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Saturday, Nov 21, 2009
Hating Nell Freudenberger -- the 28-year-old writer celebrated in Vogue and Elle -- is a virtual cottage industry among ambitious literati. And I was ready to hate her too -- until I read her book.
Sep 4, 2003 | First, the facts: In its 2001 "Summer Fiction Issue" the New Yorker printed four stories by "debut writers," a title defined by the magazine as "young writers who have not yet published a book." Among the four was Nell Freudenberger, then age 26; her contributor's note mentioned both that she was an editorial assistant at the New Yorker and that her piece, which was called "Lucky Girls," was her first published story. Author photos accompanied all the debut stories, and the three other writers had been photographed at, respectively, a park, a restaurant and a marina. Freudenberger had been photographed in her apartment, shot from above while sitting on what appeared to be a shiny, velvety mauve and silver bedspread. She had pale skin and shoulder-length dark hair; she wore a serious expression; it would be overstating it, but not by much, to say that you could see down her shirt.
On the June day the magazine appeared in my mailbox, I set aside what I was doing, which was, if I remember correctly, nothing (I had just graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was still living in Iowa City) and read much of the issue, including the story by Freudenberger. I think I liked the story, though it's hard to say now -- a bit like having been given a hamburger by a man at a picnic and only later, after finding out the man was Ray Kroc, trying to evaluate that hamburger. What I do remember is thinking Freudenberger looked kind of awkward, but in an endearing way.
I was quickly disabused of this idea. Nell Freudenberger was, as one of my Iowa classmates announced at a party that night, completely hot. (If you'd like to verify this for yourself, she has appeared in recent issues of both Vogue and Elle -- go on, get to the newsstand.) A bunch of us were sitting on someone's back porch, drinking beer, and the other males present (of course everyone I knew subscribed to the New Yorker, and of course everyone had anxiously consumed that particular issue) concurred. A debate about the story's merits ensued; most people had, apparently, been less impressed by Freudenberger's writing than by her appearance. Naturally, there were cracks about her insider status as an employee of the New Yorker. Which is all to say that the conversation wasn't particularly flattering to Freudenberger, but still -- the assumption was that she warranted conversation. (Among the other debut writers in that New Yorker was Jonathan Safran Foer, whose novel "Everything Is Illuminated" would come out the next year, but I don't remember any real talk about him.)
And yet I think I didn't truly understand the Freudenberger phenomenon until a woman at the party, a woman whom I thought of as gorgeous and brilliant and poised and intimidating, said she had gone to Harvard with Freudenberger and that Freudenberger was, basically, gorgeous and brilliant and poised and intimidating. Of everyone she knew, this woman said, it was utterly unsurprising that Nell Freudenberger should be the one to have a story in the New Yorker.
Probably that night, on the porch, some of us already hated Freudenberger. And yet, remarkably, this was before the things started happening that really made her hateful, or at least it was before all of them happened and certainly before news of them made their way out to us in Iowa. This is what occurred next: Amanda "Binky" Urban became Freudenberger's agent; a bidding war broke out, on the basis of that single story, for an as-yet-unwritten book by Freudenberger; she was offered a reported $500,000; she turned down the reported $500,000 and instead took a reported $100,000 in order to work with Daniel Halpern at Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. (Meaning she was, like, virtuous and un-greedy on top of everything else -- it was sickening!)
For a week or so, over e-mail or when we ran into each other in town, I exchanged Freudenberger tidbits with people who'd been at the party. (It was summer in Iowa. What else were we supposed to discuss?) And, apparently, Freudenberger gossip -- that is, schadenfreudenberger -- was not restricted to bored Midwestern MFA graduates: According to my friend J., a writer in New York who'd see Freudenberger at parties, "There was all this whispering, like, 'She hasn't even written it yet; she has no idea how difficult it is to write a whole book.'" Freudenberger's party persona, which according to J. was one of refined reserve, only perpetuated notions of her as charmed and undeserving. "She's just one of those people who always make me feel loud and drunk," says J.
Truthfully, among the people I know, the schadenfreudenberger tapered off pretty soon after her story appeared in the New Yorker, and I haven't heard a lot in the two years since. But on the occasions when her name is mentioned, it's guaranteed -- if at least one of the two or more people present is from either the MFA circuit or the New York media universe, someone will be compelled to announce, loudly and violently, "I hate Nell Freudenberger!"
And while my friends and I may have gotten distracted in the past two years, others have remained more vigilant -- a Web site called "The Complete Review" closely monitors Freudenberger's in-print activity and even features a play about her ascension titled "Whoa Nelly!" (A sample line, referring to her New Yorker photo: "I must say I do like the aluminum-foil skirt.") The site is, apparently, providing a much-needed service. As reported in an October 2002 entry, "Visitors to this Literary Saloon seem particularly curious about Nell Freudenberger -- 'Nell' and 'Freudenberger' remain (ridiculously) the two most popular search engine request terms that lead users here -- ahead of even 'literary' and 'saloon.'"
