“Welcome to the team,” he says, showing me to my desk in the open-plan office, which is next to Leslie’s and two seats down from Stefanie, who leads “Creative” on health. Creative? What does that mean? New terminology and acronyms fly at me like tennis balls from a machine, too fast for me to return every lob—KPIs, CPMs, owned media, paid media, ROIs, oh my!—but I love Stefanie from the moment she hugs me. In my experience of working with women, you can always trust the genuine huggers with your secrets and your life. The handshakers? Depends on the grip: the firm-grippers are usually trustworthy; the weak-grippers can be hit and miss.
Leslie’s handshake is weak. Her snack of choice is carrots. When I offer her my snack of choice, peanut M&M’s, she politely declines. She’s a long-distance runner, wiry and taut. We become fast friends, but only at work. I invite her over for dinner three times, but each time she turns me down. Always good to know where the boundaries are.
I’ll be leading our health vertical, which means once again creating content for the pharmaceutical industry, just like back in my Health Today days but with big budgets and only myself to lean on as the writer. Am I selling my writing skills and soul to Big Pharma so that my children can get a college education and health insurance? Yes. Yes, I am. Do I feel bad about this? Yes. Yes, I do. But I have sent out well over four hundred letters, emails, and résumés, hitting up literally every person of any journalistic influence in my Gmail contact list and then some, all to no avail. Those who take the time to write back keep repeating some version of the same story: So sorry, Deb. Right now we’re cutting jobs not adding them. Good luck out there. I know it’s rough.
After nearly a full week of watching mandatory corporate videos about sexual harassment, citizenship, and compliance, I get my first assignment to work with Stefanie in Creative on a brand manifesto for an estrogen-replacement product aimed at the menopausal market. “It says here that it’s a treatment for vaginal atrophy?” she says. Both of us are reduced to giggling teenagers in a sex ed class. “You basically stick it up your twat and it remoistens you. Or something like that.”
“Ah,” I say, “the marvels of middle-aged womanhood.” Thank goodness I’m not yet worrying about such things. It’s no longer the Amazon rainforest down there, but we’re a long way from the Sahara. Let’s call it Switzerland: neutral, blue-skied, still skiable. At the same time, many of the single women in my middle-aged warrior women dinners are dealing not only with parched deserts but also with Grand Canyons. Though I can tell this is a painful issue for them to deal with in private, in public, many of them treat the whole ordeal with black humor and brutal honesty. “Honey, with enough lube,” said a newly single friend of a friend, a successful business owner, “I could fit three dudes up there. And a couch.”
“I know exactly the tone we need to take to appeal to women of our generation,” I tell Stefanie.
“Go for it,” she says.
First I quickly google “brand manifesto.” What’s a brand manifesto? Then I read the materials on the estrogen product, sit down at my computer, and bang it out: “Oh, the irony of menopause!” I type. “Just when you have time to really explore your mature, adventurous, sensual self, your vagina goes on strike…”*
There’s a lot more. I’ll spare you.
I print out the page and show it to Stefanie.
“Yes!” she says. “Oh my god, yes! I love this! And I’m betting the client will, too.”
She’s right. The client loves it. I’m thrilled. Sharky’s thrilled. My first assignment, and I’ve hit it out of the ballpark.
Then I immediately erase the win with a massive if inadvertent error.
At the end of each week in the marketing and PR world, you have to account for each of your hours, just like a lawyer: a task which, every week, fills me with dread. Not just because the computer program the company’s created for this weekly millstone is as counterintuitive as any I’ve ever used, and it doesn’t automatically save your work, so you are constantly losing it. It’s more that my brain doesn’t neatly divide creative work into precise fifteen-minute intervals. Sometimes my best work is done in my head in the shower before I get to the office. Or while walking the dog. Or on the weekend, while thinking about something else entirely.
My first week on the job, I keep careful track of all of my hours and fill out my timesheet accordingly, allotting two of my fifty hours to writing the brand manifesto for the estrogen replacement company.
Big mistake.
“Two hours!!!???” Our money guy, who’s in charge of all the budgets for Creative, is now yelling into my left ear. “We negotiated with the client for twenty!” Apparently, the client was so happy with my work, they’d called not only to gush over the work itself but also to thank us for doing it far under the expected budget.
“But I did it in two,” I say, utterly confused. What I don’t yet understand—my colleagues have to explain this to me, after the money guy goes back to his desk—is that when I was assigned a twenty-hour project, this meant I was supposed to have used all twenty of those hours: no more, no less. In any other job I’ve ever worked, efficiency was an asset, not a liability.
In essence, it was beginner’s luck. Brand manifestos don’t usually come fully formed onto the page. You’re supposed to spend time researching the market, understanding the customer, learning about the product, brainstorming at least three avenues of approach then choosing one. Alas for me, I was the customer. The research was already done, the understanding of the product implicit. And because I did the job in 10 percent of the time allotted, we got paid only 10 percent of our projected budget.
My time, as a vice president in PR, is worth $300 an hour to my company. In other words, in my first week on the job, I’ve already made a $5,400 error.
Another error like that, I could lose my job.
I saw what happened to the older gentleman on our team. He’d spent most of his life at the company, working in PR crisis management, which is what large corporations pay PR executives giant sums to do when they mess up on a grand scale: crashed planes, murderous medical devices, E. coli’d burgers, spilled oil. But crisis management had become a brutal business, requiring precision weaponry and a soul of ice to turn images of ducks slicked in oil into a story about the fossil fuel industry’s deep love for planet Earth, and the older gentleman was kind-hearted, avuncular. Old school PR, not new. So he’d been put out to pasture on our floor. He was vivacious, charming, and curious: the kind of man who would tell you in great detail about the doorstop biography he was reading or the off-Broadway production of Orestes he’d just seen the previous night. Everyone loved him. I loved him. But he was not billing enough hours. A few years shy of his retirement, he was coldly cast out with a paper plate of goodbye cake.
My days begin to feel like an Ionesco play, a theater of the absurd from which the only escape is sleep, and even then my sleep sometimes gets interrupted by late-night pings requiring immediate response: SLIDE 3 OF THE RFP IS MISSING! All caps with a red exclamation point. At 11:30 p.m. As if we were all doctors on call instead of tiny cogs in the giant wheel of the pharmaceutical industry. “It’s PR, not brain surgery,” goes the classic PR joke, but only because so many people in PR have to be reminded that a missing slide from an RFP—request for proposal—is not the same as a missing chunk of human skull.
One morning, I’m invited to help brainstorm some ideas for a new drug to combat OIC. “OIC?” I say, plopping down on a chair in the conference room after sprinting from another. “What’s that?” My Google Calendar is packed with these back-to-back meetings. I often have no idea which pharmaceutical products I’ll be helping to hype until minutes before I’m supposed to provide intelligent solutions to hyping them.
“Opioid induced constipation,” my colleague says. OIC, she goes on to explain, is a common scourge among opioid addicts, only she doesn’t call them addicts. She calls th
em “people living with chronic pain.”
“So it’s a drug to help addicts stay addicted to a different drug. Am I getting that right?”
“Constipation is painful!” she says.
“I know. Believe me, I know. But wouldn’t it be better to try to get them off opioids?”
“That’s not our job. Our job is to market this drug, and we need a journalist’s perspective.”
I’m not sure she wants my journalist’s perspective on this one, actually. But my colleagues, I know, do not want to hear soapboxing. It is not our job to question or rail against the morality of the products we’re paid to market. It is our job to market them.
“Cool,” I say with a smile. “Let’s help addicts poop!”
With this one sentence, I cross a Rubicon. Any fantasies I once held of how I could work in pharmaceutical marketing and avoid the pitfalls of moral relativism have just been shattered. My father’s words rattle around in my brain, daily: You have to know where the line is. If you earn your money off the suffering or deaths or exploitation of others, that’s not a moral income. That’s blood money.
Meanwhile, the act of writing, which used to bring such joy, is now devoid of it when my words are wielded as weapons of mass manipulation instead of as pathways to shared connections with readers, which, when I stumble across them in my favorite books, feel like love.
One morning, seeking counterbalance, I open up my laptop on the subway to work and start writing the interwoven stories of Justin and Kate, Gio and me, and the long-lost love who I thought had stood me up in Paris back in 1989. My subway, the A train, gets packed during rush hour, and I’m always squished in an aisle between this one’s backpack and that one’s sweaty armpit on my way home from work, but my morning commute is different. I live at the end of the line, two blocks from the 207th Street stop, which means on my way to work every day, as crowded as the train gets, I usually get a seat. If I’m lucky enough to nab one of the chairs perpendicular to the window, at a slight remove from the crowds, I can put on my noise-canceling headphones, tune out the world, and write during the entirety of the fifty-minute ride: my daily act of quiet revolt.
I begin typing: “My interview with the baby-faced CEO was winding down when I tossed out one last question: ‘Have you ever been in love?’ ” The story flows out of me not like blood from an artery but more like lava from a volcano. It spews! It smokes! It solidifies from liquid thought into hard word chunks on the way out. I feel, in this glorious, all-too-rare moment, like the story’s amanuensis, not its creator. By the time the conductor calls out, “Next stop, Canal Street!” I have the first draft of…something.
I’d already published a Modern Love essay in The New York Times several years earlier, so I know the chances are slim of publishing a second, but I polish the threads of my story over the next few mornings, during my commute, and then I email it to Dan Jones, the Modern Love editor.
“Very nice!” he writes back, with two excellent suggestions for excavating it more deeply, agreeing to publish it if I do a quick rewrite with his edits, plus he wants me to add on another 150 words: a welcome change from “Dumb it down, and make it shorter.”
On the day the story is published, under the title “When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist,” I coincidentally have a lunch planned with a different editor at The New York Times, who I’m hoping can help yank me back into the journalist fold, prying or otherwise. I’m not sure how much longer I can handle the mental pretzeling required of my job. I was hoping the extra money to pay for my children’s tuition would counteract feeling morally compromised every hour of every day, but it doesn’t. In fact, “going over to the dark side,” as it’s often called whenever journalists make the transition to public relations, has taken such a toll on my mental health that I’ve started seeing a shrink again. “Why are you here?” he’d asked during our first session.
“I feel stuck,” I said—I keep saying—“and I can’t envision the pathway out.” The words spill out of my mouth as fast as the snot leaks from my nose. I go through half a box of tissues before admitting that the only time I feel like myself these days is during my fifty-minute “writers retreat” on the A train to work.
The shrink remains silent, but his tilted chin and raised eyebrows say it all: Then that’s your pathway out.
“No, no, you don’t understand,” I say, trying to clarify the writing-for-hire landscape for those who are not used to seeing it up close every day. “There are no jobs. The internet ate them. No one has the ad dollars to pay me to write stories for them anymore, hard as I’ve tried, because 70 percent of those dollars now go to Google or Facebook.” It’s not lost on me that I’m now helping to create digital marketing campaigns specifically tailored for Google SEO and Facebook virality. I’m now part of the problem. “I also wrote a feminist indictment of the literary world in The Nation back in 2012, and now I can’t sell a new book to save…to save my…” my voice trails off, unable to finish the sentence.
“To save your life?” says the shrink.
“Yes,” I say, “my life,” before rushing back to a meeting to discuss marketing a new drug to treat Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), an illness whose primary risk factor, I learn, is smoking. At this meeting, it is decided that I’ll do a “deep dive” into the disease, which means spending the next two weeks interviewing every pulmonologist and COPD patient on the pharmaceutical company’s payroll: definitely not the way I’ve been trained to do reporting. Experts and patients who are paid to give their opinions are always swayed by the money.
The New York Times editor invites me to meet her at the same restaurant where I’d first had lunch with Ken Kurson: apt, since I’m still hoping to land a full-time job at the Observer, but he keeps stringing me along with vague ifs and maybes. On my Google Calendar, I have written, “Meeting with a potential client outside the office,” to avoid having a meeting scheduled during my lunch. No one in my office writes “lunch” on their calendars. You can’t charge for an hour you’re not at your desk “working,” even if working means shoving a sad desk salad down your throat while scrolling through Facebook and Zappos.
“Deb! Oh my god,” the editor says, when we sit down at our table, several hours after my essay has gone live online, “your essay is going gangbusters! It’s already on track to become one of the most popular Modern Loves we’ve ever published.”
“Wow!” I say. “That’s great.” Before leaving my office for lunch, I’d checked Facebook and had noticed it was popping up all over my timeline, as well as all over my Twitter mentions. Most publications will not reveal to their freelancers how many clicks and shares their stories garner, even after they’ve clearly gone viral, so I’m glad to have this information, however vague and nonnumerical. It also makes me wonder: In exchange for the $250 I was paid for my 1,500 words—16 cents a word or 0.05 percent of my prior worth as a magazine writer—how many ad dollars did The New York Times earn? This is a serious question, not a David/Goliath indictment. I’m actually curious how many ad dollars a viral Modern Love brings into The New York Times. “What are the chances I can parlay that into a full-time job?” I say.
“Zero,” says the editor, laughing. “All of us are holding on for dear life.” In three years, this kind and brilliant woman will be the next victim of media budget cuts.
Skip Notes
* Fans of Emily in Paris will perhaps recognize this as the brand manifesto Emily creates for the fictional company, Vaja-Jeune. We’ll get to that, I promise.
TWENTY-FIVE
Private Relations
LATE FALL 2015–EARLY WINTER 2016
As promised, Ken Kurson has taken his “I come from a grudge-holding desert people” revenge on me for my publishing the essay about Justin and Kate in The New York Times instead of the Observer by ghosting me.
In the middle of the summer, he’d sent a reminder email with the f
ollowing header: “When will you know if the Hinge story is a go? I love it…Would be good for you to start your new chapter with a cover story, too, and we lavishly illustrate.” He wanted an “excellent draft” by July 13.
Justin and Kate, I told him—and kept telling him, even prior to his email giving me a deadline—did not want their story published in the Observer. This was true, even if I probably could have convinced them otherwise. But this was also my line in the sand: You promised me an actual full-time job, motherfucker, not some vague, barely remunerated “new chapter,” and you reneged on that promise. So I’m under no obligation, as a freelancer without a contract, to give you or the Observer my best story. He’d also been sending me more odd and inappropriate emails throughout the summer, culminating with this one: “Can I ask you something private and personal, unrelated to this?” This was in response to an email I’d sent asking him to please correct my byline from Deborah Copaken Kogan, which I had not used since my separation, to Deborah Copaken.
A quick side note: I did not change my last name to my husband’s when I got married. Rather, I’d changed it in a pique of postpartum frustration and ire two years after my wedding, when a postal clerk refused to give me the baby present sent to my infant son because the last name on his package did not match mine. I’d waited for over an hour in line to retrieve it, my five-week-old strapped to my chest, wailing with hunger. When we finally got to the window, and I handed over the pink package slip and my drivers license—“Who are you?”; “His mother”; “Well, how am I supposed to know that?”; “Our address is the same, and he’s attached to me?”—I was told I would need both his birth certificate and my marriage license every time I wanted to retrieve a package for him or for any future children I might conceivably have. This is not actual law but rather what Columbia law professor Elizabeth Emens called “desk-clerk law”: rules about women’s names that become normalized when a desk clerk or government official decides they are.
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