I think it’s hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.
Normally, I am a vocal advocate for ‘looking both ways’ and ‘knowing the size of one’s own body.’ But working, socialising and simply running errands in Manhattan, means I am bound to break my own rules on occasion.
Personal technology has given us the freedom of being able to do whatever we want – and in the case of celebrities and athletes, whomever they want. But it can also serve as a humiliation jetpack.
I don’t understand how you can be a decent writer and not know people.
Since graduation, I have measured time in 4-by-5-inch pieces of paper, four days on the left and three on the right. Every social engagement, interview, reading, flight, doctor’s appointment, birthday and dry-cleaning reminder has been handwritten between metal loops.
Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they’re being trusted as a friend.
The hardest thing is spending twelve hours a day accommodating the rest of the world, then going home at night and criticizing it. I would be curious about what I’d write if I didn’t have to worry about offending.
The year most of my high school friends and I got our driver’s permits, the coolest thing one could do was stand outside after school and twirl one’s car keys like a lifeguard whistle. That jingling sound meant freedom and power.
There’s already a marriage clock, a career clock, a biological clock. Sometimes being a woman feels like standing in the lobby of a hotel, looking at the dials depicting every time zone in the world behind the front desk – except they all apply to you, and all at once.
Juice cleansing has been all the rage for some time. And I used the word ‘rage’ advisedly; one must push a violent flood of liquidised vegetables and fruit through one’s system for at least three days in order to perform a ‘cleanse.’
Insomniacs tend to fall into two general categories – those who give up and those who don’t. I don’t. I refuse to admit defeat by turning on the light. I will not try to read or watch a movie, thank you. Productivity is a crutch of the weak.
I definitely rediscovered reading for pleasure by devoting such a large swath of my time to sitting on airplanes. I am now painfully adept at removing my shoes so as to have the least amount of foot surface area touching an airport floor.
I do think New York prepares you for the crossection of personalities and realities on display when you leave the country, and I’d live somewhere else if I had a reason or burning-the-the-point-of-discomfort desire to do so.
I don’t do emoticons unless I’m making a big deal out of them. I’ll type out, ‘This is so amusing it makes me want to grin in pixels.’ And then do it.
I don’t really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don’t think of them as a memoir. They’re essays; they’re not an autobiography.
I attended an extremely small liberal arts school. There were approximately 1,600 of us roaming our New England campus on a good day. My high school was bigger. My freshman year hourly calorie intake was bigger.
I now know my right from my left and my up from my down. Unluckily, my terrible sense of direction remains. For me, to live in New York City is to never be able to meet someone on the northeast corner. It is to never ever make a smooth entrance, always to get caught looking lost on the street.
I was the youngest of my entire family so you are tap-dancing to try to get the attention of your older cousins. I really hit my social stride in 6th grade, but before that I was a pretty big dork. You learn how to be amusing and how to work for it.
In New York, if you weigh under 200 pounds and decline so much as a cookie at a co-worker’s party, women will flock to your side, assuring you of your appealing physique. This is how skittish we are about the dangers of anorexia and the pressures of body image.
Picture it in your mind’s nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener.
There’s an ‘Everything must go!’ emotional liquidation feel to the end of your twenties, isn’t there? What will happen if we turn thirty and we’re not ‘ready?’ You don’t feel entirely settled in any aspect of your life, even if you are on paper.