Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"

[MirnaMinkoff]

No, because that would require writing skills and talent. She has neither one. Stephen King with severe TDS can write rings around this untalented and completely unskilled hack who lacks qualification to write a classified for the Thrifty Nickel weekly circular.

She just needs to gain skills working a traditional job.

One of my guilty pleasures as a teen was true crime paperbacks. I found even the most horrible writers couldn’t ruin my interest in a lurid and bizarre story. (Well written true crime, like The Executioner’s Song or In Cold Blood is among the very best non-fiction you will ever read, but those books are extremely rare. The subject matter drives the interest, not the writing, so the field is filled with many bottom feeder writers.

The last five years of Mallory’s life are like the most retarded, deranged woke soap opera imaginable. Take all the most half-baked extreme fringe fad politics of the last decade, apply them to Mallory, saddle her up and then let her be mounted by the narcissistic britbong grifter in a dress to put the spurs in her .

It’s the type of real life, unintentional, black comedy that I would find irresistible in book form. We will either get that book, or some self-congratulatory, mostly fictional, trans polycule academic snore fest that Joe and Mo write together. I’m really rooting for the former.

 

[Mellorine]

Even though "blurb" is supposed to refer to the back cover pitch, it's come to also refer to the praise quotes. "I've been asked to blurb a book I don't even want to read but it's by a friend" is a common enough complaint in some author circles, meaning they've been asked permission to have their name after some version of "This book was good!" on the cover. Sometimes paperback releases of successful hardcovers will have nothing but praise from others on the back and lack a proper descriptive blurb, which is what Mallory is bitching about.

 

[bei_rav]

Sometimes paperback releases of successful hardcovers will have nothing but praise from others on the back and lack a proper descriptive blurb, which is what Mallory is bitching about.

OK, but, there is actually a highly detailed descriptive blurb up top

 

[Mellorine]

Yes, and Mal is crowing that she got her way on that point while bitching that she finds a common publishing practice irritating. Literally the third paragraph onward:

I’m really pleased with how it turned out, especially because we were able to restrict the blurbs to a sane amount in a single location: there are just three of them on the bottom half of the back cover.

The only thing on the front cover is the title, my name, and an illustration of a women’s hotel. That’s what I like to see most on the cover of a book! The author photo is confined to the back flap, where it ought to be, and also has a dog in it, which gave me something to do with my hands.

Best of all, the back cover for Women’s Hotel includes a brief description of what happens in the book. This is something every book should have! When I’m browsing and trying to get a sense of whether I’m interested in a book, I feel irritable and overly-marketed-to when the cover is awash in blurbs — especially when the back cover only has blurbs on it. A good blurb or two can be helpful, especially if I already know and like whoever wrote it, but I get irritable when the back cover reveals nothing about a book but “Sensational! Says Patrick Direction” and “I couldn’t put this down — Sep Corsico of the Saturday Philharmonic Standard.”

It’s nice that so many people like this book, I think to myself, but I don’t know what the book they like is about. At most, I might learn that it’s slim, terse, searing, urgent, or necessary. I want to know what the book is about so I can get a better sense if I’m going to like it.

For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think this is an especially new problem. Back in 1997 (and it wasn’t new then, either) Doreen Carvajal claimed that: “Breathless blurbs in praise of books are as mechanical as a response to ‘How are you?’ Fine. Also delighted, haunted, satisfied, engaged, moved, thrilled and gripped. So common is the industry practice of issuing cloying endorsements to grace dust jackets and advertisements that the compliments of luminaries seem rather meaningless.”

 

[Bookwork]

Need at least one chapter on that woman who wanted the world to believe her menstrual cup was in her uterus until hot sex popped it back out. Inc. several pages re: her pet land walrus with the acres of creamy flesh.

 

[Trianon]

Tard Baby lives down to her sobriquet with some „gosh I’m just a silly billy” quirky girl drivel to announce the launch of her new website.

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link | archive

At the end of the homepage, she doubles down

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Tard Baby turns 38 this year. Her style of literary humour has always left me cold, but OK, whatever. It’s the constant childish incompetence uwu just a quirky girl trying to navigate grown up shit that is so exhausting and irritating. Tard Baby’s fear of responsibility, adulthood and mastery of herself and actual skills put her in this situation: a balding goblin playing nanny to her husband’s child with his mistress, living in the mistress’ house, with no assets apart from rapidly depreciating fugly clothes and a bicycle. BTW, imagine the novel a good author could write about that! Girl, you have got some great material there and instead you write about women when you claim not to be one #ownstories. Joe, for all his many faults, at least pretends to be an adult and expresses a confidence in his own opinions and choices, however misguided.

This is one of the top cringiest things in this thread. She can't spend an extra 15 minutes just checking the links out, deciding they work, and giving herself the greenlight to publish it? No, she must rush it out with template links still active and make sure her entire audience (the only people checking for this!) knows she couldn't put any effort in. She must take the time to write out a fail disclaimer at the bottom instead of spending one single minute reading a help article.

The last five years of Mallory’s life are like the most retarded, deranged woke soap opera imaginable. Take all the most half-baked extreme fringe fad politics of the last decade, apply them to Mallory, saddle her up and then let her be mounted by the narcissistic britbong grifter in a dress to put the spurs in her .

Her life is a pitch-black picaresque a la Candide, with a dim-witted narrator who is experiencing the most depraved life the world has to offer and yet thinks talking about Flintstones is where the real interest is. Her existence is so self-consciously blinkered, and that's what drives her to portray herself as an uwu innocent. She can't afford to look around at her life. She must self-swaddle.

 

[Potatis Salad]

Her life is a pitch-black picaresque a la Candide, with a dim-witted narrator who is experiencing the most depraved life the world has to offer and yet thinks talking about Flintstones is where the real interest is. Her existence is so self-consciously blinkered, and that's what drives her to portray herself as an uwu innocent. She can't afford to look around at her life. She must self-swaddle.

May I offer her latest Instagram post as a visual accompaniment to this paragraph?





If only you knew how bad things really are.

 

[Larry David's Opera Cape]

May I offer her latest Instagram post as a visual accompaniment to this paragraph?

I know it's probably supposed to be some kind of fancy dye job but it just looks like that's an incredibly filthy sweat-stained t-shirt.

That plus the pedo stache makes her look like someone who got busted for ejaculating on women's hair on the bus, not a chick lit writer.

 

[Pube Dandruff]

Peep that pinky pooner flush. Like a slapped ham.

 

[behindyourightnow]

It’s the constant childish incompetence uwu just a quirky girl trying to navigate grown up shit that is so exhausting and irritating.

Man, it's like seeing a ghost, isn't it? I never thought about it much until now, but going through adulthood as a female millennial has consisted of seeing so many fellow female millennials gradually shrug off that cringey "uwu adulting is hard lol I am such a hot mess helpless baby!" vibe and actually, you know, grow up.

Sure there are a few exceptions, but I did not realize how widespread the absence of this attitude was until Mallory came along, and showed it perfectly preserved in amber to us all. Thanks, I guess?

(This seems to be the norm among people who transition. They kind of freeze at the life stage and habits they had when they transitioned and never move on, because all their effort and energy goes into the hopeless task of changing sex instead.)

This is one of the top cringiest things in this thread. She can't spend an extra 15 minutes just checking the links out, deciding they work, and giving herself the greenlight to publish it? No, she must rush it out with template links still active and make sure her entire audience (the only people checking for this!) knows she couldn't put any effort in. She must take the time to write out a fail disclaimer at the bottom instead of spending one single minute reading a help article.

Notice how she did the whole thing alone without anyone offering to help her. One of the nice things about being in a relationship is that when you're having a bad day or having trouble with something that should be relatively simple, the other person generally steps in to help as a way of supporting you.

But Mallory was struggling with this for days, and publicly posting about how much trouble she was having, and Joe and Lily either didn't notice, or they silently appreciated how much she was humiliating herself.

One of my guilty pleasures as a teen was true crime paperbacks. I found even the most horrible writers couldn’t ruin my interest in a lurid and bizarre story. (Well written true crime, like The Executioner’s Song or In Cold Blood is among the very best non-fiction you will ever read, but those books are extremely rare. The subject matter drives the interest, not the writing, so the field is filled with many bottom feeder writers.

You are entirely right. People love "escape from a cult" stories, and these ones have abuse and gore too, and you wouldn't have to scout for exceptional writing talent to produce something readable.

I know the publishing industry is still ruled by pro-troon church ladies, but at some point someone at the top is going to realize that they can make big money from lurid detransitioner stories, at which point even said church ladies will quietly sign up a bunch of detrans women for book deals (and then lock their Twitter accounts for a while until the screeching of the crossdressers dies down).

 

[Dr. Butt]

People like this always get loser dogs/cats (inbred, need diapers 24/7, no teeth) because they're terrified of anything that doesn't "need" them. A healthy, independent animal is too much of a reminder that they are not the centre of the universe. Pooners and SJWs would rather stay inside tending to their rat's wheelchair than participate in a world where not everyone notices or cares about you.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

she must rush it out with template links still active and make sure her entire audience (the only people checking for this!) knows she couldn't put any effort in. She must take the time to write out a fail disclaimer at the bottom instead of spending one single minute reading a help article.

It’s also her way of criticizing her effort to prevent anyone else from doing so. One cannot criticize her webpage because she already pointed out it’s half-assed and she’s not taking it seriously anyway, so there! She’s probably also humble bragging to ann extent and expecting people to tell her it’s a really cool webpage. Daniel is so relatable!

Its also hilarious to watch Mallory’s persona of not taking herself professional self seriously, while she is married to a guy who is like an unintentional parody of self-important academic peacock.

I do find it very odd that a person who has existed as a online writer for fifteen years, and who is relatively well known in writing circles, couldn’t get anyone to assist her, either voluntarily or for pay, to create a proper author promo page. I guess even her literary agent doesn’t care that much.

If I put up a webpage and it was shitty, I know 3 to 4 people who would basically hack my account and rectify the matter for me, possibly without even asking permission depending on how bad it was. It actually happened years ago for a silly niche hobby thing I had on a on SM platform and a friend insisted on revamping and setting it up all proper much to my chagrin.

Until Joe came along Mallory appeared to have friends, a professional network and lots of friendly contacts in the media. This doesn’t seem to be the case after Joe, even her very BFF and Toast cofounder has fucked off. There appeared to be no friends of the throuple in NYC. Even their baby shower appeared to be a few uncomfortable people forced to go thanks to working for or with their literary agents/publisher.

Mallory and Lilly both seemed to have old friends going back years. It’s really Joe who seems to lack any long term relationships or friendships. He seems to have an uncanny ability to make sure most of the friends and contacts of his wife and girlfriend stay far the fuck away from the throuple.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

At the end of the homepage, she doubles down

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I looked at the code anyway even though I know it's template generated, it's hilariously 4000 lines long.

It's even funnier because of course Squarespace offers tons of step-by-step tutorials including videos: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/...Video-Series-Getting-Started-with-Squarespace
Plus you can find tons more from third parties.

I don't know the particulars about Squarespace, nor did I watch any of those videos, but it sounds like it's mostly all drag and drop and mobile friendly. But there's a possibility she may have just been better off with Wordpress because that still looks more like the UI of stuff circa 2000s/early 2010s with boxes for INSERT HEADER HERE and INSERT TEXT HERE and buttons for INSERT PHOTO or whatever.

I should also add this is even dumber than all of this because Substack has functions for setting up these kinds of pages and she could have just fucking sent the URL to it.

 

[Bookwork]

A manly sentiment:

Spoiler: Text

"I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles, or heath blossoms."

Charlotte Brontë reading Sense & Sensibility twenty years later, eyes narrowing: I am going to dedicate my life to finding and killing Edward Ferrars

Danny Boy has not pinned either her new book or her new website to the top of her Xitter. Pride of place still goes with prejudice to accusations against "my biological father."

Friend's author-mom advises that literary agents "encourage" authors to market in specific ways and "further encourage" if productive activity is not observed, hence Mallory's uwu plea for a cheap photographer and her struggle with Squarespace.

Authors can hire a publicist to deal with a lot of those marketing efforts, just as they can hire a copyeditor and a proofreader. Gone are the days when publishers or literary agents provided such services, says author-mom with more than a dozen books on a publisher's list. She noted that Mallory stumbles along the path between weak academic and feeble trade publishing.

Yet we see Joe strutting down the same path with a professionally constructed and maintained website. He did not tell his husband, "Text my web jockey and ask him what you fucked up." Interesting. Lily, as an art prof, might know some people in the area who have bested the Squarespace challenge and a few others who are photographers, yet Mallory bleats into the great unknown for help.

Does she not share her needs at home? Or are 2/3rds of the polycule just unwilling to sense her sensibility? Like a lot of lonely women unwittingly isolated by narcissists, she's made a baby her soulmate.

But it's not her baby.

 

[bei_rav]

Does she not share her needs at home?

Possibly she's shooting the moon here in the hopes of acquiring an "uncool dad" title. And/or, there's something twisted up in the way some pooners see competence/achievement. Some female qualities, skills, interests, are (or were recently) openly considered loserly by the (feminist) mainstream -- loserly for women. Acceptable, possibly even intriguing, for a man. It's been noted all over KF how many pooners are ultrafeminine, crochet as a hobby, do childcare, a little light art, etc, whereas straight women who know they're women will serve in the army or fill a traditionally male role without a second thought.

So, if you absolutely suck at basic lifeskills, are dependent on your husband, are only really good at things that few value highly, and you don't want either to work on yourself or to honestly reject social expectations, you could become a pooner. No shame in being a man who leans on his witty wife. A woman locked out of her only home by her supercilious husband and his mistress -- that's a situation which is immediately understood, we know right away the woman needs to make a serious change. A man locked out by his wife and her female lover -- "lol, how eccentric." Openly sucking at a task critical to your professional success -- feminists I must say rightly teach that that should somewhat embarrass a woman (she can at least discreetly outsource it). Absolutely sucking at technology as a man -- "Haha just like my dad" (<-- what Mal is hoping for, I think).

 

[Nothing To See Here]

Excellent analysis above, but I also think there's an element of arrested development about it. You see this sometimes in failure-to-launchs, and/or very conventionally attractive or popular women who seem to put it on as an affectation - "oh, tee hee, silly me, I'm just a girl, I could never [do a DIY task / build a website / keep track of financials], that sounds sooooo hard". None of those things are hard, but they do require a bit of persistence, trial and error, and acknowledging that you're gonna suck a bit when you start, and so these Whimsical Princess types pre-emptively absolve themselves of the fact that they'd have to be visibly bad at something by pretending it's part of their feminine mystique. It's extremely annoying to deal with in regular women (find a youtube video and learn a new skill, fuck's sake), it's just an especially jarring affectation on Mallory because she's doesn't look like a Whimsical Princess any more, she looks like a lumpy balding teenage boy and keeps insisting she's a man.

 

[Bookwork]

From Lily's Insta: "Making cherry wine in the foot spa kiddie pool."


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[autogynephobia]

From Lily's Insta: "Making cherry wine in the foot spa kiddie pool."

Isn't Joe eight years sober? Or is he one of those "wine doesn't count" types?

 

[Bookwork]

Doesn't a soupçon of kiddie poop bring the ABV way down? I shall ask a sommelier the next time one is trying to upsell me. Maybe it's just an urban legend and counts as terroir.

 

[Aero the Alcoholic Bat]

From Lily's Insta: "Making cherry wine in the foot spa kiddie pool."

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What even possesses anyone to tattoo images of naked people onto their bodies in the first place?