Mourning Julia Allison

Here is the Julia Allison post I've been resisting for months, illustrated with a photo of her cute dog. Back in the dark days of November 2006, I wrote a Gawker post entitled "Field Guide: Julia Allison." The post was written at Nick Denton's vehement insistence, but he immediately kvetched in the comments that my depiction of Julia as an obsessive attention-seeker was pointless because, duh, that's what she does. Of course, now Nick himself makes fun of Julia's self-promotion mania, mocking her branded birthday party and  agreeing (with Julia, and with me from 2006) that she really should be more discreet. Julia herself still complains about the "Field Guide," since it repeated (multiply sourced) anecdotes about instances where her famous flirtatiousness may have crossed (or blurred) a line. She even brought it up during this past January's "liveblog" clusterfuck on Gawker:

When Gawker did the "field guide" to me, which accused me, amongst other things, of being a hussy who steals women's husbands, I cried all day.

And then, a few comments later, Julia followed her usual form of inadvertent reflexive self-analysis:

I think it's fairly obvious that the comments which hurt the most are those which hit closest to the truth.

Julia asked several people (me included, long after could I do anything about it) to remove the "Field Guide" because of its prominence in Google searches on her name.  Still in the top 10 apparently.  But given all the abuse she's endured in the past three months, Julia must be longing for the relatively genteel days of the "Field Guide." And now she's passed another blogging milestone and formally blogged about her decision to quit blogging.

I actually don't wish Julia Allison ill ... never did. When writing the "Field Guide" I talked to perhaps a dozen of her friends and associates, and that was a pretty representative number back then; she was nowhere near as well known. In fact, shortly before the "Field Guide," I asked then-new Gawker bloggers Doree Shafrir and Emily Gould to stop posting about Julia (and her then-sidekick Brooke Parkhurst) quite so much. But I omitted  four or five salacious stories from the "Field Guide" because they were vague, unconfirmable, or transparently motivated by the animus of the teller. I didn't mention these omissions to Nick Denton of course, because by then I'd learned he has no problem floating anything provocative, regardless of provenance or propriety. (Later at Valleywag he prodded me to consistently refer to a Silicon Valley venture capitalist as a Nazi aficionado because of the guy's hobby of launching German WWII rocket models).

Julia's not stupid nor vacuous nor untalented. And of course she's attractive. But her super-power is that she's super-friendly. She's totally disarming in person, which is how she's leveraged most everything she's ever done. Many of those who hissed hair-raising character assassinations into my ear when I wrote the "Field Guide" can now be seen cheerfully sharing a party photo with Julia while commenting how much they just like her, darn it all. And I generally agree she's a nice gal who just can't seem to learn from her mistakes. I don't think she's nearly as interesting nor as contemptible as most people who write about her, but I never wanted to make her cry.