The Spinster Diaries

by Gina Fattore

  Or possibly a tiny little brain tumor pressing on her right frontal lobe?

  Two of LA’s top brain surgeons swear this can’t possibly be the case. For the record, Brain Surgeon #2 wound up saying the exact same thing as Brain Surgeon #1—only he made it sound much more like a Cosmo quiz…

  When it comes to big decisions like buying a house or a car, you…

  a) dive right in, the water’s fine.

  b) agonize and second-guess yourself.

  Close friends describe you as…

  a) gutsy, confident—a real risk-taker.

  b) plodding, conservative—a nervous ninny.

  The celebrity you most identify with is…

  a) Angelina Jolie.

  b) Condoleezza Rice.

  You’ve just been diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. Your next move is to…

  a) ask to have it removed immediately.

  b) wait six months, have another MRI.

  One thing both brain surgeons are in complete agreement about is that over time, if my tumor gets bigger, possible side effects might include visual problems (if it hits my optic nerve) and (bonus!) personality changes. I think I could probably use some of those. In fact, it’s been suggested to me many, many times that it’s my odd personality—and not my size-fourteen frame—that needs to change in order for me to leave my spinster past behind and start cleaning up in the boyfriend/Having It All department. But for the moment, my brain tumor is still way too small to save me any money on mental health services. It’s currently measuring in at a svelte 1.4 cm, which means that the choice of what to do about it is mine, all mine, and according

  to this new spin supplied by the second brain surgeon, it should be an easy choice, one based purely on what kind of person I am. I’m playing fast and loose with the medical terminology here, but it seems a certain kind of person, when you tell her she has something inside her head that’s not supposed to be there, will get all badass Angelina Jolie and demand to have it removed IMMEDIATELY at a total cost to her of only one

  eyebrow; while a second type will be all, like, no fucking way are you cutting my head open if you don’t have to. This second type will tend to be a little more sedate, more conservative. Her brain-tumor gut reaction might be a little more like that of Mickey Sachs in Hannah and Her Sisters, who says, and I quote…

  MICKEY’S VOICE-OVER

  I don’t want a brain operation! Once they go into my skull, I’ll—I’ll wind up like the guy with the, with the wool cap who delivers for the florist!

  Of course, with a Cosmo quiz you usually get that all-important third choice of action. You know, the gutsy yet still professional move that makes your personality assessment come out halfway between brazen slut (“Pound another margarita and make out with the hottest guy at the party”) and timid nonentity (“Slink home early and watch America’s Next Top Model”). No such luck with brain surgeons. With them, there is no halfway. No messy gray areas to navigate. You’re either all in or all out.

  Spontaneous, decisive risk-taker or plodding conservative.

  Angelina Jolie or Condoleezza Rice.

  The second brain surgeon presented me with this personality test matter-of-factly, utterly devoid of judgment, and since his cool bedside manner didn’t give me any indication of how he wanted me to answer (yes, I am that much of a people-pleaser), for one brief second, I was stumped.

  And then it hit me.

  Maybe he’s right.

  Maybe all that’s really required here is a modicum of self-knowledge.

  A moment of psychic certainty in which I, the patient, understand and admit, once and for all, exactly what kind of person I am.

  The kind who gets the guy.

  Or the kind who gets to run the State Department.

  And when you put it that way, there’s really only one choice the modern spinster can make. Obviously I will not be having brain surgery any time soon. Option #2 is the one for me. Problem solved! Decision made. We can now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

  TUESDAY, MAY 16, 2006

  IT’S WEEK THREE of the upfronts, I still don’t have a job, and my agent has just informed me that I have an edginess problem. When I got this news, I was standing on the sidewalk in front of Off Vine, temporarily rent asunder from my niçoise salad, cell phone semi-attached to ear. His basic point was that I wouldn’t be in this mess if only I had a new writing sample. By “mess,” he doesn’t mean self-service brain tumor, existential crisis, or impulsive decision to go to China this Saturday. He means, quite simply and definitively, week three of the upfronts and no job.

  Getting me a job is like a sport to Arnie Greenblatt. Always has been ever since that immortal day—some ten years ago now—when securing his good favor raised me from the teeming ranks of struggling, put-upon Hollywood assistants to the slightly less-teeming ranks of struggling, put-upon Hollywood assistants with agents.

  Trouble is I’m not exactly sure what sport we’re playing here. Two-man bobsled perhaps? You know, where he’s the guy in the front who steers the sled, and I’m the dead weight in the back providing the necessary ballast. Or maybe—considering how fucking hard it has become in recent years to get someone who lacks experience in the criminal justice system a job as a TV writer—the better analogy involves Christians and lions. Is that a sport? Feeding Christians to lions? If so, this same time every year, Arnie Greenblatt enters the arena and prepares to face the metaphorical lions on my behalf. Only this time, I’ve fucked up my end of the bargain by not providing him with a shiny new writing sample that is dark and, say it with me, edgy. Apparently, edgy is what works right now, and that’s what I need to solve all my career problems.

  Not a romantic comedy.

  Not angst-ridden teenagers.

  Not chicks talking about love.

  Something shocking and borderline pornographic.

  He’s not wrong about this. A friend of mine just sold something shocking and borderline pornographic to a major cable network, so I can totally see where Arnie’s coming from with this advice. But stories in which underage girls who aren’t wearing any underwear throw themselves at self-loathing, middle-aged white guys do not come naturally to me, and while I understand and appreciate that these are exactly the kind of stories 99.9 percent of the straight-guy agents in this town most thoroughly enjoy reading and selling, I’m not sure I’m in the mood right now to try and make all their jobs easier by supplying them with one.

  What with my brain tumor and all.

  And in case you’re thinking…

  SELF (V.O.)

  Poor him! Poor Arnie Greenblatt! He doesn’t know about the brain tumor.

  Don’t.

  Arnie Greenblatt knows all about the brain tumor, because one day back in January when I was sitting around anxiously waiting for the brain surgeon to call me back, the phone rang and it was not the brain surgeon.

  It was Arnie Greenblatt calling to tell me that one of the less-cool cable networks wanted to offer me a pilot deal.

  Because that’s the kind of career I have.

  My face is not all over coffee mugs and tote bags like Jane Austen, but periodically, less-cool cable networks will call me up and ask me if I’d like to adapt some young adult novel into a television series. As a rule, the main characters in these novels tend to be au pairs or backup dancers, and you can be sure that if any of these YA novels ever actually get adapted for television, the au pairs and the backup dancers will all be played by ridiculously hot girls, and after eight straight years as a working TV writer, the sad, painful truth about me is that I just don’t have anything left to say about ridiculously hot girls.

  I’m out.

  I’m done.

  I spent all of my early thirties writing about their dates and their Love Interests and their adventures, but I’m not one of their tribe—I’m part of the tribe that, you know, stays home all the time. So when Arnie Greenblatt called with this not-so-tempting offer, I did something terrible: I used
the brain tumor as an excuse. That’s bad, right? Bad karma. Or at the very least, bad career management. And the sad part was that I didn’t even have to use the brain tumor as an excuse, because Arnie Greenblatt, bless his heart, didn’t even necessarily want me to write the pilot for the less-cool cable network. He knows I’m not hurting for money right now—the spinster lifestyle is nothing if not cost-effective—so the guy’s got bigger plans for me. Plans that involve the giant-size paychecks you get in network television, as opposed to the more petite paychecks you get in cable television, and while I genuinely appreciate his confidence in me and my long-term earning abilities, apparently what you need to execute that sort of plan is—yes, you guessed it—edgier writing samples.

  Ones with profanity in them.

  Or crime.

  Or high concepts.

  Or girls who aren’t wearing underwear.

  And I get that. I wasn’t born yesterday. But if Arnie Greenblatt really wanted me, for the sake of my moribund career, to write something edgier than the traditional, by-the-numbers Hollywood romantic comedy I just turned in to him a couple weeks ago—the one I specifically told him back in January I was writing—well, then he really should have told me that back in January.

  Or February.

  Or March.

  Or possibly April.

  Such news would not have gone unappreciated (or unheeded, really) any time prior to week three of the upfronts, when deals are made at lightning pace, writing jobs are filling up quicker than slots in the Jolie-Pitt family, and it’s too late for me to do a goddamn thing about my alleged “edginess” problem.

  Even if I wanted to.

  Which I don’t.

  But did I say this? No, I just caved. It’s what I do, the caving. What I always do when confronted with a swaggering, stressed-out individual—agent, actor, soldier, spy—holding forth with great authority on what’s wrong with my writing. I let them talk.

  And talk. And talk.

  And then I thank them.

  It’s a little quality I like to call being agreeable. At least that’s what they would have called it back in Fanny Burney’s day, back in the good ol’ eighteenth century.

  Nowadays, I think you’ll find most people call it being a doormat.

  Not everybody is like this, of course. Some people, when criticized, stand up for themselves. They get angry or self-righteous. They tell people to fuck off.

  Or go fuck themselves.

  Or go fuck their mother.

  These are probably the same people, now that I think about it, who opt to get their brain tumors removed immediately upon discovery. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200. David Mamet, it suddenly occurs to me, would probably go that route. Perhaps he’d have them remove it right there in the waiting room, with a penknife and a bottle of rye for anesthesia.

  What he would not do is fold like a cheap suit on the sidewalk in front of Off Vine. David Mamet wouldn’t apologize to his agent for being a shitty, lazy, unmotivated writer and then march back into the restaurant and continue giving pointless advice about how to get ahead in the entertainment industry to a friend-of-a-friend wannabe-TV-writer-girl so low down on the TV-writing totem pole that she can only dream of one day having a big-time TV lit agent yell at her for not being edgy enough. David Mamet also wouldn’t agree to take a meeting on a sexy nighttime soap where female law enforcement officials fight crime in white tank tops. Where do I go? Just tell me where to go, and I will show up there. Welcome to staffing season. It comes only once a year. And for that, we are eternally grateful.

  I wasn’t kidding before, about that China thing. I really am leaving Saturday on the midnight plane to Hong Kong, and from there I’m connecting to Chengdu, where the pandas are. It’s never been a particular dream of mine to see the pandas, but for the past six months my old college friend Kitten has been living in some remote, yak-filled part of the Sichuan province with no running water and not much electricity, and periodically—whenever she gets electricity—she sends me these emails saying…

  CONCERNED AND PERKY FRIEND

  You should come to China!

  And frankly, back in April, these emails from the Sichuan province tended to be a lot more cheerful and optimistic than the ones I was getting from Arnie Greenblatt. His read more like…

  ARNIE GREENBLATT

  There aren’t a ton of jobs on returning shows for a character writer.

  At least I finished my screenplay. It all worked out! They got together in the end, my main character and her annoying boss’s son. I’ve really got to hand it to Margaret Hale Newman and her Rules for Romantic Comedy—the woman knows her shit. Once I made it past the Devastating Setback/Point of No Return (Rule #20), it really was smooth sailing to the Climactic Moment of Character Growth (Rule #25), followed swiftly by the Happy Ending (Rule #2). Really. Seriously. I think the Happy Ending took me all of about two seconds to write. It came that naturally to me. For about a day, I just sat back and basked in the glory of it. Then I spent another day obsessing on punctuation and shipped the whole thing off to Arnie Greenblatt, who waited for the weekend to read it and wrote back, via Blackberry, in his signature terse style…

  ARNIE GREENBLATT

  Good screenplay.

  That’s it. Just those two little words. So now the waiting begins. The watching and waiting to see whether someone might actually want to buy my romantic comedy screenplay. Plus, the waiting to see whether I will get a job this staffing season. And the waiting I was already doing on my brain tumor. And you know what they say about the waiting—hardest part, etc., etc., &c.—so that’s when jetting off to China to visit my dear friend Kitten started to seem like a good idea.

  Although I should probably clarify that I’m not going to the yak-filled, no-electricity, no-running-water part—I’m going to the Four Seasons part. This is going to cost an insane amount of money, yes, but keep in mind that if you are a moderately successful TV writer who is larger than a size ten (even if you are, say, a size fourteen or sometimes a twelve), and you have no mortgage, no precocious children in private school, and no current or ex-wives to support, there is literally NOTHING in the entire city of Los Angeles for you to spend your money on except expensive trips to China.

  Oh, sure, you could go out and try to spend your money. But in order to do that you would have to know where the rich people shop (hint—it is not Bloomingdale’s), and then you would have to be brave enough to walk into those places and face the incredibly skinny salesgirls of LA, and even if you happened to have that kind of knowledge—and that kind of courage—probably nothing would fit you anyway, and so you would come home depressed and wanting to kill yourself.

  Whereas municipal bonds flatter all body types.

  Just ask Harold, my business manager.

  Of course, the real danger here is not financial ruin.

  No, the real danger of spending thousands of dollars on a high-end trip to China is that by taking any sort of vacation at all—expensive, inexpensive, with yaks or without—I run the risk of inadvertently changing the genre of my brain-tumor narrative from a frothy, delightful Hannah and Her Sisters–style rom-com into one of those Eat Pray Love/Under the Tuscan Sun/Year in Provence jobs. You know, one of those stories where a stressed-out, overworked heroine goes on vacation and ends up being “transformed” by the beauty and simplicity of a foreign culture incredibly similar to the one her grandparents went to a lot of trouble and inconvenience to flee circa 1920, and then because she is so quote-unquote transformed by this experience, she quits her job, has a crisis of faith, regains her faith, and falls in love.

  But again, how likely is that? Sure, chick-lit novels and romantic comedies are required to end happily. It’s one of the rules. Not just of modern-day, how-to-write-a-screenplay gurus like Margaret Hale Newman. But of Shakespeare. And Jane Austen. And probably some super old guys like Aristophanes. Frances Burney did, of course, try to break that rule with the famously “mixed” ending of Cecilia, but perhaps that
’s why she never entered the pantheon of the greats. As for me, I just don’t see how my story could possibly work out that way due to my overwhelming lack of Love Interests.

  Where do they come from, all these Love Interests women are always going on about at book clubs and baby showers? Internet dating? That’s the answer, right? Lately I’m hearing a lot about something called JDate, but I’m not sure that would work for someone who’s only pretending to be Jewish so that her life will seem more like a Woody Allen movie. Plus, then I would have to undergo some sort of Makeover Montage (Rule #9)—you know, lose the glasses, learn to wear makeup, invest in a little black dress. When I was young, guys with beards were always hanging around my Brooklyn apartment discussing Marxist theory and trying to sleep with my roommate. Every so often, around 3 in the morning, one of them would give up and try to sleep with me. But I always said no. In Chicago, in my midtwenties, there were a few mixtapes of suspicious intent, some earnest conversations about My So-Called Life. But in my late twenties, I moved to LA to try to get ahead in the entertainment industry, and I guess maybe that jinxed things for me. The worst part is that we have this hard-and-fast rule here in Hollywood about how all the very best writing is always based on personal experience, so now I have to work overtime, 24/7, to keep my lack of Love Interests on the down-low. I can’t let on to anyone that I’m a thirty-seven-year-old modern-day spinster who’s never actually been in love—because then it’s totally possible I might never work again.

  At least not in the genre better known as Chicks Talking about Love.

  And no one wants that to happen.

  Definitely not Arnie Greenblatt.