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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Tessa, you were dating a rich, overprivileged drug addict. Too bad for you he wasn't using heroin, because at least then he might have turned out to be Seth Mnookin. A few years back, he wrote a Salon piece about his days as a junkie. It ran concurrently with a story by his mother Wendy, on how Seth's addiction derailed their entire family. The Mnookins had money too - Seth went to Harvard - but their stories were compelling in a way that few Salon stories are anymore. Maybe it was the honesty. I don't know. I keep checking Salon for articles that haunt me like those two stories did. Occasionally - very occasionally - I find one. This is not one of them.
So, you willingly encouraged someone to abuse drugs and alcohol so you could have a faux romance.
Are you telling us this story so you can get the stupid bitch slapping you so richly deserve?
Or, like most other Salon writers, do you think this somehow qualifies you for JT Leroy starfucker status: "silly me, I did a lot of incredibly stupid things but since I'm telling you that makes it all OK!"
Neither you nor your ex share a single redeeming quality. And thanks to your confusing 'being published' with being a writer, your spouse and children now have to face the world knowing that your reckless escapades will live in cyberspace for all to see for as long as we have an internet.
Are you sure you're not Ayalet Waldman writing under a pseudonym?
(A) his name graces the wall of major donors ... gifts -- blue flannel pajamas with red piping from Barneys, a first edition of Wilfred Owen poems that he bought at auction. ... fabulous "Metropolitan"-esque parties where I met Oscar de la Renta, Cosima von Bulow and the occasional royal ... flew me to Positano ... a bigger suite at Le Sirenuse than the bride and groom. ... a Pucci scarf ... we imagined our future home -- a brownstone on Bethune Street ...
(B) In retrospect, I am ashamed by my passivity. Normally, I'm a self-sufficient loudmouth. But I endured Sam's withholding indifference during the day just to hear his delicious seductions at night.
Are you sure you didn't endure his assholeness to enjoy the money he clearly liked to blow on you? From the way you lovingly catalog the things you got, I have a feeling there was something more than just the unmeant sex.
Must agree with the Waldman comment. Seems like Blake reveals more about herself than she imagines.
Boy, people sure hate it when someone writes about a rich person behaving badly! Don't listen to them. I thought this was a great story vis-a-vis the Times piece - Ambien silliness isn't limited to nurses wrapping their Volkswagens around telephone poles.
Besides, this was about Ambien, not Manhattan socialites. The drug works in rural Nebraska just as well.
Well I started to write just say what a funny, well-written piece this was, but I happened to read the previous mail first. What are you people on about? I can't imagine what it was in this story that touched such a nerve...or why you don't seem to get that it's gotta be pretty good writing to have you so up in arms...
I don't think the writer is missing that it was a messed up relationship. Clearly, in the interim between then and now, she's learned a thing or two about healthy vs. unhealthy interactions. ("Spouses commit themselves to a lifetime of Al-Anon for lesser dependencies than this.")
But I mean, really... von Bulows, first editions, and a Pucci scarf. Can you blame her for getting caught up in the madness?
Tessa, the piece is funny, with just the right hint of pathos. Fuck em if they can't take a joke.
For the record, "old Ambien Sam" does sound like an asshole.
Wanna see how Tessa describes herself? "Filmmaker Tessa Blake was born in Houston in 1969, and reared between Texas, Colorado, and Europe. The combined elements of her parents' divorce and her extensive education exposed Tessa to a remarkable variety of cultures and lifestyles from an early age. Experience from the provincial to the cosmopolitan taught Tessa to become something of a social chameleon, and she is as comfortable in Houston's fashionable River Oaks as in New York's funky Greenwich Village. It is this unique sensibility that makes Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me such a candid look at the secret world of Houston's upper crust.
Tessa's childhood afforded her enormous exposure to new and different experiences. She attended kindergarten and primary schools throughout the US and Europe. Sent to boarding school in Scotland at the age of eight, Tessa spent two years enrolled at the Gordonstoun School in Aberlour-on-Spey. She returned to the States at ten, and attended Aspen Country Day School for the next four years. High school yielded a return to boarding school, this time at Connecticut's Choate Rosemary Hall. Accepted as a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tessa majored in English and Classics. She was graduated with honors, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1991.
Having acted in and directed both theater and television productions in Chapel Hill, Tessa went on to graduate study in New York. At Parson's School of Design, she had her first taste of filmmaking, directing the comic short, Stone's Throw. Later, at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, she met legendary theater director Richard Schechner and agreed to join his fledgling East Coast Artists as Executive Director in 1993."
Salon editors, please stop publishing these icky, self-absorbent diatriabes from trustifarians. I wanna read more about people who do real, meaningful things such as the woman who used to detail her experience as a court-appointed child advocate.
Um...I think you mean "self-absorbed," not "self-absorbent." Unless this article also happens to double as a coaster.
And for the record, "icky" doesn't exactly expand your rhetorical persuasiveness.
Again, another letter completely disregarding another person's experience because of their (supposed) money. I'm sorry, but I simply must ask for your bank statements before I decide to take YOU seriously. Nice try "keeping it real," but you're WAY more boring than the "trustafarians" I've known.
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Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
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