Anonymous asked: I discovered who you were (ie, your Wikipedia page and then, your blogs) after I read and looked up Chloe Does Yale. Have you ever read that?
Yes, I have, and though I enjoyed Natalie Krinsky’s columns for The Yale Daily News (which I read in high school), I was pretty disappointed by Chloe Does Yale, her novel. Krinsky got a book deal because her writing was honest and funny in a really genuine way. But the book she wrote was fiction, not memoir (though clearly inspired by her own experiences), and merely regurgitated all the tropes of chick lit without any of the authenticity that made her columns so compelling in the first place. The “love story”, for example, comes off as totally implausible and seems to exist only to serve as a happy ending.
This is precisely what I don’t want to do if I write a book. There’s no point in making up a fictional heroine to distance myself from my own mistakes, and there’s even less of a point in writing a story that conforms to some Sex and the City-esque vision of the single gal’s life. It is not all Manolos and cocktails. Sometimes, it’s just Maddens and a handle of Gordon’s. And as glamorous as the former might seem, I’d be more likely to pick up a book on the latter.
More burning questions? Ask Lena.
