Sarah nodded. I had the sense of clearing some invisible hurdle, passing a quiz I hadn’t known I’d taken. Sarah had moved to New York from Ohio, had gotten a job in a coffee shop and given herself a year to make it as a writer. When we met, she’d started making a decent amount of money from the ads on her blog. Her dream was to start a bigger, more comprehensive, less sex-centric site. “Fashion, food, magazines, marriage, children, all that,” she’d rattled off, before giving the waiter our order—moussaka, grilled lamb, stuffed grape leaves, and more warm pita. “I’ll write about sex, of course, but I’ll need someone to cover marriage and motherhood.” Throughout the lunch we discussed design and ad buys, ideas, headlines, and titles. By the time dessert arrived, Sarah suggested I give the column a shot and try to write a few blog posts.
“Are you sure you don’t want someone with more experience?” I’d asked. I’d never thought of myself as a writer. Dave was the writer; I was a graphics-and-images girl. But we could certainly use the extra money. And the truth was that staying at home with a baby—now a toddler—did not fulfill me the way working at the paper once had. With work, there was a sense of completion. You’d start to lay out a page, or create graphics, or embed just the right video clip in an article about the city’s failing schools, and eventually, after editing and feedback and sometimes starting over again, you’d be done. With motherhood and marriage there was no finish line, no hour or day or year when you got to say you were through. Life just went on and on, endless and formless, with no performance evaluation, no raises or feedback or two weeks’ vacation. I thought that maybe working for money again could give me back that sense of satisfaction I’d once gotten from a job well done . . . or even just done.
“How is this website going to be different from the women’s websites that are already out there?” I had asked. Sarah, who’d clearly been waiting for that question, launched into her answer, about tone and content and reader engagement. I nibbled a stuffed grape leaf and thought about how lucky I was—how without my even trying, a solution for my worries had landed, like a gift-wrapped box dropped out of a window, right in my lap.
Ladiesroom.com had launched six weeks after my interview, finding its niche in the online world—and its advertisers—faster than either of us could have expected. Four months after its launch, the site was acquired by Foley Media, a bigger company looking to expand its brand. I was working harder than I had at the Examiner, pulling my first all-nighters since college, powering through the next day on espresso and a twenty-minute nap, engaging each day with the people who commented on my posts. And now the Wall Street Journal had decided we were, in a sense, newsworthy.
“Call me when you’ve read it,” Sarah said. I made some kind of affirmative noise and then turned on Dave’s laptop and found the story. I scrolled through their recap of our success, the quotes that captured Sarah’s and my funny banter, and the claims from critics who questioned our experience and asked whether our motives were self-promotional. Beneath the words LIVING OUT LOUD, I found my photograph. “Oh, God,” I groaned. I’d worn a pink jersey dress and nude heels, and Sarah and I had posed on Sarah’s desk, in front of her floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Bryant Park. When the shot had been set up, I’d thought we looked nice. Seeing the picture now, all I could think was Before and After. Way, Way Before and After. Worst of all, the caption underneath read “SEXY MAMAS: Mom-bloggers Allison Weiss and Sarah Lai at play in Manhattan.” Never mind that I hardly looked sexy, and Sarah wasn’t a mom.
Ah, well. At least we looked reasonably professional. The photographer, who’d clearly been expecting the online version of Girls Gone Wild, had been disappointed to find ladies in business clothes, one of whom was almost forty, with nary a tattoo in sight (Sarah had a few—“just not,” as she put it, “where the judge can see them”). He had not-so-subtly pushed me toward the edge or the back of the shots, while trying to get Sarah to bend over her desk, or to stand with her hands on her knees and wave her bottom in front of her laptop—“so it’s, you know, sex and the Internet.” When she refused, and also politely turned down his offer to shoot her posing with a whip, he’d asked us to have an edible-body-paint fight (thanks but no thanks). Finally, he asked if we would at least stand side by side. “And can you kind of touch each other?”
We’d declined but agreed to play catch with the Egg, a vibrator designed to look like a retro kitchen timer that Sarah had reviewed in her monthly sex-toy roundup.