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 graduating somewhere smack in the middle of my class, I leaped between several law firms in New York City, and then in 2005 I started a blog about my experiences as a paralegal, summer associate and junior attorney. Within a month, my blog was discovered by Gawker, which back then was a big deal (really, I swear).

Readers flooded the site, and by December of 2005 the blog had been discussed in a bevy of important-sounding places like the New York Times, the New York Post, the Harvard Law Record, the ABA Journal, Newsday and lots of lofty legal blogs. Daily traffic topped twenty thousand visitors per day (which back then was a lot, really, I swear), people were commenting on posts by the hundreds, and I started getting fan mail, requests for legal advice, solicitations for affairs, and anonymous threats to reveal my identity and get me fired. I also began meeting other bloggers and journalists, developing a novel based on the blog and exploring writing opportunities outside the confines of my Midtown office. Sleep was a pipe dream.

At the end of the calendar year, 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 — but that was pretty much inevitable). In need of rent money, among other things, 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. I’m now the deputy web editor at Discover magazine, and I spend my nights plugging away on freelance articles and book projects, frequenting any bakeries offering free samples, and reveling in the shed burden of anonymity — all those doubts about my actually being a girl were getting on my nerves.

Photography by Kwaku Alston