Is Everyone Growing Up Without Me?

Officially entering my "Girls" era (derogatory)...

The doctor who was supposed to remove my wisdom teeth asked if I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer. See, her best friend from college was an English major and now she, the best friend, was a lawyer. Given the surgeon’s hands were in my mouth, prying my jaws open like I was a prize horse, it was difficult to muster a sufficient rebuttal. This is a question I get asked a lot when I tell people I want to be a writer. Are you sure? For certain people, the notion of throwing away money and job security boggles the mind. For certain people, it boggles the mind—all this passion, all this want.

“Let’s just say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge at seven a.m. with the sun circulating and dawning the sky full of sharp corners of light,” so begins Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, an ode to the New York City bildungsroman. You know this book. Girl moves to New York City, girl fucks around and just gets fucked, girl cries, and maybe girl leaves, but if she stays, she is not the same as when she came.

Sweetbitter was a touchstone for my college roommate and me. As with all the good—and many of the bad—New York City novels, Danler’s heroine soon meets a troubled man to whom she is fatally drawn. In this case, the troubled man is a bartender at her restaurant who dropped out of a Philosophy doctorate and likes fingering her in taxi cabs. “He looks,” my friend said dreamily, “like he eats cigarettes.” She put a black and white printout of him on her dorm room wall and told me she was looking for a guy like him. The fairytale that made me dreamy was different but no less fantastical. Danler, a poreless blonde, wrote the book while working as a waitress at the upscale Union Square Cafe. One of her customers was an editor at Knopf who sold the novel for a million dollars. Danler quit waitressing and now lives in Laurel Canyon cottage Fleetwood Mac once passed through.

I’m still trying to figure out how I wound up moving to Brooklyn while my former roommate begins her second semester of law school.

Recently, someone told me I live like a romantic. Maybe I should have been flattered. I wasn’t. It felt like another variation of that perpetual question: are you sure? If viewed through the right lens, this next phase of life strikes the listener as an almost cliché. This lens, however, must be applied at a distance. As anyone who has worked in the restaurant industry can tell you, restaurant work is not romantic. Several years ago, I was a hostess at a popular Center City beer garden, a job that sounded quite sexy if I neglected to mention my regular duties consisted of scraping bird poop off tables and checking the IDs of drunk patrons—all in 100-degree heat. The life of a young writer sounds very romantic if you neglect to consider the cramped apartments and the miles and miles of self-doubt. Since graduating college, I have lived at home, unemployed. These are ample conditions for self-doubt. While I am lucky to be from a family that supports my creative pursuits, watching my former peers launch new careers made me impatient to start my own, anxious that I was already behind.

I come from a sphere of high achievement where the expectation, beginning with high school entrance exams, is to build achievement on achievement like the layers of a pyramid that will never be tall enough to reach the sky. When I visited my advisor in the fall, he told me to gird myself for mumbling what I do at parties. I’m not much of a mumbler, but I understood his point. From October to December, when the holiday party circuit requires the young writer to summarize their personal state of the union, I practiced my answer. Or to be more precise, I practiced withstanding my answer. I don’t know if telling people I’m an unemployed writer gets less awkward with practice, but I’m better at sitting in the awkwardness.

In the days before Christmas, I accompanied a friend to a suburban holiday party where most of the mothers had sent their children to a nearby high-achieving high school that, while similar to my high-achieving high school, was locally known as more jockish and less lefty. As my friend proudly introduced me to the suburban mothers, they remained polite, but I could read the relief in their eyes: Thank God, not my kid. Happily sucking down cranberry punch, I was unperturbed. Now, there are plenty of urban parents who would be horrified by my career plans, but I continue to believe urban centers attract people with greater respect and tolerance for creative work so long as, eventually, it pays those urban taxes. The polite relief of the suburban mothers reminded me of a rooftop party in Brooklyn that I attended last fall. It was a perfect, clear-skied October day when my friend and I stepped off the elevator, proffering a cheap bottle of wine like we were adults. The rooftop was peopled by recent Middlebury graduates, most of whom I recognized. I did the rounds and introduced myself, saying, “Great, great, great” to so many paralegals until my teeth hurt. No one was unkind, but when we left the party, a violent loneliness engulfed me that an idyllic Prospect Park sunset couldn’t cure. Luckily, my friend let me drag him to a bookstore, where I purchased Jonathan Franzen’s How To Be Alone, which, despite its title, does not resemble anything that belongs in the Personal Growth section. How To Be Alone is a collection of Franzen’s early essays, many of which detail the loneliness of the young novelist. The moment I touched the spine, I felt soothed. Over the past eight months, I’ve learned that merely crossing the threshold of a well-curated bookstore is a substantial cure for loneliness.

The most painful referendums on the writing life are not the opinions of well-meaning strangers but the widening gap between you and the friends with whom you used to talk through the night. In Either/Or, a novel I read this summer, the protagonist, a Harvard undergrad, muses, “How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—the follow the right leads.” For the writer solving mysteries becomes a full-time occupation. A drive for investigation is at the heart of all worthwhile writing, and sometimes I suspect I became a writer because that was as close as I could get to emulating one of my childhood heroes, Nancy Drew. What a disappointment for the conversation to turn to Roth IRAs when there are still mysteries.

In the essay that began Franzen’s reign as the enfant terrible of popular literary fiction, he concludes, “Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves as reasons to write... readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.” Franzen wrote most of these essays while living in New York, a city, like many young writers who grow old, which he fell in and out of love. That the isolation inherent to writing can contribute to this loneliness is not lost on me. Since graduating, it’s the people that understand a life with reading and writing at its center who anchor me.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that during this fallow period of employment, a person entered my life who was as great a cure for loneliness as a good bookstore and better to hold. Due to situational factors, our relationship was mostly epistolary and largely undefined. Despite all the reasons I shouldn’t, I developed strong feelings for him, and when he, aiming for impish, remarked that I probably hadn’t expected to find myself in a situationship after college, I wanted to cry. This was a return to my undergraduate M.O. and also entirely different. For all the times I spent crying on a friend’s dorm floor or walking home from a party alone, I was mourning a blow to my confidence more than the loss of a three-dimensional individual. But this time, I didn’t doubt my self-worth; I just missed him. Miss him.

In the middle of January, my mom and I went up to New York to tour apartments. Of the eight apartments we toured, we only liked two, and when we boarded the train home, I was dejected to return without further progress on an apartment. For months, I’d counted out all the reasons living in New York would be difficult, but my few days in Brooklyn reminded me I was ready for difficulty. Difficulty, loneliness even, is fuel for the young writer. Over the past few weeks, a popular maxim circulated through my mental loop, “You can have anything you want... But not everything you want.” I don’t know if I can achieve anything I want, but I know for sure I can’t achieve everything I want, at least not at the same time. In college my friends and I used to pass the time by spinning out our futures. When we wanted to get married, if we’d like to have kids, where we’d like to live. Over the years many answers changed; one remained the same. As the train sped back to Philadelphia, I still missed the boy, but I was buoyed by anticipation: New York, New York, New York.

The last apartment I toured was perhaps the most horrendous of the bunch. I arrived on a desolate street in Williamsburg with the broker nowhere in sight. When I called him, he said he had left and instructed me to buzz the apartments until someone let me into the building. “Don’t be shy.”

“I’m not shy,” I said, indignant.

At this point, I was almost certain the apartment was not what my roommate and I were looking for, but touring the unit had acquired a symbolic importance, so when someone finally got tired of my buzzing, I sprinted up the stairs. I was aware of the spectacle: makeup perfectly applied, hair straightened, and clomping up four flights of stairs in two-inch heels. But I didn’t let any of it slow me down. It was the combination of grit—yes, the apartment was filthy—and glam in which I took a perverse pride. Like everything else about the city, moving to New York is difficult. It’s a litmus test; if you can’t handle the bruising quest for an apartment, how can you handle such a bruising city? But the things I desire most are not achieved easily. Like writing, like love, New York demands a lot of you and doesn’t respect quitters. So, I wasn’t discouraged. I wasn’t defeated.

Even without an apartment, I knew I’d arrived.

Two days after my twenty-third birthday, I signed a lease for a tiny apartment with lots of natural light where the buzz of motorcycles and car engines begins to sound close to silence.