Verwandte Artikel zu Sociable

9780385542821: Sociable
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385542828 ISBN 13: 9780385542821
Verlag: Doubleday, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

“Extremely funny.” --Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post

An exuberant comedy of manners set in the world of digital media, Sociable is a deliciously irreverent satire about the capriciousness of internet fame, the bewildering sexual mores of online dating, the preening male ego in the workplace, and about what it means to be young, broke, dumped, and scarily good at creating viral content.

When Elinor Tomlinson moved to New York with a degree in journalism she had visions of writing witty opinion pieces, marrying her journalist boyfriend, and attending glamorous parties with famously perverted writers. Instead, Elinor finds herself nannying for two small children who speak in short, high screams, sleeping on a foam pad in a weird apartment, and attending terrible parties with Harper’s interns wearing shapeless smocks and clogs. So when Elinor is offered a job at Journalism.ly, the digital media brainchild of a Silicon Valley celebrity, she jumps at the chance. Sure, her boyfriend is writing long think pieces about the electoral college for a real website while Elinor writes lists about sneakers and people at parties give her pitying glances when she reveals her employer, but at Journalism.ly Elinor discovers her true gift: She has a preternatural ability for writing sharable content. She is an overnight viral sensation! But Elinor’s success is not without cost. Elinor’s boyfriend dumps her, two male colleagues insist on “mentoring” her, and a piece she writes about her personal life lands her on local television. Destitute, single, and consigned to move to a fifth-floor walkup, Elinor must ask herself: Is this the creative life she dreamed of? Can new love be found on Coffee Meets Bagel? And should she start wearing clogs? With wry humor and sharp intelligence that skewers everyone from grand dame newspaper columnists to content farm overlords to peacoat-wearing lit bros, Sociable is a hilarious tale of one young woman’s search for happiness.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

REBECCA HARRINGTON is the author of the novel Penelope and the comic essay collection I'll Have What She's Having. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times, Elle, NPR.com, and other publications. She lives in New York City.

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Chapter 1

Facebook: An article called “15 Images of a Sloth That Will Just Make You Laugh.” Comment: “Mike Moriarty [hyperlinked] I feel like you are totally number 7.” Elinor posted this at 4:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. It was liked thirty times, mostly by relatives.

Twitter: 30 tweets. A sample: “This is why Marianne Goodacre is my favorite writer.” The link is to a quote about writing being difficult but also rewarding. It was favorited two times by people Elinor didn’t really know that well.

Instagram: 2 pictures. Picture 1: An attenuated, wolfish-­looking animal, a dog. The dog is collapsed on the sidewalk and tied up to a fire hydrant with a yellow nylon leash. Its legs are somewhat contorted on the ground. There is a sepia-­tinged filter on the picture that gives it an oddly flat quality. For example, an irregular blob of gum is somehow in hyperfocus—­the same as the dog. Caption: “Mike saw this lil guy just chilling out near our Sunday brunch spot. #goals.” It was liked fifteen times.

Picture 2: Elinor and her boyfriend (Mike). It’s a selfie. They are smiling on what seems to be the Brooklyn Bridge (there are brownstones, industrial water, and cables behind them). Elinor has her arm slung around Mike’s neck. She is kissing his cheek. It is a very flattering picture, of Elinor especially. Her jaw looks thin. Caption: “Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge for our anniversary #lovethisguy #brooklynlyfe #bkbridge.” It was liked twenty times.

• • •

It was midway through the party and everyone was drunk in a professional but sloshing way, when we saw Elinor, hovering near a table, holding her coat. The table had three red bowls on it, filled with identical anemic chips. Elinor took a chip out of one of the bowls and ate it. No one had done something like that during the entire preceding hour.

We were in a small backyard dotted with the occasional tuft of stodgy, bulbous grass. A Twister tarp lay discarded under a tree, getting dirtier as people stepped on it. Lights with large filaments dotted the railings, which gave the gathering an aesthetic that recalled other parties in the same general milieu, and existing pictures.

The party was celebrating or mourning the fact that the Newr Report, a news website (www.newrreport.com/news), was going out of business. It was going out of business because it hadn’t ever made money. Websites couldn’t go on forever in that kind of environment—­but it did go on for a fair bit of time. And when you took it all together, there were twelve years of events collected in some ineffable space somewhere. So it wasn’t nothing.

Elinor twisted a bit of her hair in two fingers. She had been alone near this chip table for a long time and she knew no one at the party. Her coat was so heavy and made out of felt. Mike was gone. Was he in the bathroom, inside the house? He had said he wanted to get a drink. She had already looked at Insta­gram. She had already read an article on her phone. She had already texted two people. She had already been in the proximity of others and not talked to them (it was why she was at the chip table in the first place). How much more could she do?

A vulpine cat sauntered between Elinor’s legs. It had been wandering the party the entire evening. It was Andrew Newr’s cat, and as such, it had a kind of notoriety. The cat had an Instagram account, for example, in which it would sometimes travel to Malta or lie curled on a bed. Elinor bent close to the cat and trained her phone on it. The cat immediately sprinted away, to hide under another metal-­legged chip table about ten feet away.

“I’ve been trying to take a picture of that cat all night,” said a girl who had been standing near Elinor this entire time but not talking to her. She had been talking to a guy wearing a crumpled blue shirt and crumpled brown pants. “That cat is so cute. That cat was everywhere at that office. I can’t fucking believe it.”

“I was going to caption the picture #partycat,” said Elinor, shyly.

“OMG, that’s funny,” said the girl. Elinor dropped her coat on the ground, next to the chip table, kicked it under the table, and got dirt on it.

“So, did you guys work at Newr Report?” said Elinor.

“No,” said the girl. “But I knew people that did. It’s so so so sad.”

“I know,” said the guy. “It’s really extremely fucked up. Late capitalism.”

“The cat is back.” Elinor could see the cat slinking out from underneath the other chip table. Other people, people next to that chip table, started taking pictures of the cat and the cat bowed to their lenses, and seemed to smile at them bashfully.

“That cat is like, basically a meme,” said the girl. “A meme that hated you.”

The guy laughed at that, crumpling his shirt more.

“Memes are always of like, a grumpy-­faced thing. I don’t think the cat hated me,” said Elinor.

“Attention,” said the founder of the Newr Report, Andrew Newr. He had emerged on a deck that jutted in a Scandinavian fashion from the back of his house. He was extraordinarily thin. Odd bones emerged from his face that Elinor had never seen before on another human person. One under his eye—­another in his forehead. Where was Mike?

“Thank you all so much for coming.” Andrew Newr cleared his throat. “I wish I was surrounded by some of my favorite journalists for a better reason.”

Someone hooted forlornly in the audience, like a barn owl.

“When I started the Newr Report, I was very different than I am now. I was less gray.” The party chuckled lightly. “I knew far less about the Internet and I hadn’t had the privilege of meeting all of the great people here today. But I did know some things. I did know the power of a great story. And I had the privilege to work with some incredible journalists to create some incredible stories. Stories that mattered. Stories that made me laugh. Stories that made me think. Especially now . . .”

The speech droned on. As it progressed, Elinor felt even sadder that the Newr Report was going under. It seemed like such an important thing now that Andrew Newr was explaining it, and Elinor almost felt ashamed. Why hadn’t she read the Newr Report all the time? She had thought it was a normal website that chronicled normal things, like celebrities walking to their cars. The last story she remembered reading on it was called “10 Ways to Maximize Your Productivity Zone,” which was a slide show about study habits and work productivity illustrated by luridly colored photos of a woman splayed near a computer, holding her head as if gripped by intense pain.

“It’s so sad,” whispered the girl Elinor was standing next to. Andrew Newr was still talking.

“I know,” said Elinor. “It sucks. I read the Newr Report every day.”

Elinor saw Mike silently emerging from a door underneath the Scandinavian deck. He was accompanied by a girl. They both took places near the deck to watch the progress of Andrew Newr’s speech, which was still going. Mike said something in the girl’s ear, and she looked at him and smiled. The girl, if Elinor remembered correctly, was named Andrea. What was Mike doing talking with Andrea? She wasn’t mad, because it was a free country and Mike could talk to whomever he wanted to and it was good that he had female friends, and Elinor wasn’t a jealous person at...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385542828
ISBN 13 
9780385542821
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
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