The gossip columnist gets gossiped about, but denies everything.

In case you're an anonymous blogger hoping to quit your real job to write a novel, the Title Scorer has an algorithm to rate the marketability of your title.

This so-called attorney work-life calculator is completely unrealistic because it only has entries for Monday through Friday.

One ends up billing a lot of hours by having litigation (or deal-closing) emergencies requiring occasional (or, worse, frequent) 18-hour days rather than a constant consistent drumbeat of work. It's those 80-100-hour weeks spent in trial or preparing and taking series of depositions that get one's hours up.

Since I'm getting so many google hits for the Opinionista identity and forthcoming New York Observer story: it's Melissa Lafsky, Dartmouth '00/Virginia '04, who has already quit her job in advance of the book deal about fifteen months in, and less than a year after she took the February 2005 New York bar (did she fail the summer 2004 version?); by the summertime, she had already checked out. Plus she was at a branch office of Littler Mendelson, which is hardly a sweatshop, not to mention only has fourteen attorneys in New York—seven men and seven women. Which makes her blog not much less fictional than the Jeremy Blachman effort, though it had somewhat more verisimilitude. But any especially-entertaining stories about giant summer associate events or office Christmas parties and lecherous senior partners can now be safely dismissed as fictional. And I'd be stunned if Lafsky ever billed 2000 hours in a year, much less the 2400 or so real New York associates do.

It is much easier to give up a six-digit job for a speculative writing career if one's father is a (Dartmouth '71) gastroenterologist. And (if a Gawker comment is to be believed) one's boyfriend's father is a millionaire sports executive. (Update: Gawker commenter not to be believed. You can't believe everything you read on the Internet? Go figure.) And if one paid in-state tuition for law school. It will be interesting to see if the real flesh-and-blood Lafsky can hold the same attention as the imaginary Opinionista. I, for one, find it much less appealing to know that Lafsky seems never to have given a legal career any serious thought; her tale isn't one of disillusionment, but of Generation-Y silver-spoon "It-Sucks-To-Be-Me" shallow cynicism.

It's "creative non-fiction" all over again. I, for one, call shenanigans. (Update: Lafsky appears to have forgotten the power of Google cache. Here's her Ogre and Queen Bee posts, which she told the Observer she deleted because they were too close to reality. Oops.)

There's always a poll out that show "Unnamed Democratic Candidate" beating some specific Republican incumbent; that's because people project onto the tabula rasa their own preferences for what the candidate will look like, with the hard-lefties imagining a Dean while others fantasize about a Clinton or Gore or Lieberman or Kennedy. So when the real-life candidate is named, it's inevitable that some percentage of those people are going to be disappointed that the candidate differs from their projections. The comments section of Opinionistas always assumed some top-tier firm and an Ivy League law schooler telling true (or only slightly modified) stories. That fantasy got a lot more attention than "first-year labor lawyer with no meaningful legal experience writing fiction" would have. How many readers are going to follow Lafsky to the new URL?

In contrast, Article III Groupie was always an obvious caricature, and had underlying entertainment and informational value that would've survived David Lat's unmasking (had he been allowed to moonlight). The fictional entity has value beyond the suspension of disbelief in the narrator's existence, which isn't the case for a poorly-written "Million Little Pieces."

(Update: Confidential to W.: I knew I wasn't the only one who made the James Frey connection.)

From Salinger v. Random House:

Salinger, distressed that [the 18-year-old] Oona O'Neill, whom he had dated, had married [the 54-year-old] Charlie Chaplin, expressed his disapproval of the marriage in this satirical invention of his imagination:

I can see them at home evenings. Chaplin squatting grey and nude, atop his chiffonier, swinging his thyroid around his head by his bamboo cane, like a dead rat. Oona in an aquamarine gown, applauding madly from the bathroom. Agnes (her mother) in a Jantzen bathing suit, passing between them with cocktails. I'm facetious, but I'm sorry. Sorry for anyone with a profile as young and lovely as Oona's.

This seems ironic, given Salinger's later affair with the teenage Joyce Maynard.

[JT] Leroy's tale was harrowing in its details and uplifting in its arc. He was a young truck-stop prostitute who had escaped rural West Virginia for the dismal life of a homeless San Francisco drug addict. Rescued as a young teenager by a couple named Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop and treated by a psychologist, he was able to turn his terrible youth into a thriving career as a writer. JT Leroy has published three critically acclaimed works of fiction noted for their stark portrayal of child prostitution and drug use.

Along the way Mr. Leroy gained the friendship and trust of celebrities and noted writers, who supported his career financially and offered him emotional support when he declared that he was infected with H.I.V. Sales were good, and his books were published around the world. Shy and reclusive, Mr. Leroy, now 25, appeared in public often disguised beneath a wig and sunglasses.

But the young man in the wig and sunglasses, it turns out, is not a man at all. The public role of JT Leroy is played by Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey Knoop's half sister, who is in her mid-20's.

Of course, if one values fiction for its sensational relationship to the "real life" of its author rather than for the quality of its writing, this is a natural consequence. (Those who signed "Anonymous Lawyer" to a book deal made the mistake of confusing interest in the former with interest in the latter. Now that we know (as oppose to suspect) Anonymous Lawyer is neither anonymous nor a lawyer, there's no point to the blog. Blachman's book might work, but it will have to do so on its own merit, which the original blog gave no evidence of. Opinionista will suffer the same problem when she admits that most of her stories are composites at best.)

Speaking both of David Lat and romans à clef, Christopher Buckley's flirtatious review of "Dog Days" (the first good review I've seen) features a picture of Wonkette in a nice stripy shirt.

Don't open a coffee-shop (via Palmer). Which seemed like a pretty obvious truism to me, as is the concept that "If you work at a coffee-shop to save yourself the cost of hiring an $8/hour employee, you're saying your time is worth $8/hour." (OK, because of the X factor of principal-agent friction, slightly higher. But.) If you are still inclined to open a coffee-shop, read The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, which my cousin Ben got me for Hanukkah, and which does a nice job of applying David Ricardo to the theory of coffee-shops, and on my Orange Line commuting route to Farrugut West, to boot. You can get some sense of it from this cannibalizing essay on Slate.