Today on the Scroll: The real story — not reality show real, or Maclean’s real, but really real — story behind the anti-Rebecca Eckler blogger brigade. 

"The Anti-Eckler Bloggers Host A ‘Party’," a feature in the Feb. 4 issue of Maclean’s, describes a meet-up at the Pilot Tavern in Yorkville proposed by the overwhelmingly anonymous commenters on a blog parodying Rebecca Eckler.

Claiming they are not worth but a minute of her time, Eckler nonetheless proceeds to vent about them for 1,600 words. Warning: What follows might be even longer.

Nine Gram Brain, recently taken offline, consisted of tossed-off mean-spirited rewrites of the material on Eckler’s own blog, Nine Pound Dictator, a nickname given her now-4-year-old daughter at birth. The site emerged after Eckler’s stint as chick columnist at the National Post ended in 2005, in tandem with the publication of her accidental-pregnancy memoir, Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-be. She concurrently surfaced at the Globe and Mail doing Style columns under the banner of Mommy Blogger — advertorial-esque bits plugging the latest gizmos for harried parents.

Eckler’s online voice, however, was that of the malcontented mother. Based on the uncritical moderated comments on each post, she was reaching an audience of youngish women who related to stories about trying to fulfill their own materialistic desires while bringing up babies. Spellchecking was not a priority.

Lydia Lovric, a 29-year-old freelance writer and broadcaster from Hamilton, was mainly working as a new stay-at-home mom when she came across a Nine Pound Dictator post where Eckler boasted of how she was spending as little time as possible alone with her daughter. The nanny wasn’t around during an Arizona vacation, though, and Eckler learned the joys of solo parenting while visiting a country club where she boasted the annual membership was over $100,000.

A small jab in a nationally syndicated May 2006 column Lovric wrote about her belief that women who don’t work should try raising their own children led to Eckler deleting that post, and challenging her to a physical confrontation: “You want to step outside Freelancer? You want a piece of me? Oooh, I’m so scared. Actually, she could probably sit on me and I’d die.”

This exchange only pointed more Googlers in the direction of Nine Gram Brain, where comment sections snowballed into a discussion forum for all things Eckler.

And she gave them material to work with, too. Publication of a second memoir, Wiped!: Live with a Pint-size Dictator, earned an uncommonly nasty review in Quill & Quire: “What’s missing here is any intelligent self-analysis that might convince the reader that the book’s title is anything other than a declaration of how its pages might best have been used.”

Then, last June, came the most surreal book promotion stunt of all: Eckler was given the pages of Maclean’s — where editor-in-chief Ken Whyte lured many former staff members from the Conrad Black-era National Post, not to mention their attitude — to complain how the movie Knocked Up bore similarities to her book of the same name, and she was gonna sue.

Chatter provoked by that story was an obvious inspiration for the current issue’s follow-up, where Eckler’s first-person report is ridiculously supplied with a current-events context that relates her own online experience as a 34-year-old to recent headlines about teenage cyberbullying.

Eckler relishes the fact that, of the dozens who allegedly expressed enthusiasm about attending the meet-up at the Pilot, only two people showed up at first. But one of them was Lydia Lovric.

Maclean’s doesn’t mention her by name, but Eckler accuses her of having been the only person to use her full name on the Nine Gram Brain site “in an effort to restart her stalled career” and drove to Toronto “leaving behind her two small children.” (No mention was made of where Eckler’s child was during this time.)

A friend of Eckler’s joined Lovric and the other woman, allegedly a former Toronto media type in town from her alleged job at the Detroit Free Press, and the Maclean’s story claims they blamed Eckler for their bad marriages, lack of success and small bank accounts.

“Neither of us talked about our husbands, or said we had bad marriages, or anything to that effect,” says Lovric in an interview with Scrolling Eye. “Why would I blame her for my lack of success, anyhow? It’s not like I’ve ever been interviewed by her or lost work because of her. And, frankly, I don’t even consider myself to be unsuccessful.”  

Details divulged to Eckler’s female friend who joined in on the dish were limited, because they could tell that it was a mole.

“We figured it out right away,” says Lovric. “This woman said she’d been reading the site for just one week. The story she made up was that her boyfriend used to date Eckler a long time ago. She told us her name was ‘Sammy,’ and when we asked what her last name was, she stumbled a bit … first she said it was ‘Lester’ and then later it became ‘Malone’.”

This bad sitcom script was accentuated by the fact that “Sammy” went to the restroom every 10 minutes, hand-held device at hand, and was taking phone calls at the table that Eckler admitted in the Maclean’s piece were meant to coordinate her own surreptitious entrance.

“She ended one of the calls by saying ‘OK, I love you,'” reports Lovric. “And this was with a guy she’d been dating for one week? They had over two weeks to plan this stunt. You’d think they could have come up with a better story overall.”

Lovric makes no apologies for driving for 45 minutes with the expectation of having a drink or two with what she figured were other female writers, based on how they described themselves online.

“I hadn’t gone out anywhere in almost a year,” she says. “I’ve been with my kids almost 24 hours a day since they were born. This motivated me to take a break.”

This ongoing dramatic comedy has amused people well beyond Toronto media circles, too. Megan Holsapple, a 29-year-old writer living in Yellowknife has offered her own perspective on Eckler since the Knocked Up vs. Knocked Up story emerged last June — and offered reasons why she was going to sue Eckler for stealing the idea of getting pregnant from her.

“I know a few Toronto types like Ms. Eckler,” wrote Holsapple on her blog November, “and while they are extremely annoying, they cannot help themselves. They drink non-fat soy lattes and spend significant amounts of time thinking about their social statuses. They are to be treated with a mixture of disdain and pity. Disdain because they are pathetic creatures, and pity because they really believe they could never be anything else.”

Holsapple was surprised by the Nine Gram Brain parody blog, just because she thought that Eckler’s own blog was actually the work of a satirist.  

“I didn’t think anyone could be that vapid,” she says. “Then I discovered that she’d been doing this for a number of years, and it wasn’t a joke. She was willing to publicly present herself as someone who not only brags about how she prefers not to spend time with her child, but how the child irritates her all of the time.

“The frustration of being a mom is something I understand,” says Holsapple, whose son is now 7. “These things certainly aren’t glamourous. But you do them anyway. You never say 'I don’t want to change dirty diapers,' or 'I don’t want to spend the time cooking meals,' or 'I don’t want to be bothered with breastfeeding.'”

Holsapple, whose comments on Nine Gram Brain linked to her own site, also wishes the anti-Eckler sentiments weren’t largely anonymous.

Those snipes peaked in December, when Eckler attempted to stir up debate on her own blog, by sharing the story of how her daughter broke a bottle of apple juice in a store, and she was annoyed after being asked to pay for the accident.

This stoked even more speculation on Nine Gram Brain about the state of Eckler’s relationship. Since she never married to her frequently cited fiancé, and even had a Modern Love column in The New York Times indicating it was a fuzzy arrangement from the start, the details remain grist for much nastiness,

The main subject of discussion among the anti-Eckler brigade, however, is how she’s managed to develop and sustain a media career all along.

Discussion threads regarding Eckler that have veered off into tangents like the philosophy of iconoclastic British television producer Dennis Potter — and, more recently, a telling reference to Toronto Star entertainment business columnist Martin Knelman as “Marty.” These suggest that Eckler isn’t being judged by a jury of her peers, none of whom paid attention to the National Post to begin with, but embittered women of an older generation.

Like, the kind of media women that blogger Kathy Shaidle once described as “making $10 an hour as part-time proofreaders and run sites with frames and are married to their cat and wear menopausal lady ponchos and live on herbal tea.” Women who wish they were being invited to dinner parties with Maureen Dowd and Susan Orlean, but have spent the past decade stuck on trying to make sense of Eckler and Leah McLaren instead.

And, if that’s not who they are, then it has only helped to see Eckler’s public profile through the prism of the kind of narcisstic misanthropy that one used to only be able to find at the newsstand in the form of 1990s zines like ANSWER Me!, Ben Is Dead and Rollerderby. Now you can read that kind of thing in Maclean’s.

Eckler’s literary agent, Denise Bukowski, actually makes a case for this concept.

“Rebecca knows that she’s cultivated this persona as the professional Jewish princess,” says Bukowski. “And she lets the criticism roll off her back. She knows exactly what she’s asking for by doing this.”

Bukowski boasts of a seemingly bottomless list of deals for her client. These include two adult novels, the first of which will be about the shenanigans of parents of private-school children. A series of picture books called Mischeivous Moms, co-authored by Erica Ehm, will debut this fall on Key Porter. The trilogy of irritable parenting books will continue with Toddlers Gone Wild. And she’s also getting into chick lit for teenagers, signing a deal with Doubleday for a series of books whose main character will be a girl called Apple.  

“She is wonderful to work with,” boasts Bukowski. “And one of the most professional writers I have ever known. She likes to be outrageous, that’s all.”

And there are some things just can’t be learned from skimming the comments on a parody blog: Bukowski divulges that director Judd Apatow paid Eckler an undisclosed settlement over Knocked Up, too.

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