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Nerve.com
What were the challenges of being a Nerve editor?
Em: As new editors and interns came into the office, they had to figure out where they crossed the line. Obviously, when you're discussing a new story idea or you're discussing a new trend, you might share a little bit of personal experience, like, "Oh, I know a ton of friends who are into this thing, we should totally write about this." But you could definitely see new editors not realizing that just because we're discussing a story idea on anal sex doesn't mean we want to hear about the anal sex you had with your partner the previous night.
Especially as the years went on and the interns started to be people who had their own blogs about their sex lives or starred in their own porn — the generation below us who were just so much more comfortable with putting themselves out there on the internet and just had completely different notions of public and private material. Some of the interns definitely made me feel like a prude sometimes.
Lo: When I'd meet people outside of Nerve, they would misinterpret how comfortable you were talking about sex. Everything from guys just being really crass to people assuming you're really sexual and had no inhibitions. There was a lot of pressure to perform when you started dating someone.
Em: The craziest job-related thing happened when I was at a bar in the East Village. This guy was chatting away next to me, and kind of hitting on me. He found out I worked at Nerve and was really into that. At one point I went to stand in line for the bathroom. He comes up to me and he said, "I always felt like I was smaller than average. I was wondering if you could give me an evaluation." And he started to unzip his fly right there! I just started to run away, and he was chasing after me, saying, "But you're a professional! You said you do this for a living!" I don't know if that was his pickup line, or if he really did think he was smaller than average, but he thought it was totally acceptable to ask me to check out the size of his dick.
Any interesting interactions with authors?
Lo: I edited J.T. Leroy for awhile, and it was fascinating. I would talk to him on the phone — I don't know what to call
" We started by researching what else was out there, including going on some really early, really bad personals dates."
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it, him, her — and we would go over the stories. We even did a chat where I was on the phone with him and I transcribed for him, because he said he couldn't type. It was funny to watch the phenomenon around him. That was amazing currency in the literary world, to say that J.T. knew you and liked you, even though most people knew something was off and weird.
Em: We talked in an editorial meeting about doing a story on whether J.T. was real or not. We dug around a little bit. This was years before that piece in New York magazine came out. All of us at the office suspected that J.T. wasn't real. I don't know why we didn't follow it through. It never went anywhere.
Lo: A couple years later, after I had stopped working at Nerve, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things came out. There was an art-gallery opening for it. This is when [Laura Albert] finally realized she had to get someone to be the face of J.T., so the cousin or whatever, the relative, started making public appearances. This was the first time I had an opportunity to see him in person, so I went. There was a long line, and I decided to wait and introduce myself. I was in the acknowledgments of one of his books. So I was like, "Okay, so let's finally meet."
So I got up there and introduced myself: "Hi, it's Lorelei. Remember me? From Nerve?" And she had the big sunglasses on, the cousin or whatever, and there was this moment of no recognition. In an instant, I knew: this is not the person I talked to on the phone. I hate to say it, but part of me was really impressed.
What role did you have in the start of Nerve Personals?
Lo: We came up with the questionnaire.
Em: We started by researching what else was out there, including going on some really early, really bad personals dates. We went out on a couple of Swoon dates to see how the whole system works. We really put ourselves out there for Nerve.
Lo: Wasn't there a point where you had a date on one end of the bar, and I had one on the other end?
Em: Yeah. And I remember being out on the fire escape, writing the questions during our smoke breaks.
Was it your idea to do online personals? At the time, that was not a thing people were really doing.
Em: No, that was Rufus' idea. At the time, I definitely remember thinking, "Oh my God, personals are so cheesy." Rufus said — and it was an amazing vision — "No, Nerve can make personals cool." The concept of personals being cool was so far in the future at that point.
Lo. But it worked. And I think we took the voice of the Nerve office — not necessarily the Nerve literary magazine, but the Nerve office — and applied it to the personals.
I think that's why people took to it.
What about the print magazine?
Lo: I feel totally disconnected from the print magazine. NerveCenter was the bastard child that no one took seriously. At that point, the focus was on the print magazine because that was just so much more —
Em: Cool.
Lo: — noble and honorable. And it was funny because NerveCenter and Personals did so well, and the magazine didn't really work out, but so much money went into the print magazine. New people came in, experienced people. The print magazine was the golden child that got special treatment. Like the little princess in Welcome to the Dollhouse. We were the Weiner Dog for a while. And then that, you know, changed.
Em: But there were definitely aspects of NerveCenter that were a bad idea. It wasn't all lucrative from the start.
Em: We would do a weekly chat where we would give out sex advice. We were definitely the wrong people to be doing that. It's like people in a bar thinking that they can talk to you a certain way because you work at a sex magazine, and multiply that by 100,000 because of what people feel comfortable saying in an anonymous online chat.
But we did some fun chats. We did one with Justine Frischmann from Elastica. She came to the office, and we were just completely starstruck.
Lo: But then some porn star came in, who sadly confirmed all of our stereotypes about porn stars. We had to do the typing for her, and she just didn't understand all the questions.
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