Um…
Please enjoy this watery tea about my one-sided blood feud.
Scam Fam, I'm back!
And I would like to extend a very exclusive invite for you to join me aboard the nostalgia train, destination 2007, with brief diversions to the lands of Schadenfreude (you'll love it) and Life Continues to Be Unfair (not my favorite, but at least it'll look like literally everywhere else you've ever been). Grab a seat, get comfortable, let's be on our way.
When I was 22, I got my dream job as an assistant at a now defunct men's fashion magazine called Details. If you're blessed enough to still have a shred of your youth intact or if your brain has been scrambled into mush by LYFE, you may not be able to instantly conjure up an image of Details. It was a magazine that put stars like Ashton Kutcher and the guys from Gossip Girl on the cover, catered to an audience we not always lovingly referred to as metrosexual, and most famously and controversially included a back page with the rubric "Gay Or ______" ("Gay or Asian" predated my time there and provoked small scale protests because it was real offensive.) It also ran a number of really terrific articles, featured some unbelievable photography and design, and was an excellent overall magazine ~experience~.
As many people who have been fortunate enough to land their dream jobs can tell you, it was actually quite different than I had hoped! I really did love a lot of things about it and feel lucky to have started my career there and I met some of my very best friends, but fundamentally being an assistant at a B-list Condé Nast magazine in 2007 meant living a boring version of The Devil Wears Prada. Most of the glitz and glamour I witnessed and indignities I endured aren't even worthy of cocktail party anecdotes, though there are a few exceptions, some of which I'd like to share with you now.
There was a senior writer at the magazine who appeared to me at the time to be universally beloved. The guy wrote one story every third issue (there were only 10 a year because we weren't that popular), always complained about how overworked he was, made at least five times my salary, and was praised and celebrated every time he opened his mouth. For example, he once pitched a story about how all 22-year-old girls were total sluts (I was 22, female, and in the room when he said it — that was honestly the pitch, it was as bad as it sounds) and then got assigned the story with an expense budget to "report" it by trying to get picked up by young women at the Rose Bar; there may have also been a hotel room at the Gramercy? He had a wife and children in the suburbs. The story never went anywhere because no one was into him. No way anyone could have seen that coming. Certainly neither he nor his editors could have been helped by respecting a 22-year-old woman enough to treat her like a person, full stop, let alone a person who might have thoughts to contribute.
Believe it or not, none of that was terribly distressing to me back then. I remember being disappointed and a little scandalized at how casually all the married men there referred to infidelity, but not being that personally injured or angry. Hindsight, man! I'm only even telling that story to set the scene for the thing that really did upset me.
Our office was in midtown east, and I would commute on the 4/5. One morning I was walking out of Grand Central, and I saw the beloved writer walking in, waved hi, and greeted him by name. He straight up didn't recognize me despite the fact that we had worked together for months (a more generous read is that he didn't see me, but why should we give him the benefit of the doubt?) and he breezed right past. I am used to being the thirstier party in most interactions, and it's always a touch embarrassing, but I went about my day. And when I got to my desk, there was an email from the guy waiting for me. This was before I had a phone with email, but the writer was enough of a big shot to have a company Blackberry (2007!), so I thought it might be a note apologizing for blowing me off. It wasn't.
Subject line: um…
Body text: there are some dirty rags on my desk.
That was all! I walked over to the guy's office (offices were hard to come by, but of course he had one), and there were indeed some rags on his desk. I put them in his trashcan and walked back to my desk. A couple minutes later I got nervous that maybe the problem was that they were in his office at all, so I went back, took them out of his trash, walked them back across to my cubicle, and threw them away in my own bin.
Maybe I wrote back and told him I'd disposed of them? It was a long time ago, and I'm not sure anymore. I do remember that later we had an in-person version of the same interaction in which he told me that he wasn't sure if the rags belonged to anyone and I told him if anyone asked him about their dirty rags he could tell them I threw the dirty rags away.
(Remember, I warned you that it was a boring version of The Devil Wears Prada.)
There is a rational side of me that understands the million tiny ways I may have misinterpreted things, that this guy had no malicious intentions, that even if he did, it is all so minor as to not even constitute a grain of sand in the grand scale of human suffering let alone injustice, etc., etc., etc.
There is also a much more prominent petty side of me, and so despite knowing that, subject line um dot dot dot marked the beginning of my blood feud with this person. He is entirely unaware of it. I will resent him until my dying day.
I thought about all this at length this week because of nightmare coworker DAN MALLORY, Y'ALL. If you haven't read The New Yorker piece yet, run, don't walk. If you just want to gleefully relive the fun as I do, here's a quick highlight reel: claiming a dead parent when the parent is still alive, claiming a dead sibling when the sibling is still alive, questionable cancer claims, cups of pee, affected accent, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, fake email accounts, fake degrees, more lies, "You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Poirot's About You," shame, a likely pretend dog, probable plagiarism, a jaw-dropping encounter with the subject of many of the lies, and what is widely considered to be a terrible best selling book summarized with the sickest literary burn I've ever read, "It’s much more a Tom Ripley novel than a Patricia Highsmith novel." THIS IS WHY WE GET OUT OF BED IN THE MORNING, FAM.
Maybe it's not obvious to you what all this has to do with my blood feud, and that's fair, it's for sure not obvious! My extremely tortuous point is: What if we could all get Ian Parker to publish a vicious write around that exposes our enemies as the frauds they really are in The New Yorker???
Before reading the TNY piece, everything I knew about Dan Mallory I learned from a highly entertaining rant my friend Ester went on once about how much she despised The Woman in the Window and the calculating way she'd heard him talk about publishing on a podcast. It was enough, in this economy, for me to categorize him as The Worst and move on.
And after reading it … same? I mean, he does seem to be more deceitful than the average bear. I would like to think that invoking a grave illness of one's own or one's loved ones as an explanation for mediocre work and sustained absence is not a thing people commonly do (would also like to think infidelity is not a thing people commonly do, but, ya know, sometimes people disappoint and scandalize us). I would hope if I ever got a bigger book contract than my work had necessarily merited I wouldn't recycle a plot from Copycat, though I have seen Copycat, and I didn't hate it.
Maybe you think sending an assistant a thoughtless email about trash and being a generally difficult coworker and garden variety misogynist don't rise to the level of any of Mallory's sins, but I'd be willing to bet there's no allegation in the story that is any worse than a fairly well substantiated rumor you've heard about your work nemesis. Which is precisely what makes the exposé so immensely satisfying. I'd like 100 of them, please!
(In case you were wondering, my theory about the office urine is that it was a brilliant frame job by one of the many, many anonymous sources in the piece. Imagine being faced with all of these accusations and the only way to prove your innocence for the ones you did not do is to take responsibility for the ones you did. "While it is true that I wrote an essay about my dead mother, my mum is actually very much alive and 'not doing that, thank you,' and also correct that my British accent is a put on, I swear, I did not pee in cups and leave them around the office." That is a Tom Ripley flex by a jealous coworker if ever there was one.)
I assume Dan Mallory is at least somewhat embarrassed to have so much of his worst behavior made so visible, but what's public shame next to a book that continues to sell like it's actually enjoyable, a movie adaptation coming out later this year, and plans to publish the second novel moving full steam ahead? Also, he appears to have an extremely loyal and loving family, and none of them are dead!
As for my blood feud, the beloved writer left Details in a way that wasn't entirely voluntary but that didn't prevent him from getting a series of significantly better jobs at significantly better publications. He was not an obvious choice for the first of the better jobs, and wasn't especially good at it. I choose to believe that he blackmailed his way into it; I'd love Ian Parker's help in proving it. He and his wife divorced and he fairly quickly married a much younger woman. I've heard they're both miserable. I wish I could say their misery brings me joy, but it alternately bums me out and enrages me. If you are going to suck the life force out of people around you, can't you at least enjoy yourself???
One thing I learned is that, despite all the failing upwards, he turned out not to be that beloved. For the most part, anyone who's worked with him shares my antipathy and considers his success a scam. The knowledge isn't as satisfying as an exposé, but until someone gets around to writing it, it's as good as I'm going to do.
Scam big,
Ruthie
My Last Two Weeks in Consumption
I was on vacation last week, first stop Sundance to witness my friend Alison straight crushing it with her terrifying Steve Bannon documentary The Brink. We'll talk more about this later, but for now, read this Bilge Ebiri review about how good Ali is at her job. (I also saw Late Night and some documentary shorts, all of which I liked, but I'm only mentioning that to brag, sorry, sort of.)
Then I went to L.A. and ate only good meals!!! I got to go to two restaurants that were on my bucket list, Nate'n Al in Beverly Hills where I ate the hot dog Nora Ephron recommended, and Musso and Frank in Hollywood which I saw in a scene from Better Things a few years ago and decided I needed to try and finally got to. They were everything I hoped and more. Also revisited Night + Market and Din Tai Fung, A+++++++, Los Angeles is the most fun.
Speaking of Better Things, Carrie B. wrote the Pamela Adlon profile of my dreams in the same issue of The New Yorker the Dan Mallory story is in.
Back in the real world, the Encyclopedias Brown I work with at ProPublica published an absolutely harrowing story about a fatal accident at sea, and a companion piece about how effed Big Navy is. I'm working on a newsletter project related to the story that you should sign up for PLZ.
Lastly, Free Solo! What a movie!