Reader Meet Author

I read the news today… oh boy!
A few weeks ago The S^nd@y T1m3s Style section published an extract from “Summer’s sauciest memoir”, Girl With a One-Track Mind by Abby Lee. Today, with a tabloid callousness, they stuck the knife in.

You, gentle reader, should already be familiar with the blog on which the big-seller (No.7 on Amazon) is based. GWa1TM - shall we call it - was the first sexblog I regularly started reading, back in 2004. I had already come across - shall we not say - the Belle de Jour blog, but, for whatever reason, it didn’t get me hooked. TheGirl - as the writer of GWa1TM blog calls herself - did. Her writing was immediate, humorous, human and insightful. Publishers Ebury Press clearly thought so too, and decided to turn her cyber words into olde-worlde books - remember books?? Me neither. But anyway…

I mean, well, to have secured a book deal must give fellow sexbloggers food for thought (though not me. There’s more chance of me travelling to the moons of Jupiter in a clapped-out Vauxhall Viva on half a tank of petrol, with the re-animated corpse of Vladimir Lenin as navigator, then there is of this being turned into print form) (that’s not to say it won’t ever happen - the moons of Jupiter thing, that is, not the book). And also, perhaps naturally, has drawn the attention of envious eyes.

“Revealed: identity of erotic diarist behind summer’s hottest book”, thunders the headline. “The anonymous author… has been unmasked”, crows Ann@ M1khailova - the person behind this sorry piece of shit - on page three of the broadsheet. “The author says she is “paranoid” that her identity will be exposed, possibly by an embittered former lover” well, she can put those fears to bed now, can’t she? Seeing as “the woman behind it was revealed as [X]” .

“Was revealed”, as if they had nothing to do with it! Other than revealing Abby Lee’s real name, the piece doesn’t have much else to say; it attempts to stir something up by crowbar-ing in a reference to Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy’s book about the kind of women who get drunk and perform impromptu pole/lap dances to strange men in bars and the like, which has little to no relevance to the content of Abby Lee’s diary about her love life. Otherwise, M1khailova just treats the whole thing like something she’s holding at arm’s length in a pair of tongs, “with such a shameless interest in sex it is no surprise X has gone to great lengths to conceal her identity”. Yes, I know dear, disgraceful isn’t it?

The journalist delightedly reports on how they doorstepped Abby, and even had a photographer, hiding in some bushes, to get a shot of her signing for some flowers that the newspaper sent, saying they were from her publishers.

Quite what is gained from all this isn’t clear. It can’t be much news for the majority of the readership to find out that someone they’ve never heard of is, in fact, someone else they’ve never heard of. Even to a reader of her blog, like me, it tells me her real name, which has no more relevance to me then her pseudonym. I mean, what if my name wasn’t really Dielo? Talk about thinking the unthinkable, but what if it was Fred Smith, what would that change? If you don’t know me anyway, nothing. If you did know me, however, it might make things a little awkward for me.

Aye, there’s the rub. This silly little page-filler - which is what it amounts to - only succeeds in humiliating Abby, forcing her to “come out” to her friends and family, most of whom would, I’m sure, rather not know about her innermost sexual musings, and desires. On top of that, she has to face her work colleagues and everything. And all this for what? It’s so fucking small

What is a renowned newspaper - a journal of record - doing splashing about in these gutter press shallows? Silly season, is it? Nothing going on anywhere in the world, is there, middle east, anywhere… no, nothing? Oh well, tum-te-tum.

Christ, what an embarrassing fucking wank of an article.

"There is little doubt that by this summer Abigail...will be a media obsession " says The Observer on the book’s blurb.
Hmm, quite. It’s all bound to boost the sales of Abby’s book as well though, so hey…