Spike Gillespie is a writer, like many American tough guys, who struts on the edge of farce: "I get through more relationships than some women get through tampons when they have a heavy period" is one of her more memorable lines. Her partial autobiography, All the Wrong Men, has just been published in the States (the stress is on "All"); but what makes it remarkable is that it grew out of web journalism.
Gillespie used to write a diary column for Prodigy, an early on-line service that was caught and dissolved in the web. The subject was her own life as a single parent who drank too much and suffered from "penis-related problems" - as tough guys tend to do - and parts of it are simply brilliant, shocking in the way that only careful and perceptive writing can be. On her web page there is a very sharp account of cancer surgery, written in the form of three journal entries. The cyst they found on her after performing an abortion, which she also wrote about, she named "cupcake" - but when you click on the link to pictures of cupcake, there is no warning that this is what it will actually be. You are told instead that it will consist of adult pictures, yet this is a phrase that usually refers to the naked flesh outside women, not the innards under a surgeon's knife.
This may sound like Mike Doonesbury's ghastly first wife giving birth on cable. But I don't think it is. What makes Gillespie's stuff compelling is two things: the blood is real and the surroundings are admirably artificial. There are plenty of people on the web who can write for effect, but most have nothing to say. Those who have lives to tell about usually can't write. But Gillespie can write so well that she had to spend much of her early career as a waitress or, as she relates in one delightful passage of her memoirs, as a "tutor", which meant that college students hired her to write their essays. I'm surprised she could write badly enough to have these essays accepted as the real thing.
The joke in Bridget Jones is that all the angst is completely unnecessary. The nerve in Gillespie is how necessary it all is. This may be because she is a devoted mother, so her mistakes matter to someone all the time. Because her son is perfect, or at least loves her perfectly, she is able to pursue a bewildering variety of men who fall short of this standard. Then she dumps them and describes the experience in forceful Texan language. "I been shit on," says one link, from her front page, into a long account, written as a letter to the other woman, of a recent unsatisfactory boyfriend.
You'd have thought that the web would be full of writing of this sort. But almost all of it is barren. That is partly because most writers lack both Gillespie's talent and her discipline; and those who don't would normally rather be paid for their efforts than simply broadcast them. I'm not sure that that isn't a short-sighted decision. Without her web column and her free e-mail newsletter it is unlikely that people would buy Gillespie's book in any great numbers. Perhaps the wisest thing to do, for a writer who can make pearls from the irritations of her life, is to broadcast them to the largest possible number of swine and hope they acquire a taste for it. It worked for Netscape, after all.
Perhaps the next step is for authors to launch themselves on the stock market, as Internet companies; this would mean they could live well without ever having to make a profit. Besides, when you publish stuff on a website, you get to choose your own author photograph: Gillespie's, at www.spikeg.com, shows her face crudely Photoshopped on to the body of a cartoon whip-wielding dominatrix.
