My name is Melissa Lafsky, I’m a 30-year-old writer/reformed lawyer living in Brooklyn (where else?). I grew up in the D.C. area, got a B.A. from Dartmouth College and weaseled my way into the University of Virginia Law School. After managing to graduate, I leaped between several NYC law firms and then, in 2005, had the brilliant idea to start blogging about my job as a junior lawyer (”brilliant” meaning “f&#cking idiotic” in this context). Within a month, the blog was discovered by Gawker, which back then was a big deal (really, I swear).

By December of 2005, the blog had been written about in a smorgasbord of fancy-sounding places like the New York Times, the New York Post, the Harvard Law Record, the ABA Journal, Newsday and oodles of legal blogs. Daily traffic topped 30,000 uniques (which back then was a lot, I swear), people were commenting on posts by the hundreds, and I started getting fan/hate mail, requests for legal advice, solicitations for sex (mostly unpaid), and anonymous threats to reveal my identity and get me fired. I also began developing other writing projects and exploring the world outside the confines of my Midtown office. Sleep was a pipe dream.

Ten months and over three million visitors since the blog’s inception, I resigned from my job and left law in order to avoid getting canned and embarrassing my coworkers (and myself — though that was pretty much inevitable). In need of rent money, and something to do all day, I turned to a second career in media. After a stint as an associate editor at the Huffington Post, I spent a year as the editor of the New York Times‘ Freakonomics blog, and then as deputy web editor of Discover magazine. I’m now the editor in chief of Infrastructurist.com, and I spend my nights plugging away on freelance articles and a column about horror movies, frequenting any bakeries offering free samples, and reveling in the shed burden of anonymity — all those doubts about my actually being a girl were seriously getting on my nerves.

Photography by Kwaku Alston