Short version: what follows is about a piece in today’s NYT wherein a writer describes her nanny’s blog and how said blog eventually led to the nanny becoming the ex-nanny.

There is lot that one could comment on in the following piece in the NYT style section today: The New Nanny Diaries Are Online, but after reading it (and the response of the blogger in question, via Bitch, Ph.D.) but the one thing that strikes me above all else is the following: part of what upset Olen (the author of the NYT piece) was the fact that the nanny blogged about a fight she and her husband had in front of her (sans names, of course):

Looking at archived entries one afternoon, I read her reactions to an argument my husband and I had when she was in the house. “I heard a couple fighting within the confines of couples therapy-speak,” she wrote. “I wanted to say, smack him, bite her.”

It went on like that for three ghastly pages.

“I seethed,” she added.

Well so did I. But mostly I felt hurt. My issues, my problems, my compromises, my entire being seemed to be viewed by her as so much waste.

Now, I can understand why Olen was angry (although the blog entry struck me as an attempt at creative writing, sort of stream of consciousness poetry more than a recounting of an event), but since the only people who knew who the blogger was writing about was Olen and the blogger herself, it isn’t as if the blogger had publicly embarrassed Olen. However, that isn’t the thing that strikes me. What strikes me is that isn’t Olen doing to her former nanny what the nanny did to her (yet on a far, far larger scale)?

That is to say, she is writing about another person (with said persons being mostly anonymous to the reader of the essay) and using her experience with that person as the basis of an essay meant for public consumption. What, exactly, is the real difference?

Now, I understand the the fight that the nanny blogged about was a private event (although not entirely, since the Olens apparently fought in front of the nanny), and the blog that Olen wrote about was public, but in relative terms, between what I think was a fairly low-readership blog v. the NYT is a bigger leap than is private conversation to a blog. Further, Olen’s piece contains far, far more details that about the nanny than the nanny’s blog does about Olen’s fight.

I guess my question is this: if Olen can base a widely read article on her perceptions of the nanny (the essay is hardly just reporting on posts from the blog, but rather it is Olen’s interpretations and conclusions about the nanny based on the blog), then where does Olen have the room to be outraged when the blogging nanny bases part of a blog post on her observations of the fight?

Now, I will say that the Instrution to the Double makes what is probably the cardinal sin of blogging: bloggin about the personal details of those, with whom, or for whom you work (even if one does so anonymously, the people about whom you are writng will recognize themselves, and likley won’t like what they read). Isn’t that what really gets people in the most trouble? Further, whether one likes it or not, if one blogs about personal details that are generally considered unconventional (e.g., one’s bisexual predilections or one’s general sexual exploits) that will have the tendency to raise eyebrows. I would note that while Olen writes disapprovingly about some of these aspects of the nanny’s social life (and Olen’s husband initially wants to fire the nanny because of what they learn via the blog) it is telling that Olen continued to read the blog (and still does) and that she and her friends seem to get some sort of vicarious titillation from reading Tessy’s (the nanny’s nom de blog–and perhaps her real name, I don’t know) exploits:

I told my friends about the blog, and even my childless acquaintances were riveted. They called, begging for more details. “Did she wear the rose negligee, the pink see-through slip or the purple Empire-waisted gown?” demanded one after perusing a post on the proper outfit for first-time sex. “She didn’t say.”

[…]

I still read her blog, though not as frequently. Her life has settled down. She writes of domestic nights with her significant other and posts less often about coitus. (Well, O.K., they did have sex on the floor of his new abode, a Williamsburg loft.) She’ll soon be leaving New York to attend graduate school. It’s a life of passion and uncertainty, in which chance meetings can lead to the as-yet-unimagined.

In many ways it used to be my life. I miss it still. And I don’t.

It also occurs to me that it is ironic that Olen ended up making money off of Tessy’s blog, while Tessy lost her job with Olen over it.

h/t: Public Brewery