevitable, too. Chenier, now 27, had always kept a diligent journal and had been reading Jezebel for years. “I had this story I’d always wanted to tell,” she says, “and suddenly I felt like the world was ready.”

Jia Tolentino, Jezebel’s features editor, contemplated the draft. It was sure to be a blockbuster. It had graphic and devastating details, yet a matter-of-fact narrative voice. It would feed the Internet’s bottomless appetite for harrowing personal essays. But she tried to explain to Chenier just what airing this story could mean for her life: “Since she was new to writing, I just wanted to confirm—was she ready for this to be on her Google results forever?” Tolentino gave her the option of publishing under a pseudonym. But Chenier seemed confident that she knew what she was getting into. “She was sure she wanted to build her writing career around this,” Tolentino says. When Jezebel published the piece, titled “On Falling In and Out of Love With My Dad,” it ran with a bright red illustration of a bed between the words “I” and “Dad.” Of course, the essay went viral.

 

Read the full article on Slate.

 

Clean Up Your Blog – A to Z Preparation

This post by Donna B. McNicol originally appeared on her Writing My Life site on 2/17/14.

Updated repeat from a 2012 blog post:

I’m fine tuning my blog in preparation for the, hopefully, gazillion visitors I’ll have during the month of April. Okay, so maybe not a gazillion, but a lot more than normal. I just read and implemented some of the tips on Sommer Leigh’s blog post, Sommer’s Top Ten Tips for A-to-Zing it in April.

There was one tip that REALLY caught my attention since I recently vented about it: Blogger and Word Verification [rant] If you want people to comment, you really need to make it easy for them to do so. Check your blog to be sure, and while there check to be sure you allow anonymous commenters as well (as mentioned by Sommer).

One missing tip that helps keep your blog looking professional as well as identification once loaded. It’s time to add a favicon to your blog. For years professionals have used favicons to identify their websites. For those with blogs hosted on their own domains, it’s an easy enough process to create the .ico file and upload it to the home directory. I use the freeware program IrfanView to create .ico files from images. You can easily crop, resize and ‘Save As’ with this program (and much more).

But for those of us using Blogger, we were left out in the cold. Not any more! If you look at your browser tab, you will see the icon with my face (from my blog header). I use that for my blog as well as my website, DonnaMcNicol.com.

 

Click here to read the full article on Donna B. McNicol’s Writing My Life.