Moran says that when other workers at the Melody Maker began gossiping about who she was involved with on weekends 鈥� including one staffer who went so far as to write about her in a column 鈥� she wasn't sure at first what to do. "I've read novels about the patriarchy judging ... women," she wrote. "But those books don't give me a great deal of advice on what to do next. By and large, those women end up dying on moors, being excluded by the society of Atlanta, or swallowing arsenic before their daughter is sent off to work in the cotton mills. The coping tactics of grown women in the nineteenth century give me little to work on, and so 鈥� without any better role models 鈥� I simply regress into the coping methods of my childhood.... The writer who defamed me in the gossip column is told to stand on a chair in front of the whole office and apologize to me, while I point at him and say, 'That column didn't even have any jokes in it.' I can think of no worse insult."
