Back in January I was having dinner with a friend when he launched into a description of the performance he’d attended earlier that day. The performer was a mutual friend of ours — a writer and critic who had, in the great tradition of underemployed journalists across the land, gotten himself a job in a bar after leaving his editorial position at a weekly arts and entertainment magazine. And, with said bar at his disposal, he’d decided to start a salon, a weekly showcase for writers, actors, comics, and anyone else looking for a forum at 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. My friend had gone to check it out.

He did this piece, said my friend, that started out all meta, about the death of journalism and whatnot. He talked about how the New York Times had started charging readers for online content and about how this was freaking people out, and about how once upon a time not so very long ago, there was a viable business model for the free dissemination of news and stories. He talked about the Reader, said my friend — about how it could be free because the editorial side was supported by the classifieds, and about how Craigslist turned that model into mulch. And then, said my friend, he talked about you. A lot.

[Insert phonograph needle screech — universal audio signifier for cognitive dissonance — here.]

It was hilarious, said my friend. He made you out to be some sort of ass-kicking editorial superhero!

I was, to say the least, intrigued. And flattered. But despite a few attempts over the winter, I never managed to get my hands on this monologue, in text or audio form. And eventually I sort of forgot about it. Until this past week, when Christopher Piatt, the writer in question, put the audio up on the website for his series, the Paper Machete.

It’s here. And here.

And I don’t want to go too much into the gist of what Chris is saying, because you can listen to it yourself. But I did want to point out that, while I am (again) very, very flattered by the portrait he has painted here, it’s sort of awesome how wildly off it is from my memory of the period we worked together — the glory days of journalism, which Piatt locates way back in the mists of time in 2004.

Because in 2004? Man, I was a mess.

That Piatt didn’t see this is, of course, a testament to our ability to compartmentalize and put on a good show. But it also speaks to the power of narrative to construct a character. In the service of character, writers put in the stuff that hones the persona, and leave out that which makes it blurry. Anyone who’s ever been written about — ever expectantly opened a paper, or clicked on a link — knows how disconcerting this can be. Anyone who’s ever written knows how critical it is.

Teasing out the truth of the character in 1,500 words or less is a parlor trick, and  in this sense, I guess I did do a good job schooling Christopher Piatt. Because there’s nothing factually wrong with this story. I did work insanely long hours at the Reader of yore — we all did. And I did work with a lot of green writers to whom I can imagine I was probably a figure of mysterious power. Yet, I couldn’t help laughing through the whole thing, shaking my head at this too-cool-for-school woman who seems so very much a stranger.

And, in terms of narrative, it’s funny that this popped up again right now. Because after two years in the wilderness (when I was not so much “writing books” as Piatt thinks I was, as “writing book proposals that disappear into the void”) I started a new editorial job this month, as an occasional copyeditor at one of the city’s big dailies. It’s a good gig. But it is weird to be back in a newsroom, weirder still as the lowliest of the low on the cubicle ladder. It’s a biographical development that doesn’t quite work with the up-and-out arc of Piatt’s piece. Maybe I can use it myself, though.

That’s the cool thing about constructing stories. You can always create a new one from the puzzle pieces of the old.