Why Girls Are Weird (32 page)

1) Is it true that you kept an online journal?

I started Squishy (
pamie.com
) in the summer of 1998 as a writing exercise for my comedy troupe. I was introduced to journaling by a friend who kept a journal and followed her links until I realized there was an entire community of writers online. So I decided to give it a try.

Also, I've always loved zines and created a few underground newspaper-type things in high school that I'm not proud of and won't share with you because they're too embarrassing at this point in my life.

2) So how much of Anna's character is autobiographical?

It's mostly fiction. Even the entries have been reworked a bit so they're now fiction as well. But I tried to keep everyone's “favorites” in there. When I was writing the book I asked my readers which entries they loved the most. I didn't get to keep them all in there, but at least “Tiny Wooden Hand” survived. Otherwise there might have been a riot.

The “Tiny Wooden Hand” was such a big deal that people started sending Tiny Wooden Hands to my house. One reader tried to acquire Tiny Woolen Mittens for the Tiny Wooden Hands so that I could take pictures of the hands having a Tiny Wooden Snowball Fight in my freezer. When the mittens fell through, she sent over an enormous box of candy and homemade cookies. The expensive candy, too! That was when my friends started to realize how big the website was becoming. They also renamed the cookies “Poison Stalker Cookies.”

The most autobiographical part of this book for me is Anna's struggle to figure out who she is at this point in her life. I had quite the crisis when I turned twenty-five, realizing I wasn't anything like the person I'd always assumed I'd be when I got there. I wasn't the only one having a mid-twenties crisis either. I have a friend who's eight days younger than I, and when he called on his birthday sobbing, “I hate being twenty-five! Why didn't you tell me it sucks so hard!” I cried back, “I didn't want to scare you! I hate it, too!”

It was a rough year. I didn't know where I was headed or what I wanted. I didn't know who I wanted to be or what kind of relationship I wanted. Once I turned twenty-five, every facet of my life changed. The journal was a big part of that. It helped me find friends, jobs, and some of the most important people in my life. It's really quite amazing, when I step back and look at it.

3) Like Anna, were you concerned about how much of your personal life was exposed on your journal?

I wasn't for a while. I didn't realize how many people were reading, I guess. It was when other people became concerned for my safety, or felt that they were getting exposed in the process, that I started to pull back a little. With any kind of one-on-one relationship there becomes a sense of entitlement. No matter how big my audience, they're all reading one at a time, and that can be a very intimate experience for a reader; it's like getting private e-mail. That's when people can begin to think that we're close friends. I'm telling them stories about my life. It's easy to forget that it's one-sided.

There have been times when I felt someone was pushing into my life because he or she had identified with my writing and felt we should be “best friends.” But it's never been often enough or strong enough that I wished I'd never kept a journal. I don't share anything I wouldn't tell a good friend anyway.

4) Why did you take the journal offline in 2001?

Closing
pamie.com
meant I'd lost my job. I was a failed dot com. I had to move forward. It wasn't something I did out of spite.

I had lost my funding from ChickClick. Running
pamie.com
was a full-time job by then and I knew I was spending too much time working on the forum, a place of temporary exchanges that were mostly the writings of other people. I had to shut the site down, but I never imagined the response I'd get as a result!

There were e-mails, bulletin board discussions, letters begging me not to do it. One girl told me that she mentioned the site closing to her therapist, and how that bummed her out. Her therapist asked her, “Is this girl named Pam? Because you're my third patient this week to mention this site closing.” Can you imagine? I love that story.

Another girl wrote (and I'll never forget this): “You taught me how to wear a bra, put in a tampon, and to wipe from front to back. For this, I thank you. You've also taught me to follow my dreams.” I'm Big Bird for Young Adults!

5) Is that why you returned to online journaling in 2002?

Yeah, I missed it. I missed my readers. And I felt that I'd learned from my mistakes.

6) Did you find writing the book more or less satisfying than maintaining the journal?

It's very satisfying to write a book—don't get me wrong—but compared to the thousands of words I'd written for the journal, it was a much smaller achievement, volume-wise. I'm excited that the book could potentially reach a bigger audience than the site does. But the best part about writing a journal is the immediate feedback; within mintues I start getting e-mail from readers sharing their stories, commiserating, or debating something I was thinking about. That's infectious, that kind of contact. It makes you feel important. The book felt like the next logical step, and that's the best part about it. I want to see what's going to happen next.