Miss Media

Last night I went to a Mediabistro-sponsored book party for Lynn Harris, aka "Breakup Girl," who's just published her first novel, Miss Media, through iUniverse. It's a not-so-thinly veiled fictionalization of her Big Media experiences, and the four or five scenes she read for an enthusiastic audience were pretty effective, I thought. The first-person narration could have used a bit of pruning, perhaps, but that might be just a sensibility quibble--I'm of the "less thinking aloud, more action" prose school myself. On a less ambivalent tack, as someone who went through the new media grinder myself, I found her depiction of the scene (and the creeping corporitization of startups) authentic, even when jacked up for satirical purposes, and for that alone I'd recommend checking this out for yourself.