Emily Gould

In the past 13 years, Emily Gould has become an accomplished author and feminist book publisher. As she prepares for the launch of her latest novel, Perfect Tunes, she worries that to many people, she will only ever be what she was for less than a year, in 2007: an editor at now defunct media gossip site Gawker, who suffered a traumatizing moment on national television that still haunts her.

A profile of Katja Blichfeld, the co-creator of HBO’s High Maintenance, in the wake of her coming out as a lesbian, and the amicable end of her marriage to Ben Sinclair — her collaborator on the show, and its star.

A personal essay in which Emily Gould pays homage to the wide range of women food writers and cookbook authors who affected her own cooking, and her lifestyle aspirations, over the course of her adult life so far.

As the first season of the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale wraps up, author Emily Gould profiles Elisabeth Moss, the show’s star and executive producer. Gould manages to draw Moss out out a bit on topics the actress is famous for being tight-lipped about, including the book and show’s feminist messages, and how her upbringing in the Church of Scientology might square with Margaret Atwood’s story of religious oppression.

An insightful profile of Cat Marnell, author of the new memoir, How to Murder Your Life, a writer and beauty editor perhaps best known for the self-destructive tendencies that cost her various high-profile jobs and landed her frequently in rehab. Author Emily Gould casts Marnell as more together than many give her credit for, and relatively healthy—at least in her ability to keep rebounding from relapses, and writing about it all cogently and compellingly.

An excerpt of Manjula Martin’s essay anthology, Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. Gould addresses one of the many double standards in publishing: women authors must be “nice,” accommodating and virtually boundary-less, while men authors suffer no consequences for being real–or even rude.

An elegy for a much beloved volunteer chef and leader of the rest of the volunteers at a soup kitchen in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Adventures in preparing recipes from the cookbooks of “domestic goddesses” Gwyneth Paltrow and Chrissy Teigen.

Lessons from starting a small publishing business.

Here is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book from WORD Bookstores.