“Wow,” says Catherine. “You should write about that.”
“Can’t,” I say. “I’m too busy right now with my day job.”
The next morning, I wake up and read Trump’s tweet, which begins thus: “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents.”
Fuck that guy, I think. And fuck staying quiet. Staying quiet has gotten us nowhere. Worse, it’s made men doubt the veracity of our stories.
Driven by rage, I pound out the story of my rapist’s apology in the hours between Trump’s tweet at 9:14 a.m. and noon, when my day job in California officially begins. I write about the fallacy of our president’s logic; about Kavanaugh, who is my age and grew up in my hometown, albeit on the wealthier side of it; about how hearing a real and heartfelt apology can literally change the way the brain processes trauma. I send it off to Adrienne, my Atlantic editor, with a closer that will echo into the future in ways I cannot yet fathom: “The life of my daughter is at stake. Her bodily autonomy is at stake. As a mother who grew up being groped at house parties in the ’80s, I want to make sure that whoever is passing judgment on the next generation has, at the very least, judgment to pass.”
Adrienne wants to publish my story the next day, after it gets vetted and copyedited. I’m not allowed to tell her that I’ll be on set of my Modern Love episode that day, unreachable and often unable to talk, because I’m still not allowed to tell anyone about the show. So I just say, “Great,” and pray I can use my cellphone as a hotspot to finish the edit.
Which is how I find myself, the next morning, sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park in front of Dev Patel, who’s playing Justin, and Catherine Keener, who’s playing me, as I furiously edit the new essay about my rapist’s apology while hearing the words from my old essay coming out of Keener’s mouth: “He was a senior in college, studying Shakespeare abroad, and I was a twenty-two-year-old war photographer living in Paris….”
Words. Words are the one constant in my life and the only way my brain has found to make sense of it. No, they have not made me rich. But they have enriched me and, based on the evidence in my inbox, others. They’ve given me purpose; saved me multiple times from throwing in life’s towel; sparked countless heartfelt letters from strangers; and allowed me to speak loudly, publicly, and decidedly unladylikely about topics that, for too long and to women’s detriment, have remained private, particularly with regards to the female body: its health, its pleasures, its objectification, its violations, its blood, its clinical neglect, its autonomy.
Catherine Keener and Dev Patel in “When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist,” Modern Love, Season 1, © Giovanni Rufino/Amazon Studios
After the rapist apology story is published in The Atlantic, thousands of women—and men!—write to tell me that they, too, have reached out to their rapists and victims respectively for a necessary reckoning with the harm they’ve either experienced or perpetrated. Some of the women are disappointed and angry by either the lack of remorse or by the silence they receive from their perpetrators. Others are floored by the sudden healing of a true apology. Some men want to know if their past actions would be considered rape or simply dumb teenage fumbling. Others have suddenly realized what they did was wrong and want to figure out the proper way to make amends. All of them ask to read the letter I wrote, so I publish it on my otherwise mostly empty blog on my website with redactions for the sake of anonymity. This is not about calling out my rapist specifically or maligning his name thirty years after the fact for a crime he had no idea he’d committed. It’s about calling out all men to hold themselves accountable for their actions.
Within hours of the story’s publication, I am hounded by TV producers to come on their shows and continue the conversation my words have sparked. I speak live with CNN International; do a taped segment with Juju Chang on Nightline; reject an invitation to go on Fox News. “Call me when you stop lying and being the mouthpiece of the Trump administration, and then I might consider it,” I say. I sit in either radio booths or my own living room, talking to disembodied reporters from all over the world, day, night, and sometimes in the wee hours of the morning, depending on the time zone of the live morning radio hour.
The ripples from this story will continue flowing outward. One of my sisters calls to tell me about the rabbi she runs into, whose husband teaches a philosophy course at UCSF about forgiving the unforgivable. For a week, this rabbi tells her, her husband used my essay to lead one of his discussions. Another sister tells me about the rapist who, as an adult newly confronted with his past violations as a teenager, has donated a large sum of money to fund research for the cancer that killed our father. Katherine Schwarzenegger reaches out to ask if she can turn my story into a chapter in her book on forgiveness. My own rapist will reach out, months later, to express gratitude over the way our private moment of healing sparked a growing number of others: “I wish you well in every respect…and I’m glad our interaction is creating good things.”
Imagine how different college life would be, I think, for both women and men, if restorative justice were the norm in cases of campus rape, rather than these ridiculous Title IX kangaroo courts, in which no one’s rights or mental health are well-served, neither the victims’ nor their perpetrators’.
Catherine Keener will reach out to me again after a young woman she loves is later raped. She wants to know how best to talk to her. Just listen, I say, and let her speak. Don’t offer palliatives or advice. She needs to work through the trauma herself, word by word. Your job is simply to absorb them.
On October 10, 2019—a year to the day after my divorce was finalized—I attend the premiere of the Modern Love TV series at the Museum of Love in SoHo, constructed specifically for the show, in which each of the nine episodes has been turned into an interactive experience for visitors. For my episode, you get to retreat into a confession booth and type your private secrets onto a public screen. Which is pretty much as on-brand for me as you can get. Will snaps a photo of me standing in front of it.
Premiere of Modern Love, © Will Dana
Justin and Kate are there as well, their brand-new baby strapped to Kate’s chest in a red velvet baby carrier, which catches the eye of a hugely pregnant Anne Hathaway, who asks where she bought it. “I mean…” Kate says, shaking her head and hugging me. Justin tears up again, just as he did when he first told me about Kate, fearing he’d lost her forever. He opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. This man is the normally extroverted CEO of a popular dating app. He’s never, in the four years I’ve now called him my friend, been rendered speechless.
“I know,” I say, feeling every word he’s not saying. Dev Patel is standing behind us. Andrew Scott, the hot priest from Fleabag, and Andy Garcia, who played my long-lost lover, are both in my sightline. Ann Leary, an old friend, is standing with us as well, having had her own love story of playing tennis with her husband Dennis adapted by Tina Fey and John Slattery. “It’s crazy.”
And for a moment—just a moment—my world feels not only in balance but breathtaking.
Of course, balance never lasts. That’s the recurring motif in each of our lives. Just as you have all three legs of your stool finally standing solid—work, love, health—one or more of them start to wobble. Or at least two of mine will, after the word breathtaking takes on a whole new meaning.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Make a Wish
MARCH 11–MAY 6, 2020
“Stay in Cameroon!” I tell my daughter, who has now graduated college and is serving in the Peace Corps. “You’ll be safer there.” The coronavirus has swept through China. Italy is on lockdown, its hospitals overburdened to the point of breaking. We’re next, that’s clear to everyone except the U.S. government. My daughter lives in Kamba, a small jungle village of a thousan
d without running water or electricity, which means she’s miles from the nearest big hospital but also from the nearest town and other humans who might infect her. My older son has been volunteering in Samos, Greece, doing laundry, cleaning dishes, and teaching war-traumatized refugees from Syria and elsewhere how to play guitar and record their own songs. His plan is to produce an album of these songs and pump the proceeds back into the organization after a quick jaunt through New Zealand to visit friends on his way back to the States. I urge him, too, to stay put in New Zealand, if he can afford to. “New Zealand has a female prime minister,” I say. He’ll be safe there. His job as the manager of a radio station near our home in Williamsburg won’t be here when he gets home anyway. He should maybe even look for woofing (working on an organic farm) opportunities, if possible.
Official edicts for social distancing in the United States are still days away, and those that do come down from mayors and governors will be haphazard at best. Tonight, on March 11, my fifty-fourth birthday, New York City’s bars are packed. My son’s public middle school is still open. Everyone’s still traveling back and forth to work on crowded subways, trains, and planes.
This morning, Will emailed our dinner guests and gave them an out if they felt uncomfortable showing up: “We’ve put Purell in the lasagna and Deb’s wearing an outfit made of Clorox wipes. But if you don’t want to risk it, we understand and won’t be offended.” Ten friends show up anyway to what we are all jokingly—but also presciently—calling the last supper.
“We’re going to look back on this night,” says my friend Al, “as the moment it all changed.” She is right. “Cancel everything!” the headlines will suddenly scream, as journalists fill in the leadership void. Can you believe Harvey Weinstein got sentenced to twenty-three years today, too? What a day. What a dizzying, crazy day.
It has become impossible to keep up with the news. One of my dinner guests, Amanda Brainerd, served on the Weinstein jury. “What???!!!!” Every mouth at the table is agape. What a crazy secret to have kept for two months. “How was it?”
“Traumatizing,” she says and leaves it at that. She is not allowed to say more.
While Will lights the candles on my cake, our phones start to buzz with notifications from various news organizations. Trump is apparently addressing the nation right now, calling Covid-19 a “foreign virus”; the NBA is canceling its season; the World Health Organization has declared Covid-19 a global pandemic; Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have the virus.
“Make a wish!” everyone says. I ponder: What do I want? Last week, if you’d asked me what I really wanted, I would have said simply, “A string of normal days.” Without qualification. Just a string of normal days. For me.
This week? Tonight? I look around at this circle of friends; at Will, holding the glowing cake; at my youngest, now thirteen, the last child still at home, gamely showing up to a tableful of grown-ups when all he wants to do is FaceTime with his friends. I think about my daughter tucked away under her mosquito netting in the jungle; about my older son, waking up on the other side of the earth. They are children of the world, my kids. I’m proud of them. None of them will ever be able to afford to take care of me in my dotage, but that’s okay. Let them spend their limited time caring for others, if that’s what drives them. When I’m old—if I’m lucky enough to grow old—I’ll have somehow made it to being old, and that will have been enough. My candles will one day burn out like everyone’s.
I close my eyes. Squeeze tight. Today’s wish cannot just be about me.
I’ve already been all-but quarantined this past month, having undergone foot surgery to remove a Morton’s neuroma from my right foot. Morton’s neuromas are a thickening of the tissue around one of the nerves leading to the toes, which causes a shocking, searing pain in the ball of the foot every time you step on it. One of the major risk factors for sprouting a Morton’s neuroma between your third and fourth toes, where mine is located, is walking in stiletto heels. I haven’t worn stilettos since college, plus the occasional wedding in my twenties and thirties, but the damage from that small window of adhering to female beauty standards had already become permanent. I could no longer walk without feeling like I was stepping on a pebble with every step.
Morton’s neuroma surgery is not nearly as bad as getting your ladyparts cut out. It was quick: in and out of the Hospital for Special Surgery in three hours. And it was paid, minus $800 in co-pays, by the affordable health insurance coverage now provided to me by my union, the Writers Guild of America. I qualified for WGA insurance this year by virtue of having been a staff writer on Emily in Paris, but my right to that insurance runs out after one year, not two, as I’d expected, and now I’m once again fucked.
I do not like this game of Frogger. I’ve been playing it for three decades, and yet somehow I still always end up missing the log by a fraction of an inch and plopping right back into the water. Then again, the game is rigged. That’s the whole point.
As of 2020, the WGA requires nearly $40,000 in yearly screenwriting income, which can get carried over from year to year, to qualify for union health insurance. If I’d earned $80,000 from working on Emily in Paris—which I should have—I’d be okay. But I didn’t. I fell $14,000 short of this number. Why? Because I did not insist on a written contract to help write the pilot in exchange for a job on the show and a script of my own. No, let’s take that one step further. I should have never agreed to give away my intellectual property for the chance of a middle-aged lady on-ramp.
In other words? At least half of this is my fault for being shortsighted, naïve, and a patsy. Darren knew both my ladyparts and ladypurse struggles intimately. We were constant companions and confidantes during each of them. In fact, the two of us were having lunch one day during one of our Emily in Paris brainstorming sessions in New York when I received yet another difficult call from a doctor two months after my bleed-out—a bright spot on my rib on a PET scan, which showed the “uptake” of a tumor,*1 meaning the area on my rib that hurt was “hot” with cell division—and I broke down in tears in front of him. “It’s too much,” I’d said. “I can’t catch a break.”
Darren knew I wanted to transition into full-time TV writing, both to fulfill a lifelong dream and to never have to think about paying outrageous COBRA fees ever again. More saliently, he knew I’d do anything for him, just as I’d always assumed he’d do anything for me. We’d been close friends since our big fat gay honeymoon to Paris in 2002, on our Shutterbabe research trip. When my dad died, he sent food. When he was thinking of having a baby, I offered my ovum. When my marriage broke up, he was there. When each of his two serious relationships broke up, I was there. We texted each other on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, no matter where we were in the world, which is more a thing that Jewish family members do for one another: “Chag sameach!” I’d write—happy holidays in Hebrew. “I love you.” I showed up at his ex-boyfriend’s son’s birthday, the one he helps raise. He showed up at my son’s bar mitzvah. We’d taken hours-long walks on beaches, through the streets of New York City, all over Paris. When he moved to New York from L.A. in the fall of 2014, I’d thrown him that twenty-person welcome party to which I’d first invited Gio. It had taken me weeks to plan, days to cook, right as I was starting my full-time job at Cafe, but I loved every second because I loved him.
October 2014, welcome dinner for Darren Star, Deborah Copaken, © Cristobal Vivar
Darren was, in essence, the brother I never had. The fact that we’d both grown up in the same hometown and had gone to the same high school; the fact that his little brother was once best friends with my little cousin, and therefore my aunt and his mother were friends: all just icing, when we discovered this, on our multilayered friendship cake.
He is conspicuously absent tonight as I stare at the flickering candles on my actual cake.
“Great news on Emily in Paris!” a TV executive friend will say to me, af
ter the show once again hits the top five on Netflix. “Congratulations!” Not wanting to poison the well, I’ll say a quick thank-you and try to change the subject, but my face will betray me.
In exchange for the nominal $5,000 I was paid to work on the pilot for Emily in Paris with Darren—instead of the $80,000 I was paid by a signatory company on Shutterbabe—I’d been promised two things: 1) a paid job in the writers’ room; and 2) my own episode to write: Again, a bargain I’d stupidly agreed to, trusting those promises would be kept.
Darren had followed through on the first promise, but only after serious nudging from my agent and at the lowest and least well-paid rung on the TV writing ladder: staff writer. He did not follow through on the latter. I kept asking which episode I’d be writing. He kept telling me to be patient. Months passed. I remained both patient and scriptless. Later, when seven of the scripts came in needing extensive polishing and Darren panicked, he asked me to punch up all of them. I switched out wooden lines such as:
EMILY
I don’t want half of you. I need all of you.
And turned them into…
EMILY
I’m not somebody who can share a crepe. I need the whole crepe.
…but without any “written by” credit on any of the scripts.
Two weeks before the show’s premiere as the number one streamed show on Netflix, my best friend from Paris, Marion—the editor at Paris Match with whom I was constantly consulting while working on both the pilot and the show; the woman to whom I’d introduced Darren during our 2002 research trip as the best friend described in Shutterbabe—will send me the Netflix publicity materials in an email, with my name omitted from the credits. “WTF?” she’ll write.
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