Please E-Mail Your Mother

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• Letters to the Editor
  December 13, 2006

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• Jessica Grose
• Doree Shafrir
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We’ve all been there: at work, at the computer, feverishly knocking out e-mails, using and appreciating proper netiquette, pausing only for sips of coffee or chomps from a King Size, working, typing, working, when something like this comes through: “How do you take meth? Do you smoke it, eat it, inject it, or inhale it? Mom.” Or this: “Interesting picture of you on your my spacepage. So how long have you smoked pot???????????//.” Or perhaps this: “This is the best article I have seen on the risks associated with oral sex and how to reduce them. I had never heard of a dental dam before. Please do read this. Love, Mom.” Yes, it’s the mom e-mail, a warm, sometimes suffocating breath of maternal air to counter the sanity of the workplace. All the above lines are true; they were sent, received, and excitedly forwarded to the editors of www.postcardsfromyomomma.com, who just as excitedly complied them into the book, Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages from Home, which was just as excitedly picked up and released by Hyperion. The authors, Gawker alum and The New York Observer’s Doree Shafrir and Jezebel’s Jessica Grose, hit one of the many jackpots of the blog-to-book era, managing a turnaround of just one year from first post to first book for sale. It’s basically a Mother’s Day book — two stars of the Gawker empire released a Mother’s Day book — with a sweetly yellow, daily-affirmations–like cover, and good-natured mom ribbing instead of cement-truck fameball smashing. It’s not as funny as the blog (print does that to Net sensations — it’ll do it to This Is Why You’re Fat, too), but your mom isn’t reading any blog.
Fri., April 17, 7 p.m., 2009