by Gina Fattore
And probably not me.
No, I have spent the better part of a decade—twenty-seven to thirty-seven, the one most women spend trying to get married and have children—attempting to get ahead in the entertainment industry, and even though I’m not totally sure why I’m doing this (money, fame, a house in the hills, better wardrobe, better trim level on my Volkswagen, etc.), obviously, it would be a real shame to stop now that I’ve clawed my way to the middle. This I will concede: my way of getting ahead in the entertainment industry—the way where you just stay home, be a spinster, and write all the time—well, that way has become significantly less popular in recent years. It used to be fairly common. I mean think about it…
It worked for Jane Austen.
Emily Dickinson.
Not one, not two, but all three Brontë sisters.
These are all women who got ahead in the entertainment industry by following the centuries-old, tried-and-true, stay-home-and-be-a-spinster-and-write plan. Although, as the official LA spokesperson for this plan, I should probably disclose that, well, not everybody sticks with the plan. The late thirties is a popular time to step off, leave your spinster bona fides behind, and cross over to the other side with the married people. You know, kind of like Miranda on Sex and the City. Or Charlotte on Sex and the City. Or that other, more famous Charlotte: Charlotte Brontë, the most bitter and longest-lived of the Brontë sisters. At thirty-eight, she bailed on the plan for a clergyman named Arthur Bell Nicholls who had been hanging around on the sidelines of her life for a decade seeming sort of vaguely into her, and even though most sources seem to agree that she didn’t love him…sure enough, reader, in June 1854, she married him.
And then ten months later she died.
Which doesn’t exactly count as living happily ever after in my book, so I stand behind the stay-home-and-be-a-spinster-and-write plan. It’s especially good for women who don’t like domestic chores, taking care of babies, etc., although I can see how, in the post–Sex and the City era, it’s probably going to need a catchier marketing slogan. Even if you shorten it and call it “The Spinster Way,” it still calls to mind middle parts, unfortunate fashion choices, and sacrificing things for your art. Plus, lest we forget, the cruelest, most awful fate in all of GirlWorld: dying alone.
That’s the tragic fate that befell Frances Burney, star of my ill-fated, six-part miniseries. The poor woman died alone in Bath on January 6, 1840, having had the fortune/misfortune to outlive her age, her fame, the fashion for really tall hair, and virtually every single person she had ever known and loved over the course of her eighty-seven anxiety-ridden years on the planet. Of course, when I say she died alone, I don’t mean totally alone. I think she had a few nieces with her at the end, but that’s not exactly what anyone dreams of, is it? When people go on and on about true love and not dying alone and all that, they’re not hoping to go out with some devoted nieces by their side.
Still, making it to eighty-seven isn’t bad, is it? Especially in the age before Advil and aspirin and anesthesia. Back then, a severe chill or a lurking fever could eighty-six you overnight, yet somehow Frances Burney—Mother of English Fiction, inventor of the chick-lit novel—defied the actuarial odds of her time. Good genes were undeniably a factor. Fanny’s hip, cool, suspiciously young-looking musician father lived to be eighty-eight. Hetty—her older, more Hannah-like sister—checked out around eighty-three or eighty-four, which becomes an even bigger accomplishment if you factor in seven full-term pregnancies, countless “vile miscarriages,” and the type of extreme money woes that invariably result from marrying a musician. But Fanny’s favorite sister, Susanna—the one who loved to play the piano and spoke French really well—only made it to forty-four, and obviously good genes don’t tell the whole story. No, I have a strange little pet theory about this….
I think Journaling for Anxiety™ helped.
True, she didn’t own the Beginner’s Guide or the Workbook, but from the time she was sixteen to her death at the ripe old age of eighty-seven, Frances Burney wrote down virtually everything that happened to her. Diaries, letters, you name it—the woman was constantly writing. Sure, she also wrote for money: novels, plays, the occasional pamphlet. A girl’s gotta pay the rent. But throughout her life, Fanny consistently wrote down all her private thoughts with lots of dashes and exclamation points and weird eighteenth-century capitalizations and abbreviations, “etc., etc., &c.”—and here’s the part where having some devoted nieces does come in handy: it all got saved.
That’s right. All of Fanny’s eighteenth-century Journaling for Anxiety™ still exists out there in the world. A bunch of impoverished academics have taken on the official task of sorting it all out, and their best guesstimate is that it’s going to take decades to produce some sort of official, unabridged version. Till then, devoted fans are forced to rely on the many abridged versions of Fanny’s diaries currently in existence—like the little pink Everyman’s Library edition I accidentally stumbled upon one lazy Saturday afternoon in the stacks of the Beverly Hills Public Library. At the time, I had just moved to LA from Chicago with two suitcases, half a Seinfeld spec, and a sincere desire to get ahead in the entertainment industry, so when I found Fanny’s diary, I didn’t see it as an irrelevant artifact of a bygone era. No, I simply thought to myself…
STRUGGLING 20-SOMETHING ASSISTANT GIRL (V.O.)
Here is someone else who has tried to get ahead in the entertainment industry. I wonder how things worked out for her.
And since that fateful day, Fanny has always been there by my side. You know, sorta like Virgil was for Dante. He was a real person, Virgil, a real poet. Dante didn’t just make him up for comedy purposes. He used him to represent something bigger, although it’s been a long time since college and I can’t remember exactly what. I mean, Virgil never had his own miniseries, but he’s definitely made it onto busts and things, and I’m sure he’s gotta be famous for something, whereas the young Miss Frances Burney?
Well, with Fanny, one might say her defining characteristic is her ever-present anxiety.
Her angsting.
Her obsessing.
Her second-guessing.
And obviously, I’m supergood at all that stuff, too, which must explain why I plucked her from centuries past to be my patron saint. After all, second-guessing is basically my forte. I can second-guess others if it’s required, but mostly what I do is second-guess myself.
Like my decision to leave town Saturday on the midnight plane to Hong Kong even though it’s staffing season and I don’t have a job.
Or my decision not to have brain surgery.
Or my decision to choose an obscure, nearsighted, badly-dressed eighteenth-century novelist for the heroine of my six-part miniseries when obviously Jane Austen would have been a much better, more commercial choice.
Or maybe a sexy-dangerous George Sand-type with some top-of-show name recognition.
But it’s far too late to turn back, isn’t it? Basically, now we’re stuck together, me and Fanny, which is fine because I sincerely believe in Fanny as a heroine. True, no one has any idea who the fuck she is. That’s a definite downside. But that’s just the nature of the game here in LA. Fame is fleeting. People get a break. They have their moment. And then if they don’t manage their careers properly—if they take the wrong part, or turn down the right part, or do the irresponsible thing and run off to China during staffing season—they disappear.
Like that Shelley poem about the guy in the desert.
Or like Fanny when she took that awful job working for the Queen.
Ugh. That job. I wouldn’t wish that job on my worst enemy. My worst Hollywood enemy. Staffing season was obviously a bitch that year too. Sure, she kinda had to take that job because of how badly everything was going with that evil bastard of a clergyman George Owen Cambridge, aka King of the Wishy-Washy. Thirty-four was old back then—super old, actually, to be both unmarried and unemployed. You know, like I am. And the job was incredibly prestigi
ous. Not to mention well paying, and super hard to get. It even had health care: smelling salts, blisters, “the bark,” etc. But no vacation days, no weekends off—nothing to do while the King was going mad. Because, you know, back in 1786, it wasn’t considered appropriate to start composing your celebrity-tell-all memoir while still on the celebrity payroll. And after five years of that super glamorous and important job, five years of waking up at 6 a.m. to help the Queen get dressed, five years of walking backward and answering to a bell, the young Miss Frances Burney wasn’t so young anymore.
Or so famous.
She was more of a footnote.
A Where Are They Now who hadn’t published a book in nearly ten years.
She plugged away at her day job, for sure. And to pass the time, Fanny wrote these crazy blank-verse tragedies. But by the time she was in her late thirties—you know, basically my age—she started developing weird inexplicable health problems. Back then they couldn’t just throw you into an MRI tube and hope for the best. Nope, in Fanny’s case, opium was prescribed. And “three glasses of wine in the day.” But nothing worked. She just kept getting weaker and weaker. She lost weight, couldn’t sleep, and by December 1790, she was wasting away and near death—not from a small brain tumor pressing on her frontal lobe but from some nonspecific “feverish illness.” If you ask me, it was the piquet that nearly killed her. I’m not really sure what piquet is exactly, but obviously it is some card game that makes you want to kill yourself if you are a thirty-eight-year-old spinster who’s been trapped in a castle for three and a half years with a mad King, a passive-aggressive Queen, and a tyrannical German boss with a funny accent.
Plus, getting jilted for Miss Gunning and her 10,000 pounds doesn’t exactly improve your mental health. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Obviously, I should be packing for China right now and not obsessing like a crazy person on my ill-fated, six-part, Masterpiece Theatre–style miniseries chronicling the career struggles, financial woes, and romantic difficulties of Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction. Clearly, traveling the world and socializing with others is what normal, non-spinster people do with their free time, so here I go.
Bon voyage.
Top Five Possible Brain Tumor Symptoms
• Tendency to stay home and write all the time
• Tendency to digress about spinsters
• Sudden and complete lack of interest in The New York Times Sunday Styles section
• Trouble spelling words that sound the same but are spelled differently, e.g., there/their/they’re
• Total enjoyment of Ashton Kutcher/Amanda Peet romantic comedy, A Lot Like Love
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 2006
THERE IS A CERTAIN kind of female TV writer who wears $500 shoes and sleeps with actors.
I am not that kind.
But apparently several of my new coworkers are.
That’s right.
Coworkers.
That’s what happened to me while I was on vacation in China: I got a job. I was transformed, if you will, from an unemployed person to an employed one, and the person I have to thank for this transformation is, of course…
Arnie Greenblatt.
Because the second Arnie Greenblatt started putting it out there that I was “unavailable” to meet with anyone next week about being a co–executive producer on their television show, the second he started telling people I was leaving town Saturday night on the midnight plane to Hong Kong—well, then something truly amazing happened. That’s right. You guessed it.
Suddenly, everyone wanted to meet with me about being a co–executive producer on their television show.
They met me for breakfast.
They met me for lunch.
They met me in a wine bar late Saturday night.
They met me even though my writing samples don’t have any profanity in them.
Or crime.
Or high concepts.
Or girls who aren’t wearing any underwear.
This turn of events came as a huge surprise to me, although in truth it probably shouldn’t have, since it was predicted many months earlier, with great specificity, by my friend Jay, who said, and I quote…
JAY
Go to China. It will make you seem more interesting.
Et voilà. It did. Although it certainly didn’t make me seem as interesting as the girls I work with who wear $500 shoes and sleep with actors. They are all in their early thirties, i.e., younger than me, and thinner, and obviously lousy with Love Interests like all good romantic comedy heroines should be. And here’s the weird part…
They seem to be having a contest to see which one of them can go the longest without re-wearing the same pair of shoes. From the looks of these girls, it will be a battle to the death, this contest, and I am pleased to have a front-row seat. I think I’m going to learn a lot from this experience. After all, it’s not every day that a poor excuse for a girl such as myself—a confirmed spinster whose most expensive pair of shoes cost $169—gets this close to the GirlWorld inner sanctum. You know, where everyone wears expensive shoes and sleeps with actors. I swear I am not making that part up. Costars. Guest stars. Special guest stars. They have a lot of goings-on with actors, these women, and the goings-on appear to be of some sort of social nature, which is truly baffling to me, since every conversation I have ever had with an actor has started with him saying…
ACTOR
I can’t say that line.
…and ended with me crying in my hotel room and having to stay up all night to do a rewrite.
The show I’m working on? You’ve heard of it. Don’t pretend you haven’t.
Unless you’re still in your twenties and you work at an alternative newspaper. Then naturally you have to pretend you haven’t heard of it, and I’m fine with that. That’s cool. A thousand years ago, when I was in my twenties, I worked at an alternative newspaper, and back then I was always pretending I hadn’t heard of things like Friends and Mad About You and Everybody Loves Raymond. So I understand where you’re coming from, but it’s a pretty big hit, this show. At least, with the residents of GirlWorld. They’ve taken a spark to it across the board: the young, the old, the New York liberal media elite, pro-life groups…my mom. Rarely in the history of filmed entertainment has one television show been able to reach out and touch such a broad spectrum of the GirlWorld viewing population—tickle their funny bones, touch them deep down in their heart of hearts—but can I let you in on a little secret?
I don’t really care for it much.
But that’s fine! It’s not my job to like the TV show I’m working on. That’s not required. No, my job is to look at it from a distance, analyze it in Aristotelian terms, and dissect the primal fantasies it conjures up for its audience, without actually participating in any of those fantasies myself. Doing this all day every day 10 to 7 requires a little something called artistic detachment. All the people who super-super love the show and post things about it on the internet and send coffee mugs and flowers to the writers? They don’t have artistic detachment—but me, I’ve got it in spades. I think I’ve probably always had it, even before I became a professional TV writer and discovered there was a way to turn it into large sums of money. Here’s a fun test: when you were a kid, spacing out in school, trying to fall asleep at night, did you daydream long, complicated scenes, complete with dialogue, and think to yourself…
SELF (V.O.)
Wow! Wouldn’t it be cool if something like that happened to me?
Or did you daydream long, complicated scenes, complete with dialogue, and think to yourself…
SELF (V.O.)
Wow! Wouldn’t it be cool if something like that happened to a much thinner, better-looking version of me who also solved crimes?
Anyone who’s had thoughts like that second one is highly qualified to become a professional TV writer. Seriously. Trust me on this one. I have had some doings with the American network television system, and if your mind just naturally works that way, then
you’ve got what it takes. Frankly, the rest is just word processing. You know, choosing the proper margins. And nowadays there are computer programs that do all that stuff automatically. Plus, assistants. We have a lot of those around here at the new job. In fact, a new one just started today. He’s quiet and sort of studious-looking. I’m not really sure why he started late, but he’s a guy, so that explains the quietness. Guys, as a general rule, don’t bond with their brand-new coworkers by talking incessantly about shoes and divulging lots of intimate details about their Love Interests. No, in LA they tend to bond over things like sports or rock ‘n’ roll or how much money various movies made at the box office. And can I just say…
God bless them for that.
Not enough is said in praise of men and their complete and total lack of interest in broadcasting the picayune details of their love lives to their colleagues at work. It’s like they have this quality, this…I don’t know…this distanced quality, that allows them to make it through eight, nine, sometimes even ten hours at a stretch without talking in excessively minute detail about the dates they’ve been on, the dates they’re going to go on, the clothes they wore on the dates, who paid for the dates, and the phone calls they’ve received (or more often, not received) in reference to the aforementioned dates. It’s interesting to me, this quality. This emotional reticence. I admire it. And now that I have a brain tumor pressing on my frontal lobe and some sort of fibroid cyst on my left ovary, I’m going to need every ounce of it I can get.
Yes, it’s true.
Stop the presses.
I have another medical problem.
Right after I started my new job and refrained from celebrating my thirty-eighth birthday, I went in for my annual gyno appointment, and instead of everything being fine—which everything usually tends to be when you are a thirty-eight-year-old spinster who has never had any sexually transmitted diseases or mucked about with birth control pills—instead, everything wasn’t fine.
