In fact, writing for scripted TV had always been one of my dreams growing up, but when I spoke to other female friends who’d graduated from my college and tried to get work in that field back in the late ’80s, when TV writers’ rooms were predominantly filled with white, male writers from The Harvard Lampoon—the college humor magazine that had rejected me three times—it gave me pause.
I had written, directed, shot, and edited several short films for my college degree, but I figured I’d have a better shot as a woman of breaking into war photography when I graduated college in 1988 than of landing a job in scripted TV. Not that the statistics are much better three decades later, the year I’m lying on this gurney: According to a 2017 report, 80 percent of TV showrunners are male.
Was I concerned that working on a show about a young American ingenue who moves to Paris would kill any chance of Shutterbabe the TV series ever getting made? Of course. But Darren has clout in the TV world, I don’t, and the promise of an actual paid job in a TV writers’ room plus an actual script of my own—both of which would allow me to get back on my WGA health insurance for at least two years and give me an on-ramp into a new career—is too good to pass up.
At first we were calling it The Paris Show, before it had a name, then, for a while, Ex Patty, figuring we’d name the protagonist Patty or Patricia to fit the title. Soon Patty will become Emily. Gabriel, her downstairs French love interest, will grow out of Alex, an American friend of mine who worked as a chef at Taillevent when I lived in Paris and cooked dinner for a whole group of us expats every Sunday night. Emily will have worked in pharmaceutical marketing, just like I did, and her brand manifesto for Vaja-Jeune, a fictional French vaginal moisture ring, will be cut and pasted directly from the actual brand manifesto I wrote that first week in my PR job. Emily will rail against the idea of the French word for vagina—le vagin—being masculine, just as I had one of my characters do in The Red Book years earlier. This will give Emily her win at work and the pilot its ending when she tweets out, at my suggestion, “Le vagin n’est pas masculine” (“The vagina is not masculine”), and Brigitte Macron retweets it.
Darren will take a first pass at the script, folding in my dialogue, ideas, and character and plot suggestions, then we will pass the script back and forth several times, during which I’ll add in the appropriate French turns of phrase and cultural idiosyncrasies I still know from my four years of living in Paris and my many trips back since for work or to stay with my friend, Marion, whom I will keep texting, calling, and emailing during the writing of the show to make sure our present-day Paris remains accurate.
Three years later, the show will air as Emily in Paris: the number one international hit series on Netflix the weekend it opens. A few months after that, it will get nominated, dubiously, for two Golden Globes.
I don’t really understand why we can’t just draw up a contract, I’d said to Darren, so my income could be official, since he’s being paid to write the pilot by Paramount, a signatory company. Couldn’t he just ask MTV studios to pay me, too? When I co-wrote Shutterbabe with Eddie, I was paid $80,000 by a signatory company (NBC/Universal): income that I then reported to the WGA, allowing me to pay dues on it, join the Writers Guild, and have affordable health insurance for two years. But Darren insists he has to pay me out of his own pocket for now, for reasons he doesn’t elucidate, but he promises he will make sure I have both my own episode to write and a job on the show once the pilot is approved for production. He’s a good enough friend that I trust he both knows what he’s talking about and would never deliberately keep money out of my pocket or a credit off my résumé.
“I just want to write TV for a living instead of having to sell my soul to the pharmaceutical industry to feed my kids and cover their health insurance,” I tell him. “So if working with you on this pilot can lead to that, I’m in.”
“It will lead to that,” he says. “I promise. If they like it, and it goes into production, this will become your new career.”
Later that fall, during his kitchen renovation, he will also offer me the unused Wolf stove that came with his apartment when he bought it but doesn’t match his interior designer’s new color scheme. I really want and need that stove, since I cook all of my son’s and my meals at home, and my 1950s-era clunker still leaks gas from its pilot light, which keeps extinguishing. But first I have to come up with $500 to pay the movers to remove it.
A year after it’s installed, I will sell the stove on Craigslist for $2,500 when I move, which I will immediately hand over to my daughter’s college bursar.
* * *
—
“Please!” I shout into the void. “Please, I’m in pain!”
My son texts me for the fifth time. “When are you coming home?” He’s been home by himself for hours. I’d meant to stop by the grocery store on my way back from the custody hearing to pick up food for dinner.
I call him on the phone. “Whatever you do, when it gets dark, do not touch that kitchen light,” I say. These days, to avoid being shocked, I turn it on only with a thick rubber oven mitt, but I don’t trust him to do this alone. “I’ll be home soon,” I say. “Fix yourself a bowl of cereal before it gets too dark in the kitchen.”
“There’s no milk,” he says.
I text my ex to see if he can feed our son tonight or just bring him some food, but he’s out for dinner with friends. My daughter has left for Israel, so I can’t ask her. My older son is in Thailand teaching English. I text a fellow mother who lives nearby, but this is her night to see patients. I order pad thai from my phone and call my son to tell him to press the left button on the buzzer to let in the delivery man when the food arrives. He’s afraid of answering the buzzer with its still-broken intercom. What if it’s another crazy person trying to set our building on fire? “You can do this,” I say. “Just give the guy three dollars in quarters from the change bowl for a tip. That’s twelve quarters.”
“Okay,” he says. His voice sounds scared and small.
“Hello!” I shout once more into the void. “I’ve been here for four hours! I’ve got a kid sitting alone at home!”
Nada.
By the time I’m finally seen in the hallway of triage, not in a room, I’ve had it. “On a scale of one to ten?” I’m asked by a harried physician. Always a trick question, when you’re a woman. Whatever number you state, it won’t be believed. You have to game it, like the stock market. I want to say ten, but the last time I said ten, a few minutes before collapsing on the floor of my former doctor’s office in 2006, her male partner—whom I’d never met until that day—stood over me, arms crossed, eyes rolling, and said, “Come on. Get up. It’s just gas! It can’t be that bad,” and sent me on my way. Three hours later, I was undergoing emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix.
Ten, I decide, is too risky. I’ll short it. “Eight?” I say. Eight is a solid number, implying enough pain to be taken seriously but not enough to be called hysterical. Will it work?
The physician prescribes a new antibiotic for my still-infected wound.
“Don’t you have a speculum to look inside me? That’s where the real pain is,” I tell him.
That would be a job for a gynecologist, he tells me. They don’t have a gynecologist on call in the emergency room right now, but if I come back tomorrow—
“You…don’t have a gynecologist. In a hospital. What if there were a gynecological emergency?”
He mumbles something about how women are better served seeing their own gynecologists in their offices during business hours and sends me home without looking inside me with a speculum. Had he done so, he might have noticed that the closure at the top of my vaginal canal, which is being held together by fraying stitches, has already started to split open.
I want to scream. Instead, I hop off the gurney, sign some papers that will result in a new medical bill, and make my way to the subway, bent ove
r in pain. I ask a businessman who is sitting in one of the disabled seats on a standing-room only train to please trade with me. “Why?” he says, still sitting. Because I can’t actually show him the fraying flesh at the top of my vaginal canal, or the blood suddenly pooling in my underwear, I lift up my shirt and show him my still-fresh scars. With an annoyed harumph, he gives up his seat.
In two weeks, on July 2, 2017—exactly four hours after my daughter arrives home from Israel, otherwise I would have been alone in my apartment and died from blood loss—the stitches at the top of my vaginal canal will come completely undone, and those eighteen large clots (“A chai!”) that started this book will eventually shoot out of the cannon of my vaginal canal. After the first of the eighteen clots emerges, I will photograph it in the palm of my hand for scale, and I will call my surgeon’s answering service three times over the course of one hour.
No one will return my call.
Why? In the chaos of the emergency, I won’t find out. And I have neither the time, energy, nor inclination to push for an answer or to sue the hospital. But I suspect it’s because the two robotics surgeons who perform scheduled trachelectomies and hysterectomies at the hospital—the only two surgeons who can actually save my life right now—are not usually summoned for post-op emergencies and vaginal cuff dehiscence tears. So no one is actually on call right now to look at the photo of the giant blood clot in my hand as three more shoot out, and I head to the kitchen in search of a glass Tupperware container to contain them.
Instead, my daughter is gently trying to convince me to just go to the hospital at 1:30 a.m., as I wander the apartment in an ashen daze, holding tight to my container of clots, which have grown progressively larger as the tear inside me widens, like a ghost cervix, to birth them. As I leak copious amounts of blood up and down the hallway, on my bed, on the kitchen floor and all over the bathroom tiles, I will actually yell at my poor daughter when she suggests calling 911, because an ambulance, right now, is “not a good fit” for my unemployed budget.
If I ever make it through this alive, I think, my soul hovering over my dying body as it’s rushed into the operating theater to save it, I’m flying this sack of cells to meet Finn in Nepal.
THIRTY-THREE
Empty Brain
JULY 2017
Outside the window, red-robed Tibetan monks are circumambulating the Boudha Stupa, spinning prayer wheels with outstretched hands. “Om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum…” they chant, over and over. Inside, I am lying on the ground of a tiny second-floor singing bowl shop in full view of Buddha’s eyes, which are framed in the window, watching.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves groan with heavy copper bowls, several of which have been placed around my body for a session of sound healing therapy. Each bowl is a different size, for producing different vibrational tones. “Close eyes,” says one of the two Nepali men about to perform the therapy. “Empty brain.”
Empty brain? Hahahahaha. Yeah, right. But I’m willing to try anything at this point, in the name of healing. Or at least in the name of eliminating both the pelvic pain and the traumatic images of clots and chaos that keep intruding into my daily thoughts. My first few days in Nepal, after wheelchair airport transports on either end and a cramped nineteen-hour flight punctuated by a wheelchair-aided layover in Guangzhou, China, I could manage nothing more than to lie in the hammock Finn had set up on the balcony of our room at the Kathmandu Guest House, overlooking a courtyard garden below, the Himalayas above. There I swayed, back and forth, back and forth, absorbing the sounds of birds in the morning, bansuri (a Nepali flute) at dusk, birds in the morning, bansuri at dusk. Several days passed thus, watching the clouds form and reform, the sun rise and set.
But now I’m ready to get intentional about my healing. To switch from being a passive patient to becoming an active participant in my own revival. To this end, I will have to drop my smug cynicism over stepping outside the rigid confines of Western medicine, which has now failed me several times, and stay open. I have committed myself to seeking out and trying whatever ancient Eastern therapeutic modalities present themselves in this city, such as this tiny singing bowl shop we’ve stumbled upon by accident while searching for shade from the sun.
“You want?” the shop owner had said, pointing to the purple mat on the floor. “Twenty minutes.”
Yes, and…I think, checking the rates of the various sessions, which are negligible. “How about thirty?” If nothing else, it’ll be a nice midday nap. When he tries to put a bowl on my newly repaired pelvis, I wince, and he immediately takes it off. “Sorry,” I say. “I just had surgery.” I lift up the bottom of my shirt, show him my scars.
“Ah,” says the man. “So sorry.”
I wonder if the healing doesn’t work without a bowl on the pelvis. Wait, what am I even saying? As if this would ever heal me. Stop, maybe it will. No, it won’t. You don’t know that. Stay open.
My brain is at war with itself, both apostate and believer.
Finn sits on a stool in the far corner of the room, which is near enough for me to still make out each whisker on his face. His hair and beard have grown to Jesus-length since last I saw him eight months earlier, when we ended things because he was moving back to China for work, and because we knew, eventually, we would have to anyway. He stands up and steals a few noisy shots with my SLR before the session begins.
An editor I know at O, The Oprah Magazine would not promise to cover my expenses for this trip—gone are the days when one could pitch and get fully funded for a foreign story, especially on such short notice—but she did offer to take a look at any images and words I might bring back. And Finn is eager to assist with making sure I have good photos not just of what I see but of what he sees: a woman seeking the terms of a ceasefire with her own body.
Singing bowl therapy, Kathmandu, Nepal, July 2017, © “Finn”
Would I rather simply live this experience instead of having to take notes in order to have my $29-a-night hotel room covered plus some cash in my pocket after I get back and write it? Yes. Absolutely. I’m exhausted. In pain. In no mood to focus on words or to lug around the heavy camera, though to be fair Finn won’t let me lug anything. He carries all of our stuff, including water bottles and passports, in his backpack. Plus, according to the rules of my unemployment benefits, I can’t actually take time off, even to heal after my second major surgery in three weeks. I have to be actively looking for work or doing freelance work every week in order to qualify.
In the freelance writer version of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, ABC—“Always be closing”—would be ABP: “Always be pitching.” I’d emailed several magazine editors from my hospital bed on the third morning after the emergency surgery, when I made the final decision to come here. Writing about and shooting photos of my search for healing seems like a logical solution to the conundrum of working while recovering, since writer and photographer are the two professions I always jot down on my tax forms.
Nevertheless, I will end up having to represent myself in unemployment court a few months later to prove this, after I make my weekly online application for benefits from my hotel room in Kathmandu, which triggers an IP address tripwire and puts me in a catch-22 welfare purgatory. Any travel outside the U.S. is read by the NY Department of Labor algorithm as non-work-seeking vacation, so my benefits are immediately cut off.
The website suggests hiring a lawyer to represent my case at the hearing, and when I read this I’ll laugh. A lawyer? To recoup $403 a week? Hahahahaha! No, thank you, dol.ny.gov. If I can figure out custody, child support, and divorce by myself, how hard can it be to explain to a judge I’m not a welfare cheat?
Kind of hard, as it turns out.
“No,” I’ll tell the judge, “I was not on vacation.” I’ll show her photocopies of the emails with several editors, written from my hospital bed; plus paperwork from the hospital; plus more emails and résumés
sent from Nepal, looking for work; plus scans of the resulting stories in both Oprah.com and Business Insider; plus my six books; plus copies of the many previous stories I’ve written and shot abroad to prove my bonafides as a writer and shooter of international stories. “I was taking notes and shooting photos in a foreign city in the hopes of turning the story of my healing into a remunerative asset. As I’ve done many times. I am a writer and photographer. That’s how I earn my living.”
“So you were working. And someone was paying you in Nepal. Which means you are not entitled to U.S. benefits for those weeks.”
“No,” I’ll explain again, as patiently and calmly as possible. “No one was paying me. I did it on spec.” Repeating the story out loud, it will, admittedly, sound sketchy and nuts—going to Nepal to heal, because it would have been too expensive in the U.S.; turning that experience into a search for work, so as not to lose unemployment benefits—but everything about the U.S. health and labor situation is sketchy and nuts, which is not my fault except insofar as I blame myself for not using my outdoor voice over the years to scream loud enough. “Think of it as a job interview in another city,” I’ll say. “You get on a plane and travel to that interview in Cincinnati because you hope to one day get that job, not because you’re sure you will. You take a leap. Pray to land. That’s what freelancing is.”
The lawyer representing the New York State Department of Labor will come up to me in the elevator afterward and say, “Well, that was a waste of everyone’s time and energy today. I’m so sorry we put you through this. But I look forward to reading whatever you write about it.” Then he’ll wink. And walk away.
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