Hot gossip: The fall of the web's most glamorous blogger

Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cosy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I'd been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. I spent most of my free time sitting with Henry in our cheery yellow living room on our stained Ikea couch, watching TV. And almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.

Some of my blog's readers were my friends in real life, and even the ones who weren't acted like friends when they posted comments or sent me email. Some of them had blogs, too, and I read those and left my own comments. As nerdy and one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important to me. They made me feel like a part of some kind of community, and that made the giant city I lived in seem smaller and more manageable.

The anecdotes I posted on Emily Magazine occasionally featured Henry, whom my readers knew as a lovably bumbling character, a bassist in a fledgling noise-rock band who said unexpectedly insightful things about contestants on the reality TV show Project Runway, and then wondered aloud whether we had any snacks.

Henry, seemingly alone among our generation, went out of his way to keep his online presence minimal. Now that we've broken up, I appreciate this about him – it's pretty much impossible to torture myself by Google-stalking him. But back then, what this meant was that he was never particularly thrilled to be written about. Sometimes he was enraged.

Once, I made fun of Henry for referring to Project Runway as "Project Gayway". He worried that "people" – the shadowy, semi-imaginary people who read my blog and didn't know Henry well enough to know that he wasn't a homophobe – would be offended. He insisted I take down the offending post and watched as I slowly, grudgingly made the keystrokes to delete what I'd written. As I sat there staring into the screen at the reflection of Henry standing behind me, I burst into tears. And then we were pacing, screaming at each other, through every room of our apartment, facing off with wild eyes and clenched jaws.

My blog post was ridiculous and petty and small – and, suddenly, incredibly important. At some point I'd grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt. As Henry and I fought, I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don't think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative, and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn't generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved.

After a standoff, he conceded that I should be allowed to put the post back up. As he sulked in the other room, I retyped what I'd written, feeling vindicated but slightly queasy for reasons I didn't quite understand yet.

One of the strangest and most enthralling aspects of personal blogs is just how intensely personal they can be. I'm talking "specific details about someone's STDs" personal, "my infertility treatments" personal. There are non-gynaecological overshares, too: "My dog has cancer", "my abusive relationship".

It's easy to draw parallels between what's going on online and what's going on in the rest of our media: the death of scripted TV, the endless parade of ordinary, heavily made-up faces that become vaguely familiar to us as they grin through their 15 minutes of reality-show fame. No wonder we're ready to confess our innermost thoughts to everyone: we're constantly being shown that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.

But is that really what's making people blog? After all, online, you're not even competing for 10 grand and a Kia. I think most people who maintain blogs do it because they like the idea that there's a place where a record of their existence is kept – a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you.

Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. At school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my school passing out copies of a comic book I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of the reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student email revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.

In autumn 2006, I received a call from the managing editor of Gawker Media, a network of highly trafficked blogs, asking me to come by the office in SoHo to talk about a job. Since its birth four years earlier, the company's flagship blog, Gawker, had purported to be in the business of reporting "Manhattan media gossip", which it did, sometimes – catty details about writers and editors and executives. But it was also a clearing house for any random tidbit of information about being young and ambitious in New York. Though Gawker was a must-read for many of the people working at the magazines and newspapers whose editorial decisions the site mocked and dissected, it held an irresistible appeal for desk-bound drones in all fields, tens of thousands of whom visited each day.

I had been one of those visitors for as long as I'd had a desk job. Sometimes Gawker felt like a source of essential, exclusive information, tailored to people just like me. At other times, reading Gawker left me feeling hollow and moody, as if I'd just polished off an entire bag of sickly sweets. But when the call came, I brushed this thought aside. For a young blogger in New York in 2006, becoming an editor at Gawker was an achievement so lofty that I had never even imagined it could happen to me.

I was responsible for posting 12 items a day, each smart yet conversational, and often funny in a merciless way. Confronted with endless examples of unfairness, favouritism and just plain stupidity among New York's cultural establishment, the Gawker "voice" was righteously indignant but comically defeated, sighing in unison with an audience that believed nothing was as it seemed and nothing would ever really change. Everyone was fatter or older or worse-skinned than he or she pretended to be. Every man was cheating on his partner; all women were slutty. Writers were plagiarists or talentless hacks or shameless beneficiaries of nepotism. Everyone was a hypocrite. No one was loved. There was no success that couldn't be hollowed out by the revelation of some deep-seated inadequacy.

At my old job, it would have taken me years to advance to a place where I would no longer have to humour the whims of important people who I thought were idiots or relics or phonies. At Gawker, it was my responsibility to expose the foibles of the undeserving elite. But at the same time, I wasn't quite convinced that the system of apprenticeship and gradual promotion that I'd left behind when I left book publishing was as flawed as establishment-attacking Gawker made it out to be. I'd been lucky enough, in my publishing job, to have the kind of boss who actually cared about my future. At Gawker, I barely had a boss. In my old job, I'd been able to slowly, steadily learn the ropes, but now I was judged solely on what I produced every day.

Sometimes I worried that I'd been chosen not in spite of my inexperience, but because of it. Hiring women in their early twenties with little or no background in journalism was a tactic that worked for the site's owner twice before, and I'd once heard someone refer to us as "sacrificial virgins", which didn't seem too far off. Then again, being a sacrificial virgin had its perks. The career arc of Gawker's outgoing editor, Jessica Coen, seemed to be evidence that talent could and should trump dues-paying. At 24, when she moved to New York, she had two options: Columbia Journalism School or Gawker. She chose Gawker. Two years later, every magazine editor in town knew her name, and she was hired as the online editor of Vanity Fair. Maybe the days were over when youngsters were slowly mentored as they prepared to assume their bosses' titles, covering community-board meetings or fetching coffee.

"I tried not to read the comments," Jessica told me when we met for a drink just before I started work at Gawker. An hour into my first day on the job, I disobeyed her. I needed to know what people were saying about me. Dozens of readers had commented on the post introducing me, some of them dissecting the accompanying photo, some of them talking about how much they already hated me. Every time I wrote a post, the comments would pile up within minutes, disagreeing with or amplifying whatever I just said. Reading the comments created a sense of urgency, which came in handy when trying to hit deadlines 12 times a day.

The commenters at Emily Magazine had been like friends. Now, with Gawker's readers, I was having a different kind of relationship. They were colleagues, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations. They could be ignored sometimes. Or, if I let them, they could become my whole world.

Jessica also told me that the commenters loved it when she revealed personal details. Not only did I find this to be true, I found it to be almost necessary. Injecting a personal aside into a post that wasn't otherwise about me not only kept things interesting for me, it was also a sure-fire way of evoking a chorus of assenting or dissenting opinions. The commenters' compliments were reassuring. And though I was reluctant to admit it, there was even something sort of thrilling about being insulted by strangers. Occasionally, a particularly well-aimed barb would catch me off-guard, and I'd spend a moment worrying that I really was the worst writer ever to work for the site, or unfunny, or ugly, or stupid. But mostly, in the beginning, I was able to believe the compliments and dismiss the insults, even though they were both coming from the same place and sometimes the same people.

Like most people, I tend to use the language of addiction casually, as in, "I can't wait for the new season of America's Next Top Model to start – I'm totally going through withdrawal." It's easy to compare the initial thrill of evoking an immediate response to a blog post to the rush of getting high, and the diminishing thrills to the process of becoming inured to a drug's effects. The metaphor is so exact, in fact, that maybe it isn't a metaphor at all.

Gawker's bloggers often worked from home, but I went to the office every day at first. I was used to communicating with most people I knew via instant messenger, but it seemed important to see Alex, my co-editor, in person. I figured that we'd be able to express ourselves more easily by actually turning to each other and speaking words and making facial expressions rather than typing instant messages. But because we were so busy, we continued to IM most of the time, even when we were sitting right next to each other. Soon it stopped seeming weird to me when one of us would type a joke and the other one would type "Hahahahaha" in lieu of actually laughing.

I also IM-ed constantly with my colleague Josh, who joined the site as "after-hours editor" a few months into my tenure, which meant that he wrote about parties and restaurants. He was cute, and given the number of hours a day we spent trapped at our desks, the flirtation that developed between us seemed unavoidable. And the medium made it seem harmless – sure, maybe our IM avatars wanted to hook up, but our flesh-and-blood selves would make sure things stayed professional.

It was 11pm on an April night in 2007, and I was in the back seat of a speeding car on my way home from the CNN studios. I was on the phone with Alex, who was at a bar. "I don't think I did a very good job," I told him. I was still full of adrenaline from being on TV, and the noise of the bar in the background as he reassured me made me think it might be fun to join him, but the driver was already heading for my home, and I was too dazed to give him new directions.

I'd been a guest on an episode of Larry King Live, with Jimmy Kimmel as the host in King's absence. I had been told that I would be talking about "celebrities and the media". But Kimmel launched an attack on one of Gawker's regular features, a celebrity "stalker map" that relied on unsourced tipsters, one of whom claimed to have spotted Kimmel looking drunk a few months earlier. It took me a minute to catch on to the fact that Kimmel wasn't acting out some blustery caricature – he was serious about the idea that Gawker had violated his privacy, and he was genuinely, frighteningly angry.

Back at home, after wiping off the TV make-up, I logged into my Gawker email account. I scrolled through the first of what would eventually be hundreds – and then, as the clip of my appearance was dissected on other blogs over the course of the next few days, thousands – of angry messages. I ended up posting some representative ones on my personal blog:

"You got blown away. You looked like a little girl in awe of your surroundings."

"I just want to tell you how uneducated and STUPID you came off during the appearance on The LKL Show. You truly are a cheap heartless human being, who will one day have to deal with the same kind of SCUM you are."

"You were this giggling, hyper adolescent that did more to hurt your mes-sage, your site and your credibility than even coming close to simply neutralising the debate."

Watching the clip now makes me cringe. Called upon to defend Gawker's publication of anonymous email tips of celebrity sightings, I was dismissive and flip. My untrained, elastic face betrayed the shock and amusement I was feeling about being asked, somewhat aggressively, to justify something I thought of as not only harmless but also a given: the idea that anyone who makes their living in public was subject to the public's scrutiny at all times.

I expected the miniature scandal to flare and fade quickly, but for a while it seemed as if it would never go away. The clip made its way to Yahoo!'s front page, and a reporter called my parents for comment. After a week or so, the volume of angry email and blog comments subsided, but they stayed under my skin. I decided to try to develop a steely, defiant numbness. I told myself that the strangers who'd taken the time to email me their rants were wrong and crazy, that there was nothing so bad about what I'd done.

There was a harder truth that I refused to confront, though. After all, by going on TV and having a daily blog presence in front of thousands of people, I had put myself in the category of "people who make their livings in public", and so, by my own declared value system, I was an appropriate target. But that didn't mean I could handle it. A week later, I found myself lying on the floor of the bathroom in the Gawker office (where, believe me, no one should ever lie), felled by a panic attack that put me out of commission for the day.

I started having panic attacks – breathless bouts of terror that left me feeling queasy, drained and hopeless – every day. I didn't leave my apartment unless I absolutely had to, and because I had the option of working from home, I rarely had to. But, while my actual participation in life shrank down to a bare minimum, I still responded to hundreds of email messages and kept up a stream of instant-messenger conversations while I wrote. Depending on how you looked at it, I either had no life and I barely talked to anyone, or I spoke to thousands of people constantly.

I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinised. "It's important to remember that you're not a celebrity," she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it. The Monday after my disastrous CNN appearance, as I stood in the queue in a coffee shop, a middle-aged man in a suit told me to keep my chin up. "Emily, don't quit Gawker!" a young guy shouted at me from his bicycle as I walked down the street one day. If someone stared at me on the subway, there was no way to tell whether they were admiring my outfit or whether they, you know, Knew Who I Was. The more people emailed the Gawker tip line with "sightings" of me – laden with bags from Target and scarfing ice cream while walking down Atlantic Avenue – the more I was inclined to believe it was the latter.

I didn't want to go to Fire Island. The trip would take two hours, and it would involve the subway, the Long Island Railroad, a van and a ferry. For a month, whenever I left my comfort zone, I'd been seized by one of my irrational, heart-pounding meltdowns, which I would studiously conceal. The panic attacks were about a desire to be invisible, but if I showed any sign that I was having one, everyone would pay attention to me. It was kind of funny when you thought about it, and if you weren't me.

But Choire Sicha, my boss, urged me to attend the staff retreat at a house near the beach so that we could all bond as a team. Walking into Penn Station, I saw Josh and his stylish duffel leaning against a pillar. He looked up at me and smiled in a way that immediately distracted me from thoughts of how miserable I felt. The freakout I was dreading never came, and over the course of the next few days, I forgot to always anticipate its arrival.

We each wrote our allotment of Gawker posts in the mornings, and in the afternoons went to the beach. At night Choire cooked us elaborate feasts, and we played Scrabble and watched bad movies. Josh and I sat together on the couch, and I put my head on his shoulder in a friendly way. The next day, I let him apply sunscreen to the spot in the middle of my back that I couldn't reach. As a joke, we walked down the wood-plank paths that crisscross the island holding hands. I remember joking, via IM as we worked, about us wanting to cross the hallway that separated our bedrooms and crawl into bed with each other at night when we couldn't sleep. On our last day, I congratulated myself on having made it through the trip without letting these jokes turn into real betrayal. And then, 20 minutes outside the city on the Long Island Railroad on the way home, Josh kissed me.

The next few weeks eliminated every constant from my life except my job. I moved out of the apartment where I'd lived for four years with Henry, and while I looked for a place on my own, I stayed in a tiny room in a loft full of hippies who brewed their own kombucha tea. I quit smoking pot cold turkey. My parents moved out of my childhood home to a different state because my dad had a new job. My best friend, Ruth, lived a hemisphere away in New Zealand, and though we sent each other epic email messages and talked on the phone, I still felt unmoored in the way you can only feel after a break-up, as if you're the last living speaker of some dying language. But even though this sense of disconnection from my old self and my old life was confusing, it felt mostly good. After all, what was so great about my old self and my old life, anyway?

I thought about Gawker, one way or another, 24 hours a day, thrilling to the idea that a review of the restaurant where Josh and I were eating dinner might find its way on to the site the following day, and pillow-talking about the site's internal politics. Just a few weeks earlier, I had been scared to walk down my own block. Now I felt totally comfortable posting a picture of myself in a bathing suit on the site, inspiring Josh to do the same. I felt blazingly, insanely energised, and the posts came more easily than ever.

I was happy, but I wasn't a complete idiot – I knew that the euphoria was leading to a massive crash. I'd been clinging to Henry because he was my sounding board. In his absence, I was becoming more and more open on Gawker.

After the first night Josh and I spent together, I woke up as the sun rose and sat down at my desk to write a post that was nominally about a recent New York Times article about the shelf-life of romantic love. My boyfriend and I had just broken up, I revealed, and so I had been wondering whether love really exists. I wrote that I had concluded that it does. We can't expect other people to make us happy, I informed my readers with total sincerity and earnestness, and we should live in the moment and stop obsessing about the future.

I shudder involuntarily when I read this now. It's like stumbling across a diary I kept as a teenager. It's probably one of the worst things that I've ever written. The commenters loved it.

Gawker had recently added a counter beside each post that displayed how many views it received. The site's owner didn't like my "I believe in love" post, he told me, but he said he was OK with it because, as everyone could see, more than 10,000 people disagreed with him. I had managed to turn my job into a group therapy session. "Emily, I don't really know you any more than I know the people I see every morning walking the dogs," one of them wrote. "It's more of an imagined familiarity born out of reading your words for a year. But that took guts, all the way around. And I'm in your corner, inasmuch as a somewhat anonymous, faceless, nameless commenter can be."

Would anyone still be in my corner if they knew the truth – that I hadn't in fact been dumped, and that I'd thrown myself headlong into a rebound affair with a colleague? I wished that I could tell my old Emily Magazine readers everything that was going on in my life and ask them for advice. But the internet had changed, and my place in it had changed, too: I no longer had the luxury of imagining that the only people reading my posts were a handful of funny, supportive friends.

About a month after I broke up with Henry, my best friend, Ruth, and I created a new, anonymous blog on which we wrote about break-ups and cooking. We named it Heartbreak Soup. At the beginning, we didn't tell anyone it existed, but then we decided to add a sidebar of links to other sites we liked, and a tiny amount of traffic began to trickle our way.

We used pseudonyms for the people we wrote about, but otherwise our concessions to privacy were very limited. I knew this wasn't smart in the same way that I knew that dating a colleague wasn't smart, but my curiosity won out.

I wanted to know what would happen if I showed myself as little mercy as I showed everyone else. "I'm bad at describing sex, or maybe everyone is," I wrote at one point, but I didn't let that stop me from trying! I ratted myself out for being a bad daughter. I described the symptoms and probable causes of a urinary tract infection. And I wrote about how painful it was to pack up my things in my old apartment as Henry – whom I referred to as "William" – stood over me watching.

Josh was one of the first people I told about the blog. He seemed flattered that some of the posts were about him, but said he wasn't sure about how candid I was being – though we'd never discussed it, it seemed like a good idea not to explicitly reveal that we were seeing each other.

A few weeks later, I arrived home in the early morning hours after abruptly extricating myself from Josh's bed – he had suddenly revealed plans for a European vacation with another girl – and immediately sat down at my computer to write a post about what had happened. On Heartbreak Soup, I wrote a long rant about the day's events, including a recipe for the chicken soup I made the previous afternoon and the sex that I'd been somehow suckered into even after finding out about how serious things were with the other girl.

Word had spread through my immediate circle of friends about Heartbreak Soup, and it was now getting a few hundred visitors a day – about the same as Emily Magazine before I started at Gawker. I lulled myself into imagining that these Heartbreak Soup readers, like those old Emily Magazine readers, might not even know what Gawker was, that they were reading just because they liked my stories.

Not long after, Josh told me he wanted to have a talk with me about how unsecret my "secret" blog had become. I had started working from home again, but I came into the city, and we stood, smiling awkwardly, outside the Gawker office, trying to figure out what to say to each other. I offered to make the posts that mentioned Josh inaccessible by password-protecting them. "You should be password-protected," he said, and I laughed. Later, at home, I wrote about what had just happened on Heartbreak Soup, and then I password-protected the post.

*October, New York magazine published a cover article about Gawker. I took the magazine from my therapist's waiting room into her office and read aloud from the article. The article painted Gawker as a clearing house for vitriol and me as a semi-sympathetic naïf who half-loved and half-loathed what her job was forcing her to become. That week, when I walked around at parties, trying to elicit funny quotes from whatever quasi-famous people were there, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was Gawker. Someone wondered how I could sleep at night. I was getting tired of justifying my job to strangers, trotting out truisms about the public's right to know and the internet changing the rules of privacy. At the end of November, I announced my resignation, via a post on Gawker.

For a year, I had been getting up each morning at 7am. Now, without an audience, I lost the narrative thread. For months, I thought that I hated the commenters who tormented me. Now, sickeningly, I missed them. I wasn't logging on to instant messenger. I had terrible writer's block. My grandfather died, and I couldn't even come up with a heartfelt paragraph to read aloud at his funeral.

On Heartbreak Soup, I was reduced to writing about not having anything to write about. When I posted about a week spent wandering around dead-eyed in Florida's artificial beauty the week after the funeral, one reader left a comment recommending brands of antidepressants. Soon after, I lost the will to blog altogether.

Two months after I quit Gawker, Josh wrote an article in the New York Post's Sunday magazine about how violated he felt when I wrote about him on Heartbreak Soup, quoting extensively from my blog posts. On the morning that the article hit the newsstands, I made Ruth – who had become my roommate – read it first. When she finished, she looked stricken. "Emily, he's so evil," she said, sounding not at all reassuring.

I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the foetal position. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I'd have to destroy the entire internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone.

"I'm taking it down," Ruth called to me from the living room, where my laptop sat on a table, displaying our no-longer-so-secret blog. I opened my eyes. "Don't delete it," I managed to say. "Just make it all password-protected."

I lay there for a while longer. Eventually I read the article, which was, as personal betrayals go, far worse than I'd thought it could be. But the real power of the article, as Josh must have known when he wrote it, lay in the way that it exposed me to the new Gawker regime, which had already proved itself to be even more vicious than we'd ever been. Now I was no longer simultaneously sniper and target – I was just a target, and I felt powerless.

Many of the commenters – on Gawker, on other blogs and even on Emily Magazine – talked about me. Many of them explicitly pointed out that this drubbing was my karmic comeuppance. Now it was my turn. It was only fair.

By revealing my flaws to whoever wanted to look, I thought – incorrectly, as it turned out – that I was inoculating myself against the criticism my Gawker colleagues and I levelled most often. Maybe I was talentless, old-looking and slutty, but no one could call me a hypocrite. I had said that everyone was subject to judgement and scrutiny, and then, by judging and scrutinising myself relentlessly, I'd invited others to do the same.

But maybe I was a hypocrite after all, because now I was beginning to feel that no one should be subjected to that kind of scrutiny. Not Josh, not Jimmy Kimmel and especially not me.