Did you read that article in the Guardian magazine about that woman who contacted all the men she'd slept with

[morningpaper]

HOW FECKING DEPRESSING WAS THAT?

Yes you are Coddy. What are you on about?

Pitch for a book?

Go on then UQD, I've got five minutes.

oooh yes I agree with this:

very odd article because I don't think she is coming from a position of strength.
Made for very uncomfortable reading.

Yes it's very depressing because there isn't really anything REDEEMING about it, as I said before. It's just a woman's dissection of lots of relationships with men that used her and disliked her and here she is 20 years later still doing the same thing ooooh and here's an article about it. It really DID seem full of self-loathing. It sounded like the sort of thing you would write before topping yourself.

I don't think I am slagging off the writer by saying it was a very depressing piece with no obvious purpose?

God where is Jon Ronson when you need him?

I just read it and basically I want to slap her, for reasons I don't fully understand. Mind you, this seems to be the reaction she provokes from most people, judging by the piece.

i couldn't read it all, precisely because of the endlessly repetitive nature of it. she just wanted them all to fancy her, regardless of the effect it would have on their relationships. so as a piece of writing, for me there was no plot, no driving force. it was a list of fuck-ups, and seemed to me that in ten years her list would be longer. mind you, i've read other things she's written and pretty much can't stand her writing.

too much bloody introspection

teen shags accept what they were and stop over analysing

get over it move on ... they had not thought twice about you in 20 years

its called history

No, MP I see what you meant now. I think I read between the lines thinking you were saying 'this was depressing, and therefore no good' but I see you didn't actually say that.

it just struck me as odd that everyone was talking about it as 'not being funny' as though that were a judgement ifyswim.

I always seem to end up doing this. I held out for Rachel Cusk on another thread recently. I seem to always feel the need to stick up for these odd, prickly, rather unappetizing women. Can't think why.

I skim read it, thought the idea of it sounded more interesting than the article actually was. Because let's face it, who really cares about the fked up love life of someone we don't know? Her writing didn't make me care, although it did make me think she was unhappy.

Although I think there are plenty of people I don't know who could have made me care about their fked up love lives because their writing would make me care.

I know what it was (btw I LOVE Rachel Cusk) - it was what we ALL did when we were 19. And now we are proper grown-ups with partners and lovely children we can look back and say "oh DEAR what a mess we were!" But she's STILL THAT PERSON! Having awful destructive relationships! And if that was me I would want to throw myself off a bridge!

If she was my friend I would want to tell her to find a proper THERAPIST, never mind these feckless 'counsellors' she talks about, get yourself into proper serious therapy and sort yourself out.

True MP, I kept doing it for a lot longer than 19 but yes, I stopped. And it would take years to track down all my exes

Yeah, I see your point. I think that was sort of what dittany was saying too - that she's unhappy and should be sorting that, not writing about it for a newspaper without addressing her unhappiness.

I think I found it more uncomfortable than depressing though, and I still liked the ugliness of it all.

Perhaps she's the new Tracy Emin.

She sounds a lot like me in my 30s, actually.

MI - you are a million times more together than this woman.

I found it weirdly fascinating.

Fascinating that she seems so very interested in her past but never learns from it. She just replicates it.

She's not grown up at all. She's not moved on. She just keeps going for the same mistake every time, just a different name and a different kind of fuck up.

Really depressing. Nothing-to-look-forward-to depressing.

Not at 32ish, I wasn't. Ahem. .

Now I am 45 and Respectable .

about the only effect it had on me was to make me want to do the same thing. but not write about it. but then you can;t do it because you need an excuse like writing about it

I'm glad to say, it wouldn't take me long.

Is she not trying to emulate the critical success of this film?

now the things is, which I found kind of odd, is if it were about proper relationships it would take me no time at all (nor her from the sound of it) but she seemed to be going right back to teenage boyfriends and uni shags. now that might take me a while...

Mark Barrowcliffe has a new book out (I've read a review copy) on a similar theme. Gentle reader, do not waste your time with it, it's far far worse than Mz Gold's piece.

It was awful & pointless. Yuck.

true hat, they were teenage shags, not past loves.