So yesterday afternoon I posted a blind item about a Gawker editor’s book proposal, figuring that I’d have time after keeping my various appointments to call her up, get an actual confirmation, and write something more up. No such luck: Leon Neyfakh over at the Observer kept getting pinged by people wanting to know if he knew who it was, so he started digging into the story, and that’s how he wound up IMing with Sheila McClear about Every Day I Know Less and Less: Postcards From the New Times Square, which will detail “her time spent working in Times Square as a peep show girl” in 2006 and early 2007. What she told Neyfakh: “I got interested in it— obviously, it’s a fascinating and weird milieu—and my book is about that experience!”
The “narrative of modern life on the fringe of society in New York” McClear describes in her query letter to prospective agents does sound like it has potential—”documenting life inside the peeps and their history” sounds sort of like a cross between Diablo Cody and Luc Sante, or maybe Herbert Asbury. (Actually, you know who would probably dig this, given McClear’s labor background? Carol Queen.) I just hope that taking down her pseudonymous blog, which had been updated as recently as last week, is about keeping the material under wraps before it sells than about covering her tracks once her proposal became public. A look through the cached Google pages, taking into account the rough-draft nature of the blogosphere, shows significant promise, and I imagine either Neyfakh or I will be writing about the sale soon enough. After all, editors are already trying to get hold of McClear’s pages after reading both items yesterday; at this rate, she might land an editor before she finds an agent…