by Una LaMarche
“So get me up to speed,” she said, crossing her arms, her defiant smirk telling me that she was already many miles ahead of me, and she knew it.
In the course of my three months at Mallory’s, I screwed up constantly—accidentally scheduling a phone conference with two unrelated people, “replying all” to e-mails I was meant simply to eavesdrop on, failing to get her daughter into an after-school swim class. The more useless I felt, the more Mallory seemed to despise me; and the more she resented my incompetence, the more desperate I became. I started finding excuses to leave early, mining past real-life medical emergencies for fodder, even once killing an already-dead grandfather for the sake of a long weekend. But I never found relief. I lived in a constant state of dread, sure that Mallory could tell when I was lying, shuddering at her clipped voice mails instructing me to call her back right away. When you begin to flop sweat at the mere idea of speaking to your employer, it’s not a great sign. When she went back to L.A. for a long spell at the end of the summer, I was a mess. I binged on entire bags of pricey snacks and then replaced them in a panic. I slathered on her expensive face creams in an attempt to slow the growth of my stress acne. On one particularly low afternoon, I decided to see if I could fit into any of the ten-year-old’s designer shorts, then spent the rest of the day searching for hidden nanny cams.
I was finally dishonorably discharged when I gathered up the courage to tell Mallory that I was having a nervous breakdown. I wasn’t, actually, but somehow I thought my quitting would make her less angry if I did it with an attitude of pitiful self-loathing. It backfired—she just seemed even more disgusted by my existence. “You should be a waitress,” she told me bluntly. I did not take that advice, and the world is a better place for it.
In retrospect, of course, I realize that I was probably an awful assistant completely deserving of Mallory’s disdain. But I still maintain that if your boss gives you chronic terror diarrhea, and if you are forced to have that experience on a toilet made by Playskool, then you might be in the wrong job. Just a tip.
Lacking Confidence? Break into Your Dream Job Through the Back Door!
After a few more film-related jobs that ended in humiliation and faked deaths, I decided to reconsider my vocation. I had always loved writing and had recently started a blog, so I did what any young dreamer would do: I took a job as an office manager at an unpopular magazine.
The way I figured it, if I could spend a few years ingratiating myself to the editorial staff, maybe they would let me write something, get my first published byline, without subjecting me to the kind of scrutiny and rejection that writers who send unsolicited queries put themselves through. It was my version of a long con and, to my surprise, it worked, and a lot faster than I had anticipated, thanks to the appointment of a new editor in chief with questionable judgment.
Lars—let’s call him Lars—was a charming, unpredictable bon vivant who was quick to laugh, name-drop, and do things like wear French boating shirts to the office, smoke out the window, and get take-out margaritas with his lunch. He was cartoonishly opposite from both Mallory and from the ascetic geeks I’d worked with on various documentary films in between. I loved him instantly, and he took a liking to me, too, mostly because the magazine’s owners had informed him, without my knowledge, that I was to serve not only as the office manager but also as his personal lackey. He was easy, though; my errands mostly involved making expensive lunch dates with people whose names I recognized from the gossip column in the New York Post or organizing the photos from his most recent trip to Val Kilmer’s ranch. After a month or two of ingratiating myself, I painstakingly composed an e-mail asking meekly if he might ever let me write something, and I attached a piece I had recently published on my blog about how much I hated taking the bus. (Did you just get chills from the circle-of-lifeness? Me, too.) Lars gamely threw a few small write-ups my way, and before I knew it I was a published author. The fact that Lars rewrote ninety-eight percent of my prose, making me sound like a wistful, slightly drunk forty-year-old man, did nothing to temper my excitement.
About eight months after I started at the magazine, Lars—who was prone to making business decisions based on emotional attachments—fired the managing editor and gave the job to me. It was the kind of lucky break that you can get only when working for someone given to fits of whimsy and, sometimes, the use of recreational drugs. But I would never be where I am today, sitting on my unmade bed in a Hall and Oates T-shirt, if not for the opportunity he so trustingly and, perhaps, shortsightedly gave me. So thanks, Lars. Your next Dark ’n’ Stormy’s on me.
Find Out the Hard Way What You Suck At, and Then Don’t Do That Thing
For the next five years, I bounced from masthead to masthead. I racked up lots more bylines and got to tell people I was a magazine editor in New York City, which sounds unfathomably glamorous. If you’re picturing Kate Hudson right now, it’s okay; so am I.
But, alas, the magazine world I lived in was not a candy-colored rom-com in which I got to wear expensive tailored suits, Louboutin pumps, and a jaunty fedora as I interviewed heads of state in between expense-account trips to decadent sushi luncheons. I didn’t even get one of those old-timey PRESS cards to stick in the brim of my cap. In fact, the closest thing I had to credentials was the SEARCHER armband given to me by our building’s fire safety marshal, which meant that in the event of a fire, I would have to resist the urge to run out of the building screaming and instead would have to check all the ladies’ room stalls for stragglers. (The fact that immediately before my untimely death I might be able to admonish someone for peeing on the seat was cold comfort.)
Anyway, my point is that Sex and the City lied to us all. If you work as a magazine or newspaper columnist, you will not be able to afford a single pair of Manolos, let alone three hundred, because you will be too busy hiding loose change in your husband’s tube socks to keep you solvent through your next paycheck. But the one thing you can do if you work in print is talk to, and occasionally meet, famous people. It’s shockingly easy. You just call their publicists and say you work for such-and-such publication. Crazy people, please ignore this next sentence: they usually do not even check to make sure that you’re not lying. The best part of the process is that the search engine used to find the contact numbers for celeb publicists and managers is called Who Represents [dot] com. When typed out in a URL, it can also be read as Whore Presents.
Given my lifelong obsession with celebrities (when I was an infant, Wallace Shawn lived on my parents’ block, and reportedly once snuggled me, so I caught the bug early), you’d think that this easy access to Hollywood’s elite would have been a dream come true. But I quickly learned that I was not cut out for the job of speaking to, or meeting, anyone even remotely famous.
To do it well, you have to have the right personality type, which I have since narrowed down to some combination of the following: unrepentant ass-kisser and/or shameless invader of privacy. While I fall into both categories, I am surprisingly ill equipped for celebrity journalism. I blame my rich fantasy life for this. Experienced reporters—even the ones who make a living asking inane questions of pop starlets—treat the experience as a professional task. I, on the other hand, viewed it as an opportunity for the type of meet cute you would normally find in a movie starring the aforementioned Ms. Hudson. Every time I approached an interview, I allowed myself to imagine that the subject and I would totally spark and immediately become BFFs and/or lovers. I once got to eat breakfast with Kevin Bacon (no, I did not order bacon; God, you guys, be cool), and the whole time I smugly looked around the café, wondering if anyone was taking a secret cell phone shot to sell to Us Weekly: “Kevin Cheats on Kyra with Homely Mystery Date Unable to Eat Breakfast Burrito without Burning Crotch with Molten Cheese!”
Celebrities are usually polite, but the more famous they are, the more reticent they will be. Usually they’ll repeat the same sound bites over and over, because you are litera
lly the hundredth person to ask them any given question. If you ask something you think is funny or daring, they’ll often look confused or annoyed. Also, the written question is much different from the spoken question. You will find yourself tripping over the words that sounded so eloquent and thoughtful on paper, coming off inadvertently as a foreigner who does not understand English contractions. Also, for some inexplicable reason you will feel the need to read them their own biography by way of introduction: So, you grew up in the Welsh mountains mating cows before moving to Hollywood at age nine . . . They nod blankly, waiting for the question, but you did your Wikipedia research too well and still have a good paragraph left to go before there is anything approaching punctuation.
Everyone has a word or phrase that they use far too often. For me, with authority figures (or, really, anyone who scares me), this word is “absolutely.” If I am asked if something can be done, I say, with confidence, “absolutely.” If I overhear an opinion that I agree with even half-assedly, I offer a hearty “absolutely” as a show of my support. And in interviews, any halfway intelligent thing said by the subject is agreed with in this manner. I might say “absolutely”—with varying degrees of inflection—twenty-five times in the span of ten minutes.
But your matinee idol is not the only person being subjected to your nervous stammering. If you’re conducting a phone interview, ninety-nine percent of the time the publicist will be on the call, too. One fabulous exception to this rule was when I received a call directly from Ludacris. “What’s up, Una, it’s Ludacris,” he said by way of introduction. (And he pronounced it flawlessly. Gauntlet thrown, Garrison!) But most of the time you pick up the phone expecting to talk to, say, Dave Coulier,* then hear the telltale echo of speakerphone, followed by, “Hi, it’s Jenny! I’m here with Dave. I’ll just be listening in. You guys go ahead.” Talking to anyone in this scenario would be awkward, but when you are trying desperately to get to know your future paramour and/or best friend who’s talking to you long-distance only because he or she is being forced to do so by a third party, it’s even worse. Every awkward pause, every failed joke, is magnified by the number of ears listening in. And then, inevitably, “Jenny” cuts in abruptly to “wrap up” your “chat” because “we have other people waiting.” Whatever, Jenny. Way to break a girl’s heart.
A Nonworking Mother Is an Oxymoron; Anyone Who Says Differently Is Just a Regular Moron
In 2011, I left my job as the managing editor of a weekly New York newspaper in order to birth both a human child and a freelance writing career. One still keeps me up at night, rocking and screaming. And then there’s the baby.
Apart from the obvious financial challenges and the fact that I would now have to make or buy my own coffee instead of bogarting the office Keurig machine every two hours, I didn’t think too much about what it would mean for my identity to be a woman who works from home and also happens to be a more or less full-time parent. I actually imagined it would be a Django Reinhardt–soundtracked silent film romp in which my son and I took trips to museums, made cookies and got into batter fights, and then collapsed happily for a long siesta, him curled in his crib, and I on the couch with a fresh latte, pounding out masterpieces at five thousand words an hour.
It . . . was not like that.
No one told me how hard it would be. Well, okay, they did. It’s just that I, hugely pregnant, well slept and recently showered, throwing back fried mac-and-cheese balls like it was my job (and, by the end, it basically was), didn’t hear them. Because I had big plans to HAVE IT ALL.*
I did not feel like I HAD IT ALL as I awoke night after night on the living room floor at four a.m., wearing mismatched socks, one boob hanging out, manually rocking a bouncy seat as I blasted something called “Ocean Waves”—but which I suspect was actually just someone’s shitty phone recording of an industrial dryer—while trying to type one-handed on an iPad to meet a deadline. It was rough, and made all the rougher by the fact that people would not stop asking me when I was going back to work.
Let me interject with two disclaimers:
1.Being a parent is full-time work. I know some of you childless readers are probably rolling your eyes so hard right now—and once upon a time, I was one of you! I was all, Yeah, sitting at home all day watching Yo Gabba Gabba! and playing with toys—cry me a river. But, dudes. You do not even know. Your day starts when the kid wakes up (note: this generally falls around “ass crack of dawn”) and includes zero unsupervised bathroom breaks. Yes, there are fun times to be had, but you will never forget that you are on the clock twenty-four hours a day. You are a one-wo/man nanny, personal chef, chauffeur, maid, court jester, teacher, tour guide, bodyguard, punching bag, and feedlot. It is a job. And the salary is zero dollars, ever (actually, the salary is more like negative five million dollars, since you have to pay for your boss’s entire existence, for life).
2.Leaving aside whether you want to work outside the home after having kids, it is an insane privilege even to have a choice. Most women in this country, and in the world, don’t get to decide whether they want to HAVE IT ALL. So those of us who do are the lucky ones.
That said, I felt judged by the question. When was I going back to work? It felt like I was always at work, just not necessarily in locations other people associate with work. Not long after my son was born, I heard through the grapevine that a former coworker of mine—a woman who’s incredibly smart and driven and who I looked up to when I worked under her for over a year—was shocked when she heard I wasn’t “going back.” It made me want to write her an e-mail in HAVING IT ALL caps. I might not have been going back to a cubicle, but I was still valuable, still giving every ounce of my limited reserves of energy and sanity to being a decent human being, good mother, published author, and potential breadwinner. Right?
That was the problem: every defensive pronouncement I made actually ended with a question mark inside my head. I’m still valuable? I’m a productive member of society even if I work in my underpants? Even if I write work e-mails while hovering over a toilet with a screaming baby strapped to my chest? Right? RIGHT, SOCIETY??? ACCEPT ME!!!!! VALIDATE MEEEEE!!!!! DON’T DEVALUE MY CONTRIBUTION OF ALL THOSE HILARIOUS VAGINA ESSAYS I PUT ON THE INTERNET!!!!!!!!!!
It took me a long time to accept that people will probably never stop asking. That is their right. It is up to me to adjust my own expectations and to admit that while I am a perfectionist with a crippling need to be praised, I also have no desire to work in an office ever again, and I will work my ass off in pursuit of that goal.
I’m a working girl. Like Melanie Griffith, but with fewer cream-colored power suits. I may never HAVE IT ALL, but I hope to have all that I want, which, as of this writing, includes but is not limited to: a successful career; a loving partner (not “husband”—my parents were very sensitive about pronouns, just in case I ever realized I was a lesbian); happy, well-adjusted kids with whom I can spend as much time as I want; the ability to whip up a perfect roast chicken; a top-of-the-line dishwasher that lets me avoid scrubbing any dishes; enviably toned upper thighs; a beach house with a cozy white couch that never gets stained or starts smelling like shellfish; a small dog that rings a tiny bell every time it needs to be walked; hair that doesn’t frizz in humidity; preternatural beauty; wisdom; calm under pressure; inner peace; a truly idiotproof espresso maker; and a good night’s sleep.
But until that day, and assuming I never qualify for my bus license, I think I’ll stick to writing pantsless on my couch. It’s nice work if you can get it.
THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY INEFFECTIVE PEOPLE
1. Laziness
I recently Googled my doctor to look up her office hours only to find an article naming her as a suspect in a Russian prison death. In the New York Times. But then I thought, eh, she already knows the call-in number for my pharmacy, is it really such a big deal?
2. Carbo Loading
Sometimes I try to psych myself up for wr
iting by having a pasta-filled bread bowl, because writing a book is basically like running a marathon, except you don’t have to move your legs and you can do it while wearing tooth-whitening trays and slipper socks. But then I get sleepy. And since I’m already in my bed and haven’t changed out of last night’s pajamas, well, one thing leads to another.
3. Aggressive Retweeting
Those who can, do. Those who are procrastinating from doing, tweet. Those who can’t tweet, retweet, and it clogs up my feed and makes me very confused.
4. Overthinking
Okay, e-mail to the boss asking for a raise, let’s do this! Hey, Peter . . . No, too casual. Hello, Peter . . . Oddly formal, almost threatening, like I’m Hannibal Lecter and he’s Jodie Foster and he’s visiting me in my cell and I’m giving him crazy eyes. Peter . . . Clarisssssse. Fuck. Now that’s all I can think about.
5. Underthinking
P-Dog,
Let’s get together and talk about gettin’ my raise on!
P.S. IT PUTS THE LOTION IN THE BASKET. LOLOLOLOL
6. Proscrastinatory* Decoupage
Those Us Weekly covers aren’t going to stick themselves to the dining table.
7. Confrontation Avoidance
But we can talk about this later.
I Love You Just the Way You Aren’t
In 2008, when we’d been married a year, I made my husband, Jeff, a mix CD. I treated this project as if I were curating an exhibit at the Louvre and finally unveiled it on a long car ride, watching Jeff carefully to gauge what his reaction to each song—and, by extension, the depths of my soul—said about our blessed union.
A summary of my findings:
Track 1: “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” the White Stripes
