I can’t remember exactly when I got turned on to Dan Sinker’s then-anonymous @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed, but I do know that I spent a good part of that day reading back as far as I could to catch up on previous tweets. Sinker’s epic, endlessly entertaining take on Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral campaign—related in the candidate’s famously profane voice and set in an alternate reality where he actually said what he was thinking—began with “fuck you right in your fucking face-hole.”
The feed developed a number of story lines as it progressed, with Emanuel getting stuck in the sewers underneath City Hall and going Christmas shopping at CVS (“Snuggies for motherfucking everyone”). In one particularly elaborate sequence following the announcement that Emanuel was off the mayoral ballot, Sinker had Rahm trashing his apartment, then wandering the streets of Chicago, floating down the river on a sheet of ice, and running into Mayor Daley.
As a fan of the real-time @MayorEmanuel, I worried that the book, The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel—comprising the complete tweets, plus commentary from Sinker—would suffer from lack of immediacy. “Motherfucking shit fucking fuck shitters. What the fucking fuck motherfucking happened?” couldn’t possibly be as hilarious in book form as it was when it popped up a few minutes after an appellate court ruled that Emanuel was ineligible to run for mayor.
In fact, the narrative does lose something on the page, but not much—and the story lines are easier to follow now. We also get the benefit of Sinker’s disclosures about the process of creating @MayorEmanuel and why he revealed his identity through a story in the Atlantic. Sinker keeps one secret, though. Writing about the closing sequence of tweets, in which Rahm is being sucked into a vortex, he says, “I had a final, single word keyed into my Tweet box for a few minutes, but I stopped myself from posting it. I still know what it is, of course. But it’s mine.”