(Singing) People...People Who Hate PEOPLE MAGAZINE...

...are the luckiest people in the world?

Well, no, but people who hate People magazine are a growing majority, that's for sure.

The latest to join the list is one of its longtime writers, Sara Hammel. No, never heard of the bitch, but who knows the names of WRITERS?

IF I'M BEING HONEST, I barely know three or four names at Rolling Stone, and that's where writers can actually get a chance at JOURNALISM. Rolling Stone covers real issues, mot just puff pieces (between giant photos) on Kuntye and Kim, or the power couple George the Jaw Clooney and his wife Anal.

After 14 years of serving up pablum in print, a prominent staffer quit. What was it, too many Millennial backstabbers she had to deal with? Too many stupid assignments dealing with Jerky Jenners and other retards? Watching the publishing industry scamper, cringe and crawl to the whims of publicists and illiterate readers and dumbass celebutards?

IF I'M BEING HONEST, the woman was probably a cunt to begin with. You don't mince down the smelly hallways of mags like PEOPLE, US, LADIES HOME JOURNAL and other twat-rags unless you have a strong stomach for cattiness, and can stand the stench of bad perfume.

Our ex-People lady turned her back just when she "published" a Kindle tell-all about her life and work. Like, WHO THE FUCK CARES? A Kindle book? Couldn't even get a publisher? That tells you that the book publishing world is even more rancid than the magazine publishing world!

So here's somebody reaching the limit probably before she was gonna be let go anyway.

DEFINITELY before she was gonna be let go. Her letter alludes to many less fortunate than her, who were indeed kicked to the curb in the midst of backstabbing and slimy favoritism.

Thankfully, the NY Post is one of the few places (I wouldn't even be sure of "Publisher's Weekly") where a juicy story about the miseries of writing and editing could appear. I don't know of any other newspaper that actually has a columnist who handles the publishing world.

The babe thoughtfully provided Kelly (the Post columnist) with her resignation later. It's not gonna rival the more succinct words of Patrick McGoohan in "The Prisoner" but it's ok (even with the sad tease "read more in my memoir"). Don't expect anything hard hitting or memorable like "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed debriefed or numbered."

No, not from a woman who is briefed at all times, and probably spending as much time in the ladies room checking for menstrual spots on her panties as she does checking for spelling errors in her prose.

What I like about her long-winded self-congratulatory twattering, is that she managed to show the world that People (among many, many others) is NOT a fun place to work, meeting celebrities is NOT always a lot of fun either, and that in the end the best you can hope for is to get enough publicity that somebody will notice that you're now available, and that, gee, you wrote a novel you're trying to shop.

Dear People Magazine,
I quit.
It’s not me, it’s you. It’s been a wildly dysfunctional 14 years, and you’re an entirely different magazine than when we first got together. I swear half the current staff doesn’t know my name, despite my contribution to something like fifteen hundred stories in your celebrity annals, so here’s a refresher: I worked inside your London, Los Angeles and New York bureaus, covered breaking news in nine countries, and dealt with too many celebrities to remember (I know this because I was cruising through your archives recently and found my name on files I had no recollection of writing, and interviews with people I have no memory of meeting, like Ellen and Portia together, plus both leads in Nip/Tuck and that guy from Burn Notice). My first celebrity assignment for you was Spice Girl Geri Halliwell in 2002. My last was Robert De Niro in April 2016.
In between, there were memorable encounters galore, including making the gorgeous and empathic Mariska Hargitay ugly-cry (turns out she cries at like every charity-related event, phew), enduring an Oscar winner’s public bullying over an intimate dinner, facing a personal crisis at Tom Cruise’s wedding in Rome, getting basically, kind of spat on by a snotty J. Lo (okay, it was like a very wet pffttt in my general direction, really obnoxious), having fun with endless lower-key celebs like Rosario Dawson and Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Douglas, observing just how stiff and awkward George Clooney is around kids, insulting Sheryl Crow’s baby, and getting groped/harrassed by an A-list [omitted] performer in New York and Paris (that’s not to be flip—it was violating as hell. I’m still pissed I didn’t jab him in the balls with my pen).
This is just what the entitled stars and their bat—t crazy publicists put me and many other talented, hard-working reporters through. You people, as it turns out, are worse. Stupidly, we expect loyalty and support from you after years of service. We are naïve. Despite your nicey nice, glossy and chirpy veneer, some of us think of you more as the Leo DiCaprio of magazines, using up every beautiful model that crosses your path (“beautiful model”= “award-winning journalist” in this scenario), discarding them, and pretending you leave no wake behind you.
I’m oddly surprised my tenure here is ending not with explosive hatred stoked by a cold dismissal from an insensate behemoth (i.e. you)—a fate I watched ashen-faced friends and colleagues endure before my eyes during the Los Angeles bureau’s 2008 culling—but with a slow fade-out and a final venting of my gossip-weary spleen. Then again, that’s why I’m happy being freelance. I’ve survived something like eight rounds of layoffs where talented colleagues were bitch-slapped into oblivion and, I hope, will never give their nights, weekends, relationships and sanity again to keep up with an email chain about whether Jennifer Aniston is pregnant at 47 because of those tummy photos and what kind of mom will she be, when really she just had an extra burrito at lunch; but oh, wait, the rep says it’s just a rumor so there’s no story this week after all.
Read the rest in my mini-memoir.
I will say, what happens after that is that my debut teen mystery, the one I spent my adult life making into a reality, but which, despite the schlock regularly featured in its pages and online, People decided to ignore—more to the point, they ignored me entirely—even after I toiled away for them for 14 years. They wouldn’t even give me a digital post that I wrote, sourced, and agreed to remove the name of my book from (LOL). That book is called The Underdogs.
I’ll leave you with the kicker:
As I was crafting this letter, a Tweet came through from one of your top editors, Kate Coyne, crowing about her full-page People feature promoting her brand-new book, accompanied by a colorful screenshot. “Don’t ask how, but I got in touch with someone at @people—now I’m in the new issue. So grateful!”
You should be, Kate. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Sincerely,
Sara Hammel