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Revision as of 13:16, 2 May 2007 by Keith D (talk | contribs) (Minor tidy)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)E. Jean Carroll (born Betty Jean Carroll, December 12, 1943 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American journalist and advice columnist. Her “Ask E. Jean” column has appeared in Elle magazine since 1993, and was ranked one of the five best magazine columns (along with Anthony Lane of The New Yorker and Lewis Lapham of Harper’s) by the Chicago Tribune in 2003. (1) E. Jean’s rambunctious opinions on sex, her impatient, boisterous counsel that women should “never never” wrap their lives around men, and her compassion for letter-writers experiencing life’s hard knocks, make it unique in women’s magazines. (2, 2b)
Amy Gross, former editor-in-chief of Elle and currently the editor-in-chief O, The Oprah Magazine, recalls the “Ask E. Jean” debut. “It was as though we had put her on a bucking bronco and her answers were the cheers and whoops and hollers of a fearless woman having a good ol time.” (3)
NBC’s cable channel, America’s Talking, produced the Ask E. Jean television show based on the column from 1994-1996 (when the channel became MSNBC). (4) Entertainment Weekly called E. Jean “The most entertaining cable talk show host you will never see.” (5) Jeff Jarvis in his review in TV Guide said watching E. Jean and her “robotic hyperactivity,” “drove (him) batty.” He went on: “However then I listened to her⎯⎯and couldn’t help liking her. E. Jean gives good advice.” (6.) Carroll was nominated for an Emmy for her writing for Saturday Night Live, (1985) and an Cable Ace Award for the Ask E. Jean show (1995).
The AskEJean.com website, based on the Elle column, is an on-going experiment in the gripping ways people give and get advice. Users can type in questions and receive instant video answers on topics such as career, beauty, sex, men, diet, sticky situations and friends. Or users can join the Advice Vixens (a section where “YOU become the advice columnist”). Top Campus Sex Columnists features the best college advice columnists from across America. (7)
Journalism and Books
In 2002 E. Jean’s “The Cheerleaders” which appeared in Spin, was selected as one of the years “Best True Crime Reporting” pieces. It appeared in Best American Crime Writing edited by Otto Penzler, Thomas H. Cook, Nicholas Pileggi (Pantheon, 2002). (8.)
E. Jean has been a contributing editor to Esquire, Outside, and Playboy magazines. Her beat is “the heart of the heart of the country.” For an April 1992 issue of Esquire, she chronicled the lives of basketball groupies in a story called “Love in the Time of Magic. In June, 1994, she went to Indiana and investigated why four white farm kids were thrown out of school for dressing like black artists in “The Return of the White Negro.” In “The Loves of My Life, June, 1995 she tracked down her old boyfriends and moved in with the fellows and their wives. (9) Bill Tonelli, her ] and Rolling Stone editor has said: “All of E. Jean’s stories are pretty much the same thing. Which is ‘What is this person like when he or she is in a room with E. Jean’. She’s institutionally incapable of being uninteresting.” (10)
For Playboy (February 1988) at the height of the “Sensitive Man” era, E. Jean told her editors “that modern women run around complaining that they want a primitive man so I thought it would be fun to come to New Guinea and find a real one.” (11) E. Jean hiked into the Star Mountains, with an Atbalmin tracker who stood 4’2” and a Telefomin warrior. She became the first white woman to walk from Telefomin to Munbil, and came close to perishing. (11)
For Outside, E. Jean wrote about (among other things) taking Fran Lebowitz camping and going down the Colorado with a group of “Women Who Run With No Clothes On.” Several of E. Jean’s pieces for Outside have been included in various Non-Fiction collections such The Best of Outside: The First 20 Years (Vintage Books, 1998), Out of the Noosphere: Adventure, Sports, Travel, and the Environment: The Best of Outside Magazine (Fireside, 1998) and Sand in My Bra: Funny Women Write from the Road (Traveler’s Tales, 2003).
E. Jean is the author of four books:
-Female Difficulties: Sorority Sisters, Rodeo Queens, Frigid Women, Smut Stars, and Other Modern Girls (Bantam, 1985)
A Dog in Heat Is a Hot Dog and Other Rules to Live By (a collection of her Ask E. Jean columns, Pocket Books, 1996)
-Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson (Dutton, 1993)
-Mr. Right, Right Now (HarperCollins, 2004).
The Thompson book received massive critical praise. (1) The other three, not so much.
Websites
In 2002, E. Jean got “sick sick sick of women writing to me asking how to find a man,” and co-founded (with her sister, Cande Carroll) Greatboyfriends.com. On the site women recommend their ex-boyfriends to each other. (13) (The Oprah Winfrey Show did a show about it in 2003). The Knot, Inc bought GreatBoyfriends in 2005. In 2004 E. Jean launched Catch27.com as a spoof of Facebook. On the site, people put their profiles on trading cards and buy, sell, and trade each other. The Boston Globe headline was “You Can’t Buy Friends Like These⎯Well, Actually You Can.” (14) AskEJean.com was launched in 2007. The Top Campus Sex Columnists (a section of the AskEJean site) is the only select gathering of college columnists in the world.
Biography
E. Jean’s father Tom Carroll is an inventor, and her mother, Betty Carroll is a retired Allen County politician. E. Jean was raised in a school house outside Huntertown, Indiana. She attended Indiana University (on probation, her SAT scores were horrendously low) where she was a Pi Beta Phi and was crowned Miss Indiana University. She received an F in the only journalism course she took. And, of course, E. Jean was a cheerleader. In 1964, representing Indiana University, she won the Miss Cheerleader USA title. Her cheerleading can be seen in almost every letter she answers in the “Ask E. Jean” column. (15) She lives on an island in the mountains in Upstate New York. (16)
Footnotes
1. Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2003 “The 50 Best Magazines” http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/results.html?st=advanced&QryTxt=%22e.+jean+carroll%22&type=current&sortby=REVERSE_CHRON&datetype=0&frommonth=01&fromday=01&fromyear=1985&tomonth=04&today=26&toyear=2007&By=&Title=&Sect=ALL
2. Joan Kelly Bernard, Newsday, March 1994, pg B.13 “Get a Grip and Take Some Sassy but Sane Advice from Elle’s E. Jean”
2.b. The New York Times, Sunday March 30, 1997, front page of the Styles section
3. Katherine Rosman, “Method to Her Madness,” page 99, Brill’s Content, November 1999.
4. USA Today, Friday, December 15th, 1995, front page
5. Entertainment Weekly, December 30 1994/Jan 6, 1995. And September 30, 1994
6. TV Guide, March, 1995
7. www.askejean.com
8. http://www.avclub.com/content/node/20721
“…The book’s first and finest piece, “E. Jean Carroll’s “The Cheerleaders” (which surveys an upstate New York community cursed by murder and suicide on their high school football team) would be exploitative if its dismembered, half-naked cheerleaders were on a movie screen; conceived as reportage. the details pf the case retain their mystery.”
Noel Murray, Book Review on A.V. Club.
9. Esquire April, 1992, June, 1994, June, 1995.
10. Katherine Rosman, “Method to Her Madness,” page 98, Brill’s Content, November 1999.
11. Playboy, Page 88, February, 1988
12. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times, January 25, 1993.
13. Ginia Bellafante, The New York Times, November 24, 2002. “Take My Ex, Please: Preowned, Preapproved.”
14. Matthew Shaer, The Boston Globe, February 21, 2006
15. Holly Miller, Indianapolis Monthly (October 1996) “Zings and Arrows”
16. Bio appearing on AskEJean.com 2007.