Emily Gould is the oversharing writer and blogger the US literati loves to hate. But is the pillorying she gets a fair response to her candid confessionals or part of an uglier strand of online misogyny? Aaron Hicklin meets her

“You really shouldn’t read the comments,” Emily Gould was told after arriving at the notorious gossip blog Gawker, in 2006. Not looking at online comments is a writer’s armature against rage and despair, but Gould, fresh from the less brutal world of book publishing, didn’t heed the advice. The rise of Gawker – founded in 2003 by English expat Nick Denton – as new media’s rabid attack dog, with its Private Eye-esque takedown of celebrities and politicians, had been swift and merciless. Gould showed up at the exact moment the site was mushrooming into a water-cooler phenomenon, in which Denton’s gotcha stunts frequently made the headlines. Blowback was inevitable.

A little over 18 months later, exhausted by the emotional comeuppance of “being shady, insulting and two-faced” as she later described the Gawker work ethic, Gould announced her resignation online, in a Gawker post that captured the disenchantment of a one-time naïf waking up to realise she no longer believes in what she is doing.

For Gould, the nadir of her tenure came during an appearance on the Larry King Show in 2007 when Jimmy Kimmel, the stand-in host, attacked her over the site’s popular Gawker Stalker map. The feature, designed to “pinpoint the location of every stalkworthy celebrity as soon as they’re spotted”, was typical of the kind of publicity-seeking high jinks for which Gawker was known at the time. Hollywood publicists had lined up to denounce it as irresponsible and dangerous; George Clooney even hatched a plan to bombard Gawker with false sightings, rendering it useless.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emily Gould grilled by Jimmy Kimmel over Gawker Stalker

Nevertheless, Gould was unprepared for Kimmel’s tub-thumping offensive, and it showed. Humiliated by the experience, and the corresponding deluge of hate mail, she found herself paralysed by panic attacks, often too scared to leave her apartment.

“If I wanted to get really melodramatic about it, I could say that I feel like I was punished,” Gould says today. But whatever remorse she feels, it is not for stalking celebrities; it is for making fun of other writers — once a meat-and-potatoes target for Gawker’s editors. “I don’t think people understand that writers, with very few exceptions, aren’t rich and don’t have power,” she says. “I don’t think I understood that when I was at Gawker, and now it’s been made abundantly clear to me, by a God who has a sense of humour, if you want to believe in stuff like that.”

Gould’s first priority after quitting Gawker was to write about her experience in a long, self-involved, but fascinating cover story for the New York Times magazine in which she presented her career and relationships as a modern morality tale on the dangers of oversharing online. “At some point I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt,” she wrote. “Even having to take into account someone else’s feelings about being written about felt like being stifled in some essential way.”

Although she was loudly pilloried for it at the time, Gould’s essay now reads as a trenchant insight into the way digital media was rapidly erasing the distinction between public and private, particularly for the generation – Gould is now 33 – who had never known a time before the internet. Gould sometimes appears conflicted about whether this is a good or a bad thing, but knows, unquestionably, that it is her thing. The pieces she posts to her long-running blog, Emily Magazine – which got her the job at Gawker in the first place – are engaging precisely because they feel as unvarnished and unfiltered as being in the room with her.

“I hate it when people are very different online than they are in person, and she’s very unified,” says Choire Sicha, her former editor at Gawker. “Her in-person and online personas are completely identical.”

Not surprisingly Gould has often found herself alienating the people who are closest to her. A former boyfriend went public in the New York Post, penning a critical piece about the way she published details of their relationship on her secret(ish) blog, Heartbreak Soup. After her memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever, was published in 2010, her family, stung by the way she characterised her parents’ relationship, stopped talking to her for a time. Even her best friend, Ruth Curry, took umbrage at the depiction of Bev, one of the two central characters in her recently published debut novel, Friendship (they are still close, but Gould says that Curry trusts her less).

“Every time I write a book I offend someone much more than I thought possible,” Gould says, the first time we meet, at a hipster ice-cream parlour-cum-coffee shop in Brooklyn. “I think I’ve gotten less inflammatory for the sake of it, but I’m still inflammatory when I don’t mean to be. That’s something I would like to work on.”

I’d not felt terribly invested in Emily Gould’s reputation when I began writing this piece, but so many people rolled their eyes when I said I was interviewing her that it began to have a contrary effect. Some of that animus, of course, is a consequence of Gould’s very public role as a social scourge when she was at Gawker, but some of it, I think, also speaks to the way that women who write about themselves – such as Elizabeth Wurtzel, say – are often marginalised, by women as much as by men. It’s something Gould has referred to often on her own blog. “You cannot be pretty and be taken seriously, still,” she wrote in a 2009 entry. “You cannot be honest about your own experiences and be taken seriously, even if your own experiences are the best examples at your disposal of social and cultural phenomena that affect us all, even if your experiences are ones that you know or suspect that hundreds and thousands of other women share.”

One of the most notable things about her New York Times story was not the criticism directed at her writing, but the way that criticism was reinforced by the scorn directed at the cover, for which Gould was photographed sprawled across an unmade bed, a tattooed arm to the fore. Reading the vitriol, you can’t help thinking that most of the eye-rolling comes back to old-fashioned misogyny.

In June, just as Friendship was being published in the US, a blowhard critic named Edward Champion took her to task in an 11,000-word blog post titled “Emily Gould, Literary Narcissism, and the Middling Millennials”, in which his principal beef appeared to be that Gould was a woman and not James Baldwin. Gould left it to her then-boyfriend, now-husband, Keith Gessen, to read the piece in her stead.

Gessen, a founder of the combative literary journal N+1 who writes in longhand to avoid being distracted by the internet, told Gould never to read the article, but then Twitter went into full-on hyperventilation mode as other women came forward to accuse Champion of harassing them online. Events culminated in a suicide threat by Champion, and efforts by Sicha, among others, to talk him down. Champion eventually announced a change of heart, tweeting, “Staying off Twitter for months, seeking help.” His resolve lasted less than 24 hours.

Gould, too, is a self-confessed Twitter addict who also sometimes tries to go cold turkey. In May 2009, nudged by Gessen, she took to her blog to announce she was quitting Twitter. “I don’t think Twitters in general are evil or anything, but I do think that for a person like me (impulsive, given to overdisclosure) they are poison,” she wrote. “The brand called me can do without my <140-character deep thoughts, probably, and I can do without having another medium for obsessing about how friends and randoms respond to those deep thoughts.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Backlash: after being interviewed by Gould, Lena Dunham told her: ‘You fully suck.’ Photograph: Mike Pont/Getty

It was almost no time before Brand Gould returned to the fold. Since she became a Twitter acolyte, she has written almost 25,000 tweets, ranging from a recent riff on the similarity of containers for almond milk and chicken broth (16 retweets; 116 “favourites”) to a public apology to Lena Dunham, after Gould managed to slight the writer and actor during an interview for Elle. In that case, Gould had recounted meeting Dunham at a party – “she brought her boyfriend and they engaged in elaborate PDA” – before winding up in Dunham’s nearby apartment, feeling increasingly resentful at the way their separate fortunes had played out. It was not the first time Gould had made the comparison. In an essay for the anthology MFA vs NYC, published this year, she’d written that watching Dunham turn her life into art – just as Gould was trying to do – had been excruciating. “That could have been me, I catch myself thinking, but of course it couldn’t have been, or at least it isn’t.”

Dunham responded to the Elle article by sending Gould a private message over Twitter. “She said: ‘You fully suck. I was going to promote your book, but you need to get a better talk show story,’” Gould told Interview magazine in July.

Today, Gould is understandably wary of the subject, aware that no good can come of it. “It terrifies me to even talk about it,” she says. “No matter what I say, it’s a really, really bad look for me, and I took so much shit for even seeming to imply that, you know…” Her voice trails off as she marshals her thoughts. Finally, she says: “I’m un-media-trainable.”

Recently, Gould found herself giving advice to a friend whose insecurities resembled her own. “She writes a lot about new motherhood, and there’s someone else who is writing a lot about new motherhood, and she’s getting a lot more praise and attention, or so it seems to my friend,” says Gould. “And I told her: ‘No one can do a better job of being you than you… Getting wrapped up in comparing yourself to anyone else is just a huge distraction.’ And afterwards I looked my email over, and thought: ‘Oh, my God, why can’t I take this totally obvious advice myself?’ because I feel super jealous all the time myself, and it’s mostly about money.”

Gould’s ongoing financial problem – in 2010 she claims to have earned just $17,000 – is among the central themes of Friendship, in which two young women living in New York navigate work, romance and money, none with any great success. Their friendship, when it’s going well, is the ballast that keeps them afloat. Friendship is also very good at nailing the precarious nature of living in a city where most of us are a pay cheque away from oblivion.

Of course, if anyone can appreciate Gould’s ability to skewer the animating delusions of living in New York, it should be Dunham. Both women present themselves as masters of the overexamined, overshared life and both are lightning rods for deeply polarised reactions. When Dunham’s own memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” , was published this autumn, it was Gould who defended her (on Salon.com) from rabid right-wing critics who characterised Dunham as a child molester for confessing to peeking at her sister’s vagina when she was seven.

“I’m so shocked about what people can get really upset about,” Gould tells me. “People have been recreationally offended on the internet for a long time, but I do feel there’s some sort of peak.” She now wonders if it’s beyond saving. “It’s become more toxic as it’s become more popular,” she says. “At the beginning stages of any of these forums there’s a different social code of how to behave because it’s understood that we’re all here, together, in this semi-private club.”

But she’s not yet ready to stop defending her corner. “I can’t help it if people disagree with me about literally anything I say,” she says. “What are my options?” Often, it is left to friends, like Sicha, to intervene. “There have been times when I’ve sent Emily all-caps emails, to say: ‘I know this thing is going on, stop tweeting about it, stop talking about it: please, please, please do not tweet,’” says Sicha. “That’s petulant and controlling of me, but I feel like someone needs to be that voice, sometimes telling Emily: ‘Don’t engage.’ Because it’s not worth it, and you will never make them understand.”

Gould says she takes criticism less personally than she used to. “My main move has been to come out swinging and then make everyone angry,” she says. “When you’re young you’re interested in hearing what the world thinks of you because you’re not sure what you are doing, and what you think of yourself. I am just older now.”

Part of getting older for Gould has been a burgeoning conviction that she can help other writers, particularly women, get their voices heard. With Ruth Curry, she has founded Emily Books, combining their shared enthusiasm for literature with a mission to promote female writers who are otherwise forgotten or somehow marginalised, through an e-book subscription service. “I wanted to use my charm and charisma on behalf of other people’s books and that seems to, mostly, be working,” says Gould. “My dream is that in the next 10 years I am the editor-in-chief of Emily Books and I write novels, and I don’t write little 1,000-word pieces about whether Lena Dunham is a child molester.”

Recently Gould came across her baby book, in which her mother had recorded her early development. “The whole book was remarkable for how consistent my personality has been ever since I was born,” she says, before paraphrasing one of the entries: “Three months old: loves looking in mirrors.” She laughs, aware how much she’s just reinforced her image, but happy to own it, too. Living with her writer-husband Keith Gessen, she says, has been a lesson in the kind of writer she isn’t. “He’ll get assigned to write a book review for the London Review of Books, and he’ll read every book the author has written, and he’ll stay up all night finishing it, whereas if I get the same assignment, I’ll be, like: ‘What’s the least amount of work I can possibly do?’ And then half the review will be about me and my feelings.” She smiles wryly. “Those are my strengths.”

As for reading the comments, Gould says she never does it any more. “There are other things I do that are really self-flagellating,” she says. “I definitely search my name, not just my mentions on Twitter. That’s sick, by the way – that’s really bad.”