“Within hours” of a routine visit to the dentist, Steel “discovered what appeared to be a betrayal by someone I have known for nearly 20 years,” an incident which registered “a severe jolt to what I think of the human race.” In desperation, Steel retired to her immaculate beach home, decorated with curios from the Second World War, to reflect on the tragedy of human existence.

Writes Steel: “on Saturday, to clear my head and get some air, I went to my beach house, and was greeted by a rug I have there with a quote from Anne Frank woven into it. It says ‘In spite of everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart’.” After close inspection of the Holocaust victim rug installed in her summer home, Steel came to a realization that revealed a stunning comparison between Frank’s character and her own: “Some people do some really rotten stuff, but that’s the point, ‘some’ people, not all people,” writes Steel. “And even in the midst of a bad experience, I have faith in my fellow man.”

Satisfied, Steel returned home to celebrate the storied act of devouring a “golden turkey, delicious stuffing and all the trimmings, surrounded by people you love who treat you well.” But even as the American pastime marched on, Steel had the unsettling feeling that her efforts to find something to be thankful for was but a farce necessitated by the annual holiday. “I went to the dentist, which is never my favorite pastime (although it wasn’t too bad),” Steel writes. “But it turned out to be the happiest event of my day, and my week.”

As a non-man who is nevertheless quite interested in the pursuit of manliness, I was interested to try the Genderanalyzer—which “uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman.” Last time I plugged the Sexist into the Genderanalyzer, it told me I wrote like a dude. I basked for several seconds in the news, believing that I had fooled this widget through my progressive, gender-bending style of blogging. Then I plugged Danielle Steele into the analyzer. Turns out she writes like a dude, too.

Now, it looks like this ye olde online gender identity crystal ball is beginning to get rather specific. The analyzer—which I’m not convinced isn’t entirely bogus—can now determine the dudeliness of your blog down to the percentage point. Just how manly am I?

We think http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist is written by a man (70%).

Seventy percent man. Not bad! But how does Danielle stand?

We think http://daniellesteel.net/blog/index.php is written by a man (71%).

It is with great shame that I must submit to the incontrovertible fact that Danielle Steel is more of a man than I am.

“Man Down” by wili-hybrid.

In the latest update to her online diary, Danielle Steel delves into the seedy underbelly of the Parisian nightlife scene. “I went to a great dinner party the other night in Paris,” Steel writes, in a post entitled, simply, “Dinner Party.”

The party, which began promptly at 8 p.m. one cold, Parisian November evening, raged without regard for the social barriers of class or age. In an intoxicating frenzy of conversation and fine food, these baser human classifiers were brazenly and conspicuously shunned. Guests circulated, caring nothing for the subtle markers of social status that divide us all, even as the class war remained embroidered in the clothing on their very backs:

instead of one social group, or socio-economic group, there were fancy looking women there in cocktail dresses and pearls with men in suits and ties, and people in jeans and tee shirts. No one seemed to care what anyone was wearing (nor what age they were), they made no apology for showing up in jeans and sneakers, and the people in jeans were totally at ease talking to the people in suits and vice versa.

More troubling, however, was the guests’ complete disregard for accepted markers of time and place. “The conversation ranged from French politics to the up-coming American elections (which they were all deeply interested in),” writes Steel, who furthered the conversation, as if the elections had not occurred a full week earlier, and Barack Obama had not already clinched his historic win. The conversation devolved quickly. “[There was] even some startlingly frank talk about sex between two total strangers who looked like they had nothing in common,” writes Steel.

With all markers of social rank jettisoned, guests competed for party dominance through a battle of wills. “No one left the dinner table until 1:30 a.m. on a week night, and we all hated to leave then,” Steel writes. “I could have stayed there for several more hours, although we all got there at 8 p.m.”

From there, the dark tale unraveled with violent urgency. Steel recounts a recent time when she “was feeling down” and purchased an “inspirational book.” But the book held only more details of the unspeakable tragedy that afflicts all Humankind. “Instead of telling me how to solve my own problems, it told me to put my own worries on the shelf, and help someone else,” she wrote. “Are you kidding? Did the author have any idea of the miseries I was dealing with?”

Can any man truly understand another?

“I decide recently that I am at what the French call an ‘ungrateful’ age, i.e. a bad age,” wrote Steel. “[T]urning fifty seemed so horrible, it nearly killed me. And everything after that has been truly scary.”
Steel reasons, however, that the very enterprise of blogging her horrific aging experience will allow her to come to terms with the process. “[M]y commitment today, on this first day of my blog, is to enjoy whatever age I am, and you enjoy whatever age you are, without feeling that you’re on the wrong side of the age fence . . .thank you for reading my first blog!”

But following the cheery send off, Steel returned to blog darker revelations. In her second entry, entitled, simply, “Halloween,” Steel wrote: “Now that we’re getting to know each other a little better, I will confess that I have an extremely silly sense of humor,” she wrote, before detailing a long history of verbal in-fighting disguised as jokes between Steel and her children:

My oldest daughter has an outrageous sense of humor too. She dressed as a pumpkin for Halloween one year, painted her face orange and dyed her hair green. It was a great costume, until she discovered the next day that the orange color on her face wouldn’t come off—-for the next 3 weeks! (She works in a hospital, and they sent her home, thinking she was jaundiced.) My other children demonstrate the same inclination, and April Fool is a nightmare at our house. Every year, at least two of the unmarried ones call to tell me that they’re pregnant, and three to say they’re in jail. And I always fall for the first three calls until I realize what day it is.

Danielle Steel’s domestic nightmare is mediated only by her insatiable desire to disguise herself as increasingly ridiculous alter-egos in an attempt to dull the pain. She writes:

Okay, guess—what I am going to be this year? A fairy princess? Dracula? Little Bo Peep? Wonderwoman? NO!!! . . . I’m going to be a whoopee cushion for Halloween. I love the costume! And to make matters worse, I am going to have a remote controlled device in the pocket to add the sound effects. It is unbelievably funny and rude.

It’s worse than anyone could have possibly imagined. Stay tuned. I’ll be updating the complexities of Steel’s story as it develops.