The thunderdome of authors

Last night at Drom, a metaphor comparing (of all things) the hand of a friend about to give one his first pubescent homosexual handjob and a sucking starfish helped to win The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt author Jon-Jon Goulian first place in the Literary Death Match. The 5-year-old event is currently on a two month tour through 31 cities, the New York version of which included an unlikely cast of literary, tech, and comedy types.

Mr. Goulian was matched for a seven-minute reading in the first round against Emily Gould, who read a new piece about a girl in Kansas who had kind of a shitty boyfriend and didn't like to jog (but did it anyway).

The decision for who moved forward in the Deathmatch was put to New Yorker editor Ben Greenman, who judged on literary merit and who took copious notes throughout; comedian Jessi Klein, who judged on performance; and Videogum editor Gabe Delahaye, whose area of expertise was "intangibles" and whose judging included long riffs on Taylor Kitsch, bellbottoms, and the new article about Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton in this week's New Yorker.

"You look like the right amount of sexy-creepy," Ms. Klein said after Mr. Goulian's performance. "Like Jordan Catalano meets someone on a sex-offender registry."

Host and LDM founder Todd Zuniga, who looked impressively cute with that kind of shaggy haircut that only boyish men like Ricky Van Veen can pull off, was coming straight from Montreal, where he had performed the night before. Today he'll be in San Francisco.

"I feel a little bit like Conan O'Brien describes in his Can't Stop documentary," Mr. Zuniga told us. "I get excited, and then halfway through the tour I feel like 'Not this again,' but as soon as I see the performers I get excited all over again."

Before the show, we asked Ms. Gould if she could tell us what she'd be reading.

"Not unless you can Mind-Google it," she said.

We attempted the Mind-Google technique, which Ms. Gould interpreted as us "giving (her) a mean look" as she told us later in the evening. BetaBeat darling and front-wedgie taker Matt Langer showed up to cheer the blogger/authoress on.

The second round pitted British author Ned Beauman (Boxer Beetle) against writer and frequent NPR guest Starlee Kine.

"I know that everyone here is excited about The Art of Fielding, so there isn't much room for another sports novel," Mr. Beauman told the audience. He may have been right: his reading lost to Ms. Kine's.

The finale involved Ms. Kine and Mr. Goulian in a literary spelling bee, which personally sounds like our worst nightmare (Houellebecq? Palahniuk?), and went on for an impressively long time before Mr. Goulian finally defeated his competitor.

Later he and Miss Gould conspired on how they would (hypothetically) take home Ms. Klein, before the Emily Books founder (carrying an N+1 tote bag) decided to call it an early night and head back to Brooklyn.

We left soon after, so we have no idea if Mr. Goulian had any later success with Ms. Klein, the comedian who had judged him as an attractive sexual predator.

Jon-Jon Goulian's book cover.

The New York Post this morning wrote of Jon-Jon Goulian's "pre-crash deal" with Random House--the reported $700,000 advance for a book that, despite its ample publicity, has been "notably absent from best-seller lists." The Post quotes a figure of 957 copies sold of Mr. Goulian's memoir of gender confusion, a figure Nielsen Bookscan quoted to The Observer as 1,000 sold.

It is earlyish in the book's run (The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt was released just over a month ago), and Mr. Goulian has been promoting the book with in-person events. But short of a book by a celebrity and his co-author (Chaz Bono's memoir of a different sort of gender confusion, Transition, was released a week before Mr. Goulian's memoir and has sold, per Nielsen Bookscan, 6,000 copies), any book by an emerging author is a hard sell, no matter the publicity. Well-loved blogger Matthew Gallaway posed with Mr. Goulian for Out and has written much on the subject of publishing for The Awl; his novel The Metropolis Case, released in December 2010, has sold (per Nielsen Bookscan) 2,000 copies, though his advance was surely a bit under $700,000.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

When word dropped in 2008 that Mr. Goulian was writing a memoir, and that he had received a $700,000 advance, the publishing industry rejoiced. For years, the city had been using Mr. Goulian's elegant sarongs and indeterminate sexuality as a salve against drabness; a book deal meant he was at last earning recognition for his atmospheric contributions.

Now we know that Mr. Goulian's bonhomie has been hard-won. Likability, and its nervous analogue, the desperate need for approval, are the structuring themes of The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt (Random House, 336 pages, $25) a "making-of" memoir that traces the emergence of a tattooed, glam boy layabout from a Jewish-American childhood spent among eminence-driven achievers.

Mr. Goulian's mother is a successful lawyer who works long hours; his father is a well-known hematologist and health food fanatic; his two older brothers, unnamed, are scholar-athletes accepted to Harvard and Yale; his grandfather was the late political philosopher Sidney Hook. Growing up alongside so many winners leaves little space for Jon-Jon to distinguish himself. To make matters worse, the family lives in La Jolla, Calif.--a "theme park on the beach"--burdening the praise-addicted Mr. Goulian with a range of beauty-related pressures unknown to a Gopnik or a Foer.

As a young boy, Mr. Goulian has it relatively easy--he's a good-looking soccer star with plans to become a surgeon. Things head south after his middle brother goes off to college, abandoning Mr. Goulian to "the overwhelming love and scrutiny of my parents." His body begins to betray him: his nose swells, his legs start to bow and, most worrisome, he grows what seems to be a third, undescended testicle (it turns out to be a stray pies of intestine). The triple threat saps Mr. Goulian of inner strength, spurring a lifelong dysmorphic quest to conceal and correct bodily imperfections.

Mistakes are made along the way. He ruins his gums through overzealous flossing. He parches his skin with astringents. At 15, he asks his mother for a nose job, and she agrees, satisfying him for nine years until he decides he needs another. He smiles with his mouth closed, pivots his body to block the "weak" side of his face, and walks in "frenetic diagonal movements" to avoid exposing his bowlegs. 

The decisive event of Mr. Goulian's early life is the moment he learns he's scored a 650 on the Achievement Test in Math (the easy one). He erupts in tears, scrawling in his journal "I can't handle this intense life. ... Maybe I'll just drop out of school and marry someone wealthy." After examination Armageddon, the dominoes fall. He quits soccer. He starts wearing lip gloss and Ugg boots. He fails to enroll for Advanced Chemistry. He goes to prom wearing white tights, black pumps, a black skirt, red lipstick and a red bow tie.

The next year, when he enters Columbia--not generally considered a second-tier school, but not the Harvard or Yale of his older siblings, and in any case Mr. Goulian points out it had a worse reputation in that era--he is heckled as a "faggot," a "freak" and, this being the '80s, an "AIDSmobile." He takes refuge at Barnard, electing to live in a women's college rather than risk hostile encounters with the football team. When he tries to get a summer job manning the cash register at Chic Accessories, a jewelry store in a San Diego mall, he's fired on the first day for arriving in yellow overalls embossed with "riotous," honey-swilling bumble bees. After graduating, he enters law school, but rules out becoming a lawyer on account of the dress code: wearing a tie with a collared shirt makes your head appear smaller, and Mr. Goulian's head is on the small side to begin with. In need of a job where no one will notice or care about his sartorial peculiarities, Mr. Goulian eventually finds work at The New York Review of Books.

Sex is another source of trouble. His encounters are few, and each is more or less coerced. Girls named Zoe, Edie, Daphne and Stevie are among the assailants, as are boys named Oliver and Gunnar. (Mr. Goulian admits that some names have been changed to protect the innocent.) "After my encounter with Zoe," Mr. Goulian writes, referring to a 14-year-old stranger who gives him a blow job and unsuccessfully tries to coax him into coitus in bushes next to a mall parking lot, "my sexual curiosity waned considerably." An experience with a girl at Columbia during freshman year leaves him so traumatized he has trouble getting out of bed for days. The "mammalian tendencies" of the female body disgust him, and erect penises cause him to "flee." His one object of sustained (unrequited) lust is a genderless anorexic girl referred to as "the Vegetable Monster." In an ill-conceived attempt to get her attention, Mr. Goulian drifts into anorexia himself. It's only later that he turns to bodybuilding, an interest he explains as an effort to direct attention away from his face, which he cannot change, and to his arms and stomach, which he can push toward perfection.

Mr. Goulian's sexuality remains a puzzle even to himself; no amount of gender theory, with its formidable array of terms--"bisexual, transsexual, polysexual, metrosexual, metasexual, autosexual, cryptosexual, crypticsexual, protosexual, extraterrasexual"--provides an adequate explanation. Mr. Goulian himself settles for a lengthier qualifier: He is simply the Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt.

The video artist Ryan Trecartin is fond of proclaiming that "personality is replacing gender." That would seem to capture something important about Mr. Goulian, whose gregariousness overwhelms sexual presence (and even sexual preference). Within the family, though, gender still has consequences. It's only in his 30s, for instance, after reading a women's magazine, that Mr. Goulian discovers that applying harsh acne products to the skin can actually increase your chances of getting pimples, since the skin responds to excessive drying by producing more and more oil. What the teenaged Jon-Jon needed was moisturizer. As Mr. Goulian points out, girls learn these things from their mothers while still in their teens. There is no analogous social mechanism for the transmission of grooming knowledge between men--you can't ask your father about using moisturizer, particularly if the world thinks you're "half-a-fag." These days, Net natives can rely on the Internet to supplement paternal authority. Girly boys in the '80s knew no such luxury.

With no Internet to turn to, Mr. Goulian often retreats into the company of his considerable collection of stuffed animals, a virtual world that provides an important crutch through several decades. The animals, Mr. Goulian explains, "are fundamentally nonjudgmental." They accept him "unquestioningly" and don't hold him to "any conventional standards of success, dress, or sexual virility." Avatars of parental affection, the animals are more than pillow buddies--they travel to work, too. When a typist at the NYRB eventually points them out to editor in chief Bob Silvers, a man deft with abstraction but oblivious to his surroundings, Mr. Silvers cheerfully proclaims, "I'm very glad to have them on board. We need all the help we can get!" Mr. Silvers, another père manqué, eventually starts to remind Mr. Goulian too much of his own family. After three years, he quits.

Mr. Goulian is a natural wit, and his interpersonal predicaments provide fodder for Groucho Marx-style setups like the stuffed animal quip (they need the eggs). A Gen-X update on an archetype we associate most readily with Woody Allen, Mr. Goulian offers himself as "a neurasthenic man" in a "city of horrors," terrified of moths, sex, saturated fat, the draft, Central Park, taxi cabs and high-school reunions. If Woody Allen were a cross-dresser from La Jolla, is this who he'd be?

The most important distinction between Mr. Goulian and his comedic forebears is not his wardrobe--it's his will to ingratiate. Where Mr. Allen's generation of Jewish neurotics asserted nebbishy nonconformism through the disparagement of  phonies--be they professors, politicians or parents--Mr. Goulian's departure from the mainstream is not a rejection of the mainstream, but rather an attempt to deflect its censure. To be "uncategorizable," Mr. Goulian concludes, is to be "uncriticizable." He jokes that his mother won't be able to make it past the memoir's first paragraph, but she and all other relatives come off as superheroes (an extended riff that assesses Mr. Goulian's parent-induced traumas is imputed entirely, and unconvincingly, to a dead grandmother). Desire for approval from his parents metastasizes into a generalized "innate capacity for solicitousness." Unlike Alex Portnoy, Mr. Goulian has no complaint. 

When I was 20 years old, struggling with my sexuality, and often consulting with stuffed animals of my own, my therapist told me repeatedly that I was not betraying my parents by being happy at college. (The same therapist insisted I was using the whole "gay thing" as an excuse to avoid pursuing women.) She was wrong, of course. Growing up is a betrayal, and a necessary one, just as surely as mothers betray nurslings when they replace the human breasts with watery bottle tops. Freud was sensitive to this, but contemporary therapy tends to obscure the tension.

To devastate one's parents is perhaps the only permissible motive for writing a memoir. But as the personal essay boom is amplified by a family history boom (each more or less a consequence of the college admissions boom, which has sanctified the "personal statement") the norm is increasingly to write memoir as a parental love letter. This disfiguring of Oedipal rage into something intimate and shackling, the product of a generation that gets along too well with its parents, has literary consequences whose magnitude remains unclear. The personal consequences, at the extreme end--and Mr. Goulian's final piety is nothing if not extreme--can be quite dire: entrapment in a family romance so intense that it forecloses the possibility of any other.

Ms. Durra had been planning the bash for almost two years. Perhaps it deserves a title of its own. Here are a few tries:

The Harlem-Hailing Nigerian Bop Bands Are Still Alive! An afrobeat outfit uprooted for the night from its residency at St. Nick’s Pub on 148th Street shook maracas and sawed violins and pitter-pattered on bongos. St. Nick’s makes an appearance in the movie, as one of the many spots frequented by Asya and friends. Bourgeois émigrés embracing the Djembe: still alive!

The Pantsuit-Wearing Glammy Auteurs Are Still Alive! Ms. Durra—who is of Palestinian, Bosnian, Lebanese and Jordanian extraction—speaks with an accent like she went to Oxford, which she did. She was wearing an Yves Saint Laurent tuxedo and talked over the bouncy racket. “I just love giving parties, and I thought, ‘Oh, I have to have the band at the premiere party,’” Ms. Durra said. The West End pronunciation of the word “premiere”: still alive!

The Indie Film Royalty Cameos Are Still Alive! The film steals from Godard both its title—a line from La Chinoise—and its tricks. And Whit Stillman, one of the director’s clear points of reference, appears as a man in a nightclub dancing vigorously. Days of disco: still alive!

The Black Eyeshadow Goth Art Kids Are Still Alive! “Individualism is something New York is kind of lacking,” said Chadd Curry, a video self-portraitist. He had darkened his eyelids with soot and smeared Tin Man–colored silver paint elsewhere on his cheeks and face. “Everything is kind of the same,” he added. The woman with him referred to herself as a “photographess.” Noticeable lack of irony: still alive!

The Neighbors of Occultist Pandrogeny Icons Are Still Alive! The crowd’s punk relic contingent consisted of two women in leather jackets. They told The Observer a story about an adorable pandrogynous couple who decided to get breast implants. “Genesis P-Orridge was my landlord, and on Valentine’s Day when Jackie Breyer and Genesis got their, um, augmentation. I was the first person to hear about it.” The other chimed in: “Then we drank wine with them … ” “… We did more than that,” the first women corrected. Ah, the satanic charm of Mr. P-Orridge’s apartment, with its occultist paraphernalia and wooden swastikas. “When you find blood in the freezer, it’s scary,” she noted. Freaky raconteurs: still alive!

The Feline Wiles of French Ingénues Are Still Alive! “Is Elodie here yet?” asked Ms. Durra. She was referring to her star, Elodie Bouchez, who in a diva move withheld her presence until late in the evening. When she arrived, The Observer happened to be outside. Her dark eyes honed in on us, and dragging on a cigarette she mustered a nod and promised an interview. She later proved elusive. Makes sense—she’s married to Thomas Bangalter, half of masked duo Daft Punk. Robot wives: still alive!

The Sarong-Wearing Muscle-Hipped Lit Boys Are Still Alive! Jon-Jon Goulian, whose memoir The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt hits bookstores next month, arrived wearing a skintight belly shirt, sarong, high-heeled platform shoes. Literary androgyny: still alive!

But the event needed no new name. It was simply an extension of The Imperialists Are Still Alive! As the dance floor cleared out, DJ Rachel Chandler paused her iTunes and joined The Observer at a booth, where he was sitting with Mr. Goulian, Ms. Durra and a sprinkling of her friends. They ordered a final round at the bar, bummed cigarettes from the adjacent table and basically re-enacted any number of scenes from the film. Ms. Durra must have been content.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Trouble was, no one at FSG thought to make a guest list, so every little culture worker in New York showed up expecting to get in. And none of them came fashionably late: the party officially started at 8 p.m., and according to several attendees there was a line stretching around the corner by 8:30.

FSG editor Lorin Stein, one of the evening's organizers, started bracing himself for an overcapacity crowd early in the day. "This is going to the most chaotic fucking book party ever thrown," Mr. Stein wrote in an e-mail. "You can put that in the bank. It will make all other book parties look like fucking well-oiled teutonic machines; and it will furthermore raise the question why it should be in the least bit difficult to establish and preserve a *guest list* like every other fucking publisher, in the history of time, who ever put together a party to launch a book. Something which simply DID NOT OCCUR TO ME. Because I AM AN IDIOT."

Mr. Stein told Media Mob this morning that he and a few assistants went outside when they realized how long the line was and sold copies of 2666 to the people waiting. "It was awkward seeing friends whom one couldn't let in," Mr. Stein said. "There was a delegation from Media Bistro who got very annoyed. I tried to help, but I think it was too late."

He said also: "Apparently some kids kept asking where Bolano was. They wanted to meet him. Which is rather sweet, no?"

Related: Jonathan Lethem apparently felt old while he was standing in line. Same with the literary agent Elyse Cheney, who you can see on the left in the photo above.

Also in the photo: Jon-Jon Goulian, who all but disappeared from public life earlier this year when Random House agreed to pay him lots of money to write a memoir. He's the one with the tattoos and the sunglasses on the right, next to all the ladies.

Executive editor Kate Medina acquired the book in a preempt; literary agents Edward Orloff and Sarah Chalfant of The Wylie Agency, who submitted the proposal to several houses around town before receiving Ms. Medina's offer, brokered the deal.

Mr. Orloff said Mr. Goulian's book is tentatively titled The Man In the Gray Flannel Skirt: A Memoir Of Androgyny, presumably a reference to his days as a cross-dresser.

Though he hails from La Jolla, Calif. and looks more like a street-tough surfer than a member of New York's delicate and droopy intelligentsia-in-training, Mr. Goulian's menacing tattoos, skin-tight tanktops, and frenetic manner have made him one of the most recognizable unknowns in New York letters. And although he has never published a book and has been more or less unemployed since he left the New York Review in 2005, he has achieved nothing short of iconic status in the publishing community here.

Mr. Goulian--who has a law degree from N.Y.U. and is the grandson of the pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook!--would not comment on the book or his contract with Random House, saying that he has not finished writing it yet.

Mr. Silvers, whom Mr. Goulian worked for at the New York Review from 2001 until 2005, was not aware of his former assistant's book deal when reached by phone this afternoon.

"Jon-Jon was one of the most brilliant people who ever worked here," he said. "He had tremendous energy and curiosity and also analytic ability. I was sad when he left. He said he was going off to write a book."