Wannabe Girl Writer vs. Mommy Blogger

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
February 2, 2014

So, this just happened: Someone contacted me, asking me to write about one of their clients. I turned them down, because — frankly — the aforementioned client isn’t a good fit for my column.

This someone, then proceeds to get defensive and says, “Oh, really? I thought you’d need stuff to write about and it’d be good for you since we usually don’t work with mommy bloggers.”

Wha? Did you just try to dismiss me as a mommy blogger?

First of all, I WISH I was a better mommy blogger, ‘cause I don’t have enough time to devote to my blog.

Second of all, would she have referred to a male journalist who also happens to have a blog as a daddy blogger? Hell to the no!

Third of all, I’ll do just fine without your client — who’s not an actual celebrity — seeing as how I write a celebrity column for one of the largest syndicates in the world. That’s right. I’m patting myself on the back here.

Yay! Me!

But this reminded me of an incident a long time ago when I was (relatively) young. I wrote a book about the New Kids on the Block (NKOTB). They were the One Direction of their time. The book, which was aimed at tweens and younger, did really really well. It peaked at No. 7 on the New York Times Bestseller list and gave my parents something to brag about.

Someone once asked if I was embarrassed of the book.

I said, “No, why would you ask that?”

And she said, “Because you never talk about it.”

Laughing, I said, “I don’t talk about it because it’s out of print. If it was still in stores, I would be promoting the heck out of it, ’cause book sales are a good thing.”

Anyhow, shortly after the book was released, my friends in Los Angeles called me. They told me that a writer had reviewed the book in one of the LA weeklies. He didn’t tell his readers that the book was for kids. His point of reviewing the book, basically, was to make fun of the book and me. In his review, he called me a “wannabe girl writer.”

Wannabe. Girl. Writer.

His comment was condescending on so many different levels. He chose to put me in my place by referring to me as a “girl,” when he knew full well that I was a grown woman. Would he have slammed a male author as a “wannabe boy writer?”

And regardless of whether he liked my writing or not, I was a published reporter.

Meh. In reality, the review didn’t impact my life in any way.

A couple decades passed. And then I received a message from that same reviewer. Only now, he was asking me to write about his new book (see the first comment below).

Huh.

I didn’t take him up on his offer. Was I being spiteful? No. Worse things than that have happened and I’ve still maintained professional relationships with those people, even though I don’t trust them any further than I could throw them.

However, this guy — who is doing quite well in his career — had written an incredibly xenophobic article that I found smarmy and repulsive. That, coupled with the fact that his book did nothing for me, was the reason I took a pass.

Also, I write primarily about celebrities. Now, I might’ve made an exception if he were a daddy blogger…

© 2014 Jae-Ha Kim | All Rights Reserved