Emily Gould is the author of the novels Perfect Tunes, Friendship, and the essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever. With Ruth Curry, she runs Emily Books, which publishes books by women as an imprint of Coffee House Press. She has written for The New York Times, New York, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and many other publications. She lives in New York City with her family.
"...Gould turns a sharp eye on her own life...The
perceptiveness...that...made her so controversial [carries] the
book." --Booklist
"gut-wrenching and smart and naked and beautifully written. You can
read it as a document of a particular techno-era in New York (and
of confessional online culture in general), and as a chroncile of
the faullout from a very specific moment in Gawker's reign. But the
stories Gould tells here are also very personal, and very sad...she
captures better than almost anyone the feeling of what it's like to
be young(ish), both ambitious and aimless, more watchful and
introspective than is good for her, at this particular moment in
our culture...she builds on Joan Didion's sense of [New York]
rather than just imitating, or playing tribute to her....She's
obsessed with the way time passes, and especially with what it
means to be young--to feel your youth draining from you in a way
that feels like both a punishment and a reward...it feels utterly
true. Gould is attuned to the way things around and inside her are
shifting and changing, and she can't stop herself from testing
certain boundaries, pushing against her surroundings to see if
there's any give." --The Rumpus
"[A] collection of essays about what it's like to live the literary
life in New York (even better, Brooklyn)...This girl is going to
hold on to the bits she cares about, no matter how much glamour and
trauma is thrown her way. The great path [to success in publishing]
looms like the yellow brick road: surreal, nostalgic." --The Los
Angeles Times
"[Flouts] traditions of many women's memoirs...the antithesis of
personal growth narraives like Eat, Pray, Love...Gould's account of
her early twenties will ring true to many young people who have
longed to prove their worth without being totally sure what that
worth is....for teenagers and early twentysomethings seeking what
Gould calls "permission" to pursue their dreams, a narrative arc
may matter less than the simple tesitmoney of someone who's been
there, offered without guilt and without apology." --Jezebel
"[Gould] may yet prove capable of becoming her generation's Fran
Lebowitz." --The Boston Globe
"A valuable social document of a transformative time in journalism
and also, thanks to Gould's evocative writing, deliciously
readable...the most realistic Manhattan bildungsroman in years. The
only shopping stories involve sale racks at H&M." --The Globe &
Mail
"Brutally honest." --Just Books
"Controversial media maven Gould....traces her sentimental
education through eleven vignettes of sex, relationships, and
unfocused ambition." --Greenpoint Gazette
"Gould [is] more than a blogger. And the Heart Says Whatever proves
she's a very talented memoirist...What Gould taps into is the
universal freshness of the particular pain that many people only
feel as a young adult, when life starts feeling for the first time
like it's spinning out of control, and you don't have the
experience yet to know if you'll be able to rein it back in.
There's a courage and lack of sentimentality in Gould's voice
that's engaging and likeable. She's not neurotic. This is the
person you'd want as a roommate in your 20s....And she has great
stories...it takes a lot of balls to write about this, and only a
writer of Gould's talent could pull it off." --Montreal Mirror
"Gould...is fearless." --Iowa City Press-Citizen
"Gould's brand of confessional literature isn't new, but [her]
unsentimental, unapologetically female tone is powerfully
of-the-moment- [she speaks], in our often phoney and cheesy
culture, to the truths of women's lives...[Gould makes] good
writing look easy."
-- Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Magazine
"Honest and witty...And the Heart Says Whatever will engage you
with its entertaining essays." --Hollywood the Write Way
"I recently devoured...And the Heart Says Whaetver, appreciating
her willingness to let her youthful unhappiness lie still, to look
unblinkingly at the unpleasantness of her days and often of herself
and perhaps recognize that unpleasantness as a stew from which her
specific ambitions evolved, but more often to simply describe it as
it was: life."--Rebecca Traister, Salon.com
"In this limpid, poetic elegy to the New York of her twenties,
Emily Gould proves a sharp and feeling observer of her generation.
Honest, gorgeously rendered, and occasionally brutal, And the Heart
Says Whatever is a testament to the pleasures and pains of
heightened self- awareness."
-Amy Sohn, author of Prospect Park West
"Pithily written." --The Observer
"Weighty...What makes Gould's essays so readable is their utmost
honesty." --Washington Post Express
We think [Amy Sohn's warm praise of the book] is perfect...Gould,
the host of compulsively watchable web TV series Cooking the Books
and a blogger of deserved renown, finds her way through the wilds
of New York as [an] astute absorber of all that passes before her."
--ThirtyDaysNY.com
"And the Heart Says Whatever confirms what fans of Emily Gould's
previous writing already knew--that she's massively talented, just
as good at devastating us with an emotional truth as she is at
amusing us with a clever joke. These smart, poignant essays about
being young and literary in New York City are like a twenty-first
century version of The Bell Jar but with more pot, sex, technology,
and (thank goodness) a different ending."
--Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Prep and American Wife
"In her first collection of essays, Gould tackles the tough
questions that come with a life lived online." --More Magazine
''This is not a 'nice' book, but it comes by its anger and
melancholy honestly, and it makes sense of much that is puzzling
about our cultural moment.''
-- Jonathan Franzen
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