TBR: I’m Not The New Me
Today’s book is I’m Not The New Me, by Wendy McClure. It’s the story of her popular weightloss blog (although she doesn’t call it that) Pound and how it affected her life. (The link is valid — but McClure is mostly blogging about the book now. She also writes for Television Without Pity.) I have to admit that I had never heard of Pound before I picked up the book, but I had seen the infamous 1974 Weight Watchers Recipe Cards that she found and scanned. (If you haven’t seen them, check them out. They’re scary.)
The book is partially about body image and weight loss, partially about the weirdness of interacting with people who think they know you because they read your site. As the title suggests, McClure didn’t really feel like the success story her readers were looking for, and worried that she was letting them down when she plateaued short of her goal. The book is a quick read, interesting without being profound, amusing without ever being hysterically funny.
It made me think a bit about the different genres of blogging. Some of them — weight loss blogs, race training blogs, infertility blogs, and some illness blogs come to mind — are organized around a specific goal and therefore have, if you will, a narrative arc that draws the reader in. Whereas other blogs — political blogs, most parenting blogs, most craft blogs — meander around a theme or themes. You read them because you enjoy the writing, are interested in the topic, or care about the person, but there’s not the "what happens next" hook to keep you coming back.
May 17th, 2005 at 10:22 pm
Yup, that narrative arc is important for a lot of people. After our daughter came home, my hits really dropped off. But I kinda think more like it consolidated to the people who were reading me for me and not for the plot line!
May 18th, 2005 at 1:31 pm
I disagree: there is narrative to the personal blogs (most, I suspect, though not all), even if it’s less directly focussed than in the goal-oriented blogs, and of a somewhat different sort.
May 19th, 2005 at 3:26 pm
For me the hook is the personality. Looking through the blogs I read right now, I read many “topical” ones such as a few infertility blogs, many parenting, many technical, a couple political… but the ones I go to first in my rss reader are the ones that have a personality behind them that I gel with – or disagree with so strongly that I want to see what I can disagree with next 😉