Kate Zambreno

Mimi Smartypants is going to hate this article. Well, not hate exactly, she's just going to think it's completely inane that anyone would want to read a profile of her. And although she relented, albeit reluctantly, to being photographed (surprising, considering besides a few recent readings, none of the fans of her personal weblog know what she looks like and she's an admitted "freak about anonymity"), we already have a pretty good idea how she really feels about it.

Just read the entry dated April 15, at 1:05pm, under "Mimi's Meta Corner":

"The photo shoot was weird because part of it took place on the street, in front of Filter, and at one point they wanted a shot of me from the back. So I got to stand on the street looking casual while cute girls crouched down behind me and fiddled with camera lenses. Hi, my name is Mimi and I'm a professional booty model."

This is not to say that Mimi is all negative. (Her web alias is a childhood nickname. We're not going to reveal her real name, even though it slipped out in an interview with a U.K. newspaper, the one that she got tipsy during--for more on that, read below.) Her daily online diary that's read by up to 2000 people a day, that she's kept since 1999 on the Internet site Diaryland ( http://smartypants.diaryland.com), devotes equal space to both ranting about her pet peeves and ruminating rhapsodic about her passions in her caffeine-pumped river of consciousness.

Some recent Mimi turn-ons: Archer Prewitt; drinking; misspelled street signs like "We Sale Cigarettes"; a medieval cookbook with instructions of how to cram a swan; her new black tulle skirt that she wears for the interview (she later posts, "It has a PETTICOAT. Not a giant frothy Cyndi Lauper petticoat, just this little layer of netting that makes the skirt stand out from my body and OH MY GOD THE HOTNESS"). And, of course, the newest object of lyricism dominating her diary entries, "my constant obsession, my one-note diary theme, my entire ball of wax," her 14-month-old daughter, Nora (her real name, one of the non-pseudonyms on the site) that she and her husband adopted from China six months ago. Nora's baby pictures are often posted on the site along with the constant marveling of the new mom, Mimi Smartypants style: "I would so be Google-stalking her if she didn't live in my house and wasn't fourteen months old."

Some recent things subjected to Mimi's snark, or venom, or worse: crazy bus people; Ally Sheedy's character on "The Breakfast Club," ("a movie I hate anyway for its fascist retrograde message"); the Sun-Times weather word, especially when "sticky" is repeated twice in August ("I got all irate. I'm like, do you think we're not paying attention to this?"); Insecure Hipster Fashion Girls ("I. Do. Not. Care. What. You. Look. Like."); St. Patrick's Day; birth-control placebos (It seems to imply that "you are such a robot, a zombie, a brain-dead creature of habit, a big dumb instinctual animal, that you cannot remember to NOT take a pill for one week, even with the helpful mnemonic device of the vaginal bleeding, thus here are some sugar pills, there is no need to vary your routine one iota, you sweet stupid girl."); that guy who smiled at her on the street because they both had iPods ("Okay dude, we are iPod buddies. Whatever."); the book. The "dead-tree" version, as she's been known to dismiss it, "The World According to Mimi Smartypants," entries from her blog packaged in book form, published by HarperCollins U.K. in February with a version to hit the States within the year.

So how did the world's most unwilling author garner a book deal? Publishers have recently been courting bloggers in the hope of recruiting the Next Big Thing writer. One day the 32-year-old editor got an email from a woman alleging she's from the U.K. HarperCollins. "For all I know she cleans the toilets at HarperCollins," says Mimi. She turned out to be an acquisitions editor, and they offered her a fairly healthy advance to turn selections of her diary entries into a book. Mimi at first argued with her. "I was like, 'Okay, but why? It just seems kind of strange. It's not a book, it's a website, and who would read such a thing?' Eventually she was just like, 'Why don't you let us sell the book,'" Mimi starts laughing, "'and not worry about its target audience and all this other sort of stuff.' And I was like, `I guess you're right.' I really almost said no to the whole thing. I think it's gay, in the sixth-grade sense of the word."

Much humor was mined on her site from the entire drama, including her own insecurities about selling out and not being punk rock enough to refuse a book deal. Especially regarding the cover. Not surprisingly, HarperCollins chose to package their Mimi Smartypants as a Chicago party-girl version of that British icon of diaristic neurosis, Bridget Jones, and went with the typical chick-lit cliché on the cover, teetering legs held up by their Manolos. Mimi retells the conversation she had with someone at the publishing company regarding her discomfort with the original cover. "I was just saying to a friend of mine, 'I don't care what it looks like as long as it's not legs and feet,' and she sends me an email with an attachment and I open it up and there's legs and feet." At first she localized her anxiety towards the specific types of shoes the girly girl was wearing on the cover, "zebra-striped, stiletto-heeled sandals that were all crazy, all fashion girl."

When the rep called to see what she thought, Mimi tried to be delicate. "I was like, 'I just think it's played out. I just see it all the time.' And she was like, 'Oh, it's very fresh over here in the U.K.' And I'm like `O-kay. The shoes! I just wouldn't wear those shoes, I say, and I know, like, you're trying to appeal to...' I just kept on apologizing and digging myself deeper. And she's like, 'Well, we just thought they were fun shoes, that you'd got to a bar in.' And I'm like, 'Not in Chicago,'" Mimi cracks up, laughing. "'Not in the bars I go to. Something horrible would probably land on your foot.' And she said, 'What kind of shoes would you like?' And I was just about to answer, and she said, 'Because we can't have stompy Doc Martens.' I was thinking, 'Oh, I was probably going to say something like stompy Doc Martens.'" Eventually they reached a compromise: red and pink clunky heels. "They're kind of goofy, they're not too bad," says Mimi.

The paperback, which comes out in the U.K. in August, has "an equally terrible cover," she says. "It's kind of like a skinny, stylized silhouette of a Cosmo girl." Mimi finds this marketing mostly amusing. "I think it's counterproductive in this way because I wouldn't pick up my own book if I saw it on the table because of the cover. And I think someone who picks it up because of the cover would be disappointed in what they found," she giggles.

She's trying to get over her issues with the book. Recently she rationalized online, "I mean, it's a book. Of stuff I wrote. I'm not shilling for McDonald's or anything." And the cover's no big deal either. "I kind of got over it because I think that I didn't like slave over this novel, and then try to shop it around, and get the best deal and all that. It just kind of happened out of the blue. I figure that anything at this point is just kind of a free ride. Whatever they've got to do, it doesn't hurt me personally. It's like, 'Eh, whatever.'"

There can be possible perks to the whole publishing biz. For example, in the contract she signed with HarperCollins, there's a clause typical in such contracts stipulating the possibility of TV, movies...action figures. "I'm typing HarperCollins like, 'Dude, can we have action figures?'" laughs Mimi.

The book contains classic Mimi material, pre-mommy. "It's a lot of funny stuff that happened in bars and weird work things." The material in the book took place a while ago. "That stuff's so done! I'm still doing the website, all that stuff that's published now in the book form is so old to me." In fact, if she were to pitch another book, which is a definite maybe, it might be a parenting guide done in Mimi Smartypants style, since parenting guides are her new obsession. "Nora's not in the first one, and she's such a big part of the thing now that I kind of feel that's weird. Which would be a terrible reason to write a book," she laughs. "'Here, honey, you can be in your own book.'"

Mimi almost never rereads her posts, which is one of the reasons this whole book thing makes her uncomfortable. "Really, it's literally having your diary published, so I mean, you've gone back and read old diary entries and been like, 'Oh, man. I can't believe I was all worried or upset about that, or thinking about that.'" She puts it a little stronger in an entry dated February 8:

"I never read myself because: my god. There is really no need to rehash last week or last month or last year or the LAST FOUR FREAKING YEARS of jittery online self-scrutiny, self-promotion, self-revelation, and plain old self-abuse (in the Victorian, masturbatory sense.) Nearly every time I have tried to read old diaries it's been cringeworthy, except when it's funny, like my diary entry from March 30, 1981, when I was all of nine years old and writing in a Paddington Bear diary with a tiny key and everything. With a strange capitalization style, it says: The President was Shot Today. Then I skipped a line and wrote: WHAT A DAY!!!!"

Mimi didn't start the diary as a regular writing assignment, she says, although she often references online the very writerly compulsion to hit one thousand words each entry. "No," she frowns. "I don't know why I started it. It was something to do, I guess. I liked the freedom of it. It wasn't 'for publication,' it wasn't serious capital-W writing." That's a distinction she makes often in conversation--she's not a serious "Writer," but sometimes she contradicts this instance. "I went through phrases of thinking I was going to do the whole write books thing, and write for publication and all that. I'm kind of over that," she says. "I don't know. I just think that's a game I don't want to get into. I love journaling. Everyone's got that fantasy that when you die your notebooks are published, "The Collected Writings of Whatever." So, there's a little bit of that."

Online and in person she downplays her site as a "dashed-off, unserious webspace." She describes the type of writing she does on it like writing a long email to a friend. "There's always that temptation to start thinking, 'Oh my God, I have this audience that I have to write for' and everything," she says. "And it shouldn't be like that. It should just be--fun. The web is kind of unserious. You can go back and change stuff. It's a whole different way to publish. It's not permanent, stuff goes away without warning."

"I get the sense that she could write the hell out of anything she wanted," says Wendy McClure, a 33-year-old, Chicago-based blogger whose site exploring body image and other weight-related issues, Pound (poundy.com) eventually scored her a book deal. "But you get the feeling that she's not taking the whole endeavor too seriously and I think at this point in time with the whole blogging community that's really important. Blogs are getting bigger and bigger, and there's a lots of things that are getting kind of goofy, like award ceremonies. It's sort of inevitable. When you're writing, and your readership reaches a certain level, after a while people will start to think of themselves as having a certain stature." Not Mimi. "I'm pretty cynical about the whole thing. There's nothing to be proud of here. I wrote a book by accident. How dumb is that?"

One of the most high-profile anonymous bloggers is Belle de Jour, a London-based call girl who recently scored a big-bucks book deal that has British tabloids tearing their hair out over trying to discover her exact identity, even attempting to match her prose style with that of other possible suspects. There's also that sort of intrigue surrounding Mimi Smartypants, if not more low-key. In February the local Chicago webzine Gapers' Block organized with SPEC Chicago (the Self-Publishers Event Council of Chicago) a reading of local bloggers at Uncle Fun, an event covered by the local media. McClure says that many people showed up curious to catch a glimpse of both Mimi and Sour Bob, another pseudonymous blogger who doesn't have a picture on his site. "I had a friend of mine who didn't make it to the first reading. She even said, 'I'm not sure I want to know what Mimi Smartypants looks like,'" says McClure.

Mimi's not as uptight about anonymity since, well, basically she has no choice, what with the U.K. media tour she did for the book. (For this interview, she teased, "I won't get drunk this time," referencing an interview for the Sunday Telegraph in which the reporter was late "and a glass of wine turned into a bottle of wine.") Then the local CBS station wanted to do a piece on her, which she grudgingly relented to. "I was like, 'Dude, I don't want to do TV. It just seems so retarded.'"

"It's kind of falling apart, isn't it, since I was on TV?" says Mimi. At first she was publicity-shy, fearing a "Harriet the Spy"-esque backlash, after the writer behind the popular blog dooce.com lost her job and alienated her family because of her snarky online posts. "I think that I care less now that I know it's going to be okay, even with the book and all that," she says. For a while she wanted to make a clear division between her "web life" and her "real life." Until the book came out, she had almost no real-life friends who knew about the web site. Her family in the northwest suburbs had no idea.

Her husband eventually found out. "He's not that voracious a reader of it," she shrugs. "He checks it once in a while, but he's not nuts about keeping up, which I think I would be with him." Now some of her friends read the site, and a few people at work know as well. She told her mother about it one week before the book came out, she says.

One of the issues she had to wrestle with this new public persona was whether her real-life or web-life name would go on the book. She stuck, obviously, with Mimi Smartypants. "It's more fun, this way, really." She laughs. "Very complicated issues of self and identity going on here."

(2004-04-22)

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