Miss Misery Read Free

calling from the airport: Her flight was canceled; her job was canceled; she had mistakenly booked her tickets to A Hague instead of The Hague. Anything that would get her back to me safely by lunchtime. But I pressed play and found out otherwise.
    < YOU HAVE ONE NEW MESSAGE>
    David? David, buddy! It’s Thom calling. We haven’t spoken in a while and you know I love to check in with my struggling authors! Not that you’re struggling! Or not that I’d know! Ha, ha! Listen, David—call me! The manuscript is due in a month, and I’m very curious to hear the latest. You know my number. We should get drinks. Call me. Call me!
    
    
    Thom Watkins, my editor at Pendant Publishing: the only man I knew who laughed like he was spelling the letters out, with exclamation points attached. Not that I really knew him; the only day Watkins and I had ever met face-to-face was back in March, when he took me to lunch, put a contract in front of me, and said, “You sure you don’t want to get dessert? It’s not like you’re getting another one of these free meals! Ha, ha!” That was nearly three months ago. In the contract I was given four months to write a book. The funny bit—really “ha, ha!” funny—was that I still hadn’t started the thing. Which is why I had yet to return any of Watkins’s increasingly shrill phone messages.
    Oh, did I somehow neglect to mention that part? That I was writing a book? And that I’d never written one before? That I was unable to get past the first paragraph, which led my girlfriend to leave both me and the country because I was paralyzed with indecision and she had a career to think about? Funny, that was usually the first thing I thought about in the morning.
    Just then, a voice came from the living-room window.
    â€œSeñor, sorry to disturb, but you’re dripping water on the wood floor!”
    I turned to the painter, who was dangling in a different spot now but still smiling. “Gracias,” I said, and walked back to the bedroom to get dressed.
    Ha, ha!
    Â 
    The book was about diaries. Not itself a diary—who would want to read about a self-obsessed twentysomething with writer’s block?—but a history of the medium written for a new, confessional generation: a handy, user-friendly tome that would trace the heretofore unseen connections between Samuel Pepys and the personal Web site of Emolover48. The whole thing had started innocently enough: I was writing freelance stories about rock and roll, etc., for glossy magazines, making enough money to go out to dinner but not enough to take cooking lessons, when I received an assignment that interested me far more than the usual hand-jobby band profiles and navel-gazing record reviews. It was to be a quick, “newsy” piece on the explosion of teen-oriented online diary sites: the phenomenon that keeping a public, daily journal of life’s mundanities was suddenly required behavior for the black-clad, occasionally pierced, under-eighteen set. Coming as it was after a run of five straight reviews of records that I’d only managed to listen to once, the assignment seemed promising. Plus, I had run out of adjectives.
    So back in March I had logged on to LiveJournal.com and its bubbling competitors Diaryland, DeadJournal, iNotebook, and DailyCry. I “met” sad-eyed surfer girls in Orange County and furious hardcore boys in the Florida panhandle. I met Jaymie who cut herself and Margo who had a friend who did. I met crazy Theresa, drinking and fucking her way through freshman year at Ball State, and quiet, comic book–obsessed Edward, who listened to Cursive and Billie Holiday alone in his bedroom at night. I met Mike C., wry and funny, who was desperately in love with anyone in the tenth grade who would kiss him back if he made the first move during the third act of Amelie. And all four feet eleven inches of