published in the guardian 22 sept 2009, her salary is mentioned at the end.Give Liz Jones a break!Her confessionals highlight the agonies of women. Is that why other women columnists hate her so much?
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Tanya Gold The Guardian, Tuesday 22 September 2009 Article history
Liz Jones is not afraid of her vulnerability, she earns a fortune off it. Photograph: Suki Dhanda
Have you shot Miss Jones? I ask because a few weeks ago someone shot the journalist Liz Jones's post-box. And even I ? a female journalist well accustomed to receiving a postbag full of suggestions that I kill myself ? was impressed. My readers only put letters in my post-box ? Liz Jones's got shot! Why do people hate her so much?
Whenever I read a "Suppress Liz" column ? the latest is in the current Private Eye, and it suggests that she chop off a limb to write about it ? I wonder why our response to this woman is so ambivalent. She was editor of Marie Claire, but was fired for moaning that she was forced to use bulimic models. (Magazine editors are expected to politely ignore the smell of vomit wafting off their cover girls.) So she became a fashion journalist who screams that she despises the industry. She also became Britain's highest paid confessional journalist. And then the bile emerged.
There are many confessional journalists in Britain, but none as forensic or as self-critical as Jones, who writes in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. Not for her the fluffy "I've Got Two Kids and a Malfunctioning Aga!" ramblings of other female hacks. A typical Jones sentence goes, "I was six when I first realised how hideous I looked; my eyes are too close together, my skin sallow and my teeth crooked." She has written about the failure of her marriage to the "fat, self-obsessed bastard" novelist Nirpal Dhaliwal, her eating disorder (anorexia), her isolation, her self-hatred and the obsessive love she has for her pet horse ? also called Liz.
While others flee from the confessional genre (I try to avoid it more and more), exhausted by the hate mail it brings, Jones mines on at the coalface of herself. Her vulnerability is her calling card; it flaps in the wind, like the breasts she would have had if she hadn't had breast reduction surgery at 29 (she wrote about the scars, of course). Male writers scribble their lives on to a page as well, but not like Liz Jones. She auto-crucifies every week, under her oddly grinning byline photo.
And bullying Jones has become a sport. Anti-Jones columns are published (usually by women), lamenting her self-hatred and exhibitionism, in faux-sisterly vein. How can you do this to yourself, Liz? How can you demean yourself? We are so ? er ? worried about you! One female writer recently went to Somerset, where Jones now lives, to hatchet her in an interview. The first paragraph read ? "Is Liz Jones mad? I'm not sure. She certainly looks a bit mad." Yesterday another columnist called the countryside "the home of swine flu, foot-and-mouth, dangerous mushrooms, unbalanced farming folk . . . and Liz Jones".
It could be jealousy over her obese salary (£200,000 a year?) and bulging profile ? but I think not. I think it is the vulnerability that disgusts; Jones is not ashamed of her vulnerability ? she earns a fortune off it.