When I started reading Cosmopolitan at seventeen, I lived to read her Editor’s column every month. It was such a thrill to read and I really admired her for being the youngest Editor in the history of Cosmo worldwide.
I read her column for years til I found she had written a book, The New Black, on a late night browse through a book store in Paddington.
Although I found that the book was very Carrie-esque from Sex & the City, I still admired her so much that I didn’t care. I inhaled her book cover to cover in about a week and continued to read her columns religiously. Back then I thought Mia Freedman was the shit.
You can’t even comprehend how excited I was when Mia had a small page every month in Shop Til You Drop magazine and even had columns in the newspaper every week. I couldn’t get enough of her writing. I loved reading what she had to say and loved it even more how she wrote it.
She was one of the reasons why I fell in love with words and why I started blogging again after taking a sabbatical post-high school graduation.
After she retired from being Editor and became Editor-In-Chief where she didn’t have monthly column in magazines, I have to admit I missed her. The only sort of ‘fix’ I had was to find her in the paper every weekend and most of the time I forgot to buy it.
When Mia released her second book Mama Mia: A memoir of mistakes, magazines and motherhood I couldn’t have picked up a copy quick enough.
Since her first book, she had a short stint on TV with The Catchup which was supposed to be the Australian version of The View but failed with flying colours.
Even for me – a Mia fan – I didn’t like it.
So when I read her second book I was shocked to learn that Mia admired Lisa Wilkinson just like how I admired her. It made me feel less fan-girl and stalker-ish, which I still laugh about after so many years.
I sympathised with her story of her toxic relationship, the hopeless romantic in me gushed at the story of when she met her husband and my heart broke when she wrote about her miscarriage.
When she launched her own blog mamamia.com.au where she posted regularly, I was glad I didn’t have to chase her around in books and newspapers anymore. As much as I loved reading her columns, it proved quite exhausting sometimes.
Since she’s now made an empire online making what possibly started off as a regular blog where she would write about whatever she wanted into what is now a reputable business, I’ve found that Mia has somewhat transformed into a highly opinionated know-it-all that sometimes needs to think before opening her mouth.
As a friend once quoted on Twitter…
First it started off with her post about how obesity is a mental health condition, which has since been torn down from her website back in May 2010. (Convenient, no?)
Although we all know that being overweight isn’t healthy, for someone who is a body image advocate for the National Body Image Advisory Group – what she had written was insensitive and highly offensive. Even for me, a woman who isn’t a skinny-mini but isn’t morbidly obese either.
It was the first time in almost a decade I thought that Mia really put her foot in it and made me think that Mia Freedman might not be the great writer I once admired.
I degress… I understand that nobody is perfect but I thought for someone like her you would think twice about publishing something like that and proudly put your name on it.
Or perhaps not, in Mia’s case because she has stated in a video that she usually doesn’t revise her work and “fuck it” it ends up online.
Although she was slowly becoming an internet train wreck, I still read her columns. I had been a faithful disciple for years, something like this wasn’t going to deter me.
When she launched her third book Mia Culpa: Confessions from the watercooler life in early 2011, it was like I was twenty year-old again when I bought The New Black; albeit everything that had surfaced in between.
I didn’t like her third book as much as the first two. I didn’t even finish the first chapter. I found that I couldn’t relate to it. I wasn’t married, I didn’t have children, nor did I have any of the conversations she written about – I didn’t have anything in common with the book so… I never finished it.
I, in fact, used it to prop a wonky table at one point, used a few ripped pages as bookmarks for other books I was reading and the rest… I don’t think I should disclose.
Although I didn’t care for her third publication I still read her blog regularly. Every Monday morning, sipping my soy latte I would log on to mamamia.com.au and read her latest post and loved the words she wrote, no matter what the subject was.
Then in July 2011 Mia made a spectacle of herself on live morning TV not giving a shit about Cadel Evans accomplishment at winning Tour de France. She blatantly refused to acknowledge that Cadel Evans was ‘a hero’, saying that doctors and professors were far more extraordinary than a dude who rode his push bike around France.
Maybe it was the use of the word ‘hero’ that Mia didn’t like, even though Dictionary.com does define a hero to be a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities and A person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal.
Once again I shook my head at what I was watching and later reading on her blog. Mama Mia! Foot in mouth – strikes again!
The thing that made me question how much I held Mia Freedman in such high regard was when she wrote about Yumi Stynes when she had made inappropriate comments on TV about Corporal Roberts-Smith.
While the post was titled Why the abuse of Yumi Stynes must stop, the majority of her post was about her and the Cadel Evans debacle, shamelessly using the Yumi Stynes incident as a buffer. Read the post and see for yourself!
That was then I stopped reading her posts, I stopped following her on Twitter and I just didn’t care what she had to say on TV, online or in the news. A woman who had spend most of my young adult life admiring had just turned to be someone who repulsed me.
Fast forward to today, I’m not as repulsed by her as much as I was. People make mistakes; Mia is human after all and any of us could say the same things she does and not be crucified by it. It’s because she’s in the media spotlight her mistakes are amplified, so I felt it wasn’t fair that I judged her so harshly.
I’m now at that stage where anything Mia Freedman has an opinion on I commence eye rolling. Sometimes I roll my eyes so hard I see my brain; cue in the know-it-all.
Gone are the days where I thought she was an amazing writer and journalist; whatever respect I have left for her is enough to keep me reading her website every once in a while. Sporadically, even.
Since then, there have been many posts on Twitter about Mama Mia that I’ve found entertaining and had grabbed my attention for longer than a lap eye rolling; the hashtag #fakemamamia, where people would tweet fake MamaMia headlines – some of which were hilarious! – and earlier this month when writer Marieke Hardy asked Mia why she doesn’t pay her writers.
Mia’s answer?
…Really?
My little blog is amongst hundreds of thousands in Australia and if ONE person read my opinion – like this post – I’d be happy. Fuck the 1.2 million people audience! Sure, exposure is good but no one actually needs 1.2 million people reading it. Not unless they want to make a career out of it – say a paid career perhaps.
Furthermore, if someone is writing to people of that capacity shouldn’t they deserve some sort of financial compensation for their work? Someone like me doesn’t need to be paid because having one person read my blog is reward enough for me. But the fact that my blog and what I write reaches thousands of viewers every week, I can’t even express how ecstatic I am about it.
Mama Mia is worth millions by now, surely there’s some spare change in it for them?
In full disclosure: I don’t hate Mia Freedman nor is this a Mia-bashing post. This post is merely me slapping my forehead when a friend has said something stupid out loud; although you still respect that person, you think to yourself, ‘Geez, you can be an idiot sometimes!’
