The Spinster Diaries

by Gina Fattore

  And I guess that’s fine.

  Nothing that a little more Journaling for Anxiety™ can’t cure.

  Or perhaps some opium and three glasses of wine in the day?

  I’m sure it’s fine, this new thing I’ve got, this new source of anxiety. I’ve already had the thoroughly invasive and humiliating ultrasound test they give you for this, and any day now I’m sure my Ivy League–educated gynecologist is going to call and give me the all-clear. Unfortunately, I’m not writing a frothy, delightful romantic comedy at the moment, so I’ve got nothing to distract me while I wait this one out. Maybe I should start something new? Open a Western front in the war against low-level medical anxiety? Maybe try to pitch a pilot? It’s almost the Fourth of July, aka summer, or as we call it here in LA…network development season.

  Sure, some people might find this second medical problem alarming.

  People who hate driving to Beverly Hills and are true hypochondriacs.

  You know, people like Mickey Sachs in Hannah and Her Sisters.

  Me, I’m not worried.

  Or maybe I am.

  Just a tiny bit.

  After all, this second diagnosis does seem to indicate that we have now veered away from the frothy, delightful romantic comedy terrain of Hannah and Her Sisters and wound up in the second act of a medical show. You know, the part when the doctors who are either sleeping with each other or have bad interpersonal skills meet up in one of their standing sets, and then one of them says…

  RIDICUOUSLY GOOD-LOOKING DOCTOR-GIRL

  Wait, we missed something…the patient also has THIS.

  And that raises the stakes and spins the story off in some new direction, and shit—those medical shows never end well, do they?

  At least not for the guest stars.

  The series regulars, the actual doctors, are usually fine—but in this story, I’m definitely not the doctor. No, I’m the patient, so maybe it’s finally time to panic. You know, call my lawyer, get my affairs in order, finish the only task that truly matters to me: my six-part miniseries documenting the career struggles, financial hardships, and romantic difficulties of Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction. It wasn’t just my birthday last week—it was also hers. I turned thirty-eight, which now puts me officially in my late thirties. She turned…254. That’s sort of funny, right? That we’re both Geminis. Unlike me, the young Miss Frances Burney wasn’t doomed from the start to wind up a thirty-eight-year-old spinster. She chose to be one. The girl had options. Or at least one option. The historical record is very clear on this point: When she was twenty-two, about to turn twenty-three, a short, sensible guy named Thomas Barlow totally wanted to marry Fanny, but she flat-out turned him down with the eighteenth-century version of the It’s Not You, It’s Me speech—which is basically the same as the twenty-first-century version, only during the “It’s not you” part, you reassure the person that you have no doubts of their worthiness, and in the “It’s me” section, you give them leave to think you singular, odd, queer, nay, even whimsical.

  No one in Fanny’s immediate circle of family and friends was happy about this oddly stubborn, pigheaded decision of hers. Her older sister, Hetty, was particularly pissed. He seemed nice and sensible, this Thomas Barlow. Why the negativity? Her suspiciously young-looking musician father refused to play the will-they-won’t-they game for a while, which makes sense because the guy was a busy man. He had eight children to support, a cranky, passive-aggressive second wife, music lessons to give, books to write, and in his spare time he liked to hang out with socialites and famous people no one today has really heard of, like Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, and David Garrick. But eventually, on behalf of the patriarchy, he jumped in and picked a side. He desired Fanny not to be “peremptory” in rejecting the poor guy; and after that, misery ensued. So much misery that one of Fanny’s biographers, who shall remain nameless because in my opinion she’s kind of a judgmental bitch, accuses Fanny of being—again, at this critical juncture in her life—“a trifle hysterical.” Then she goes on to totally diss her for being weak.

  But if you ask me, she was actually being quite strong.

  Faced with the very real prospect of having to marry some strange, inarticulate guy she barely knew, Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction, did indeed become a bit hysterical. She lost it. She wigged out. That is a matter of historical fact. It’s not open for debate. But once the crisis was over, she did not hesitate. She did not falter.

  She chose to stay home, be a spinster, and write something.

  Something called Evelina, which people still read 225 years later.

  Not a lot of people.

  Not tons.

  Just a few mentally unbalanced TV writers and assorted English majors at East Coast liberal arts colleges.

  Which isn’t bad when you think about it.

  You know, in literary-immortality terms.

  And when she was two-thirds done with her bid for literary immortality, the young Miss Frances Burney, spinster, of the parish of St. Martin in the Fields, enlisted the help of her younger brother, Charles—aka Carlos, who would eventually become one of many black sheep in the Burney family, but at this point in our story was basically just a college freshman who drank too much and liked to gamble—and he delivered the manuscript of said novel-in-progress to Thomas Lowndes, bookseller, of Fleet Street, and a couple days later Lowndes wrote back, thinking the author of this anonymous work was a guy, and said…

  Sir

  I’ve read & like the Manuscript & if you’ll send the rest I’ll soon run it over.

  Which reads almost exactly as if it had been sent by my agent on his Blackberry, except that, you know, it’s very positive and encouraging, and it seems to imply that someone has actually written something and that someone else is going to disseminate that work to the general public in an incredibly expeditious fashion, thereby skipping the traditional Hollywood step of no one ever getting back to you about your screenplay and you just sitting around waiting and wondering for months on end. And that, my friend, is the one hundred percent true story of how Frances Burney invented the chick-lit genre and actually became, as Virginia Woolf once called her, the Mother of English Fiction. Even though I’m sure we all wished she’d invented some cooler, hipper, more impressive-sounding genre, like, I don’t know, the buddy action comedy.

  MONDAY, JULY 17, 2006

  OKAY, SO NOW nearly a month has gone by and tons of shit has happened, and I haven’t written any of it down, and that could be a sign that I’m really busy and my mental health is improving. Or, guess what else it could be?

  What will you find if you start Googling the phrase “olfactory groove meningioma”? A short list of symptoms. Check this out…

  Loss of smell (anosmia)

  Subtle personality changes

  Mild difficulty with memory

  Euphoria

  Diminished concentration

  Did you catch that last one? Diminished concentration. I think I might have that. I’m reasonably certain I don’t have the euphoria. I’m still waiting—hopefully, as in filled with hope—for the subtle personality changes, but I’m starting to think I might have the diminished concentration.

  Although it’s not like I’ve just been sitting around doing nothing this whole time.

  I have been rather busy.

  A couple weeks ago, I got my first story assignment, and last week I wrote an outline. This makes me sound like a conscientious, efficient sixth grader, but I swear that’s how we actually do things in the world of professional television writing. The story I got wasn’t one I particularly liked, but whatever. I made the best of it. Very often in professional TV writing, you get assigned a story you don’t particularly care for, but it’s your job to write it, so you soldier on and try to make the best of it and make it your own. Sometimes, by the end of this process, once the script is finished and shot and it airs on national television, or sometimes even years later when you walk to your mailbox and fin
d a foreign-residual check, you eventually discover that you don’t mind the story so much. But in this case, the story in question has a lot of fart jokes in it—more than I generally like to have recourse to, as an artist—so I doubt that in my heart of hearts I will ever reach a point when I truly love this story.

  Nonetheless, I soldiered on.

  I turned in the outline last Friday, and this morning, this Monday morning, mind you, my boss spent a good fifteen minutes standing in the doorway of my office having the obligatory How Was Your Weekend chat and discussing the cocktail party we’re all required to go to tonight at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, and never once did he mention this outline.

  It was kinda like the whole thing never happened.

  Like he never assigned the outline.

  Like I never turned it in.

  Like we were just a couple of TV-writer acquaintances having a chat at the car wash while waiting for our foreign cars to be detailed.

  And, sure, I suppose I could have broached the topic. The opening was certainly there, what with all the obligatory talk about our weekends, but it seemed, etiquette-wise, like the ball was in his court.

  Him being the boss and all.

  So I said nothing, and he said nothing, and then after a while too much time had passed to even think about bringing it up. At that point, the outline basically became like this one-night stand neither one of us wanted to acknowledge. And, being a spinster and all, I’m not supergood at one-night stands, so I changed the subject to how I might possibly be a little late getting back from lunch Wednesday without explicitly explaining why—you know, because I have to drive to Beverly Hills and have another MRI of my head.

  Can you believe it’s been six months already?

  I know I can’t. Six months since I made the mature, responsible, and thoroughly informed medical decision to ignore my brain tumor and focus all my time and energy on writing a romantic comedy screenplay. You remember my screenplay, right? The one I wrote back in the spring with so much assistance from that how-to-write-a-screenplay book, Rules for Romantic Comedy? Well, this probably won’t come as a huge shock to you, but it looks like everybody who is anybody has now passed on my screenplay.

  Yes, it’s official. The two biggest Jennifers represented by my agency aren’t interested. So I guess that dream is over. No chariot awaits to swoop me out of TV and into the more prestigious realm of features. I guess I’m sad about it—I can’t really tell. I mean, I did put a shitload of time and energy into that thing. The story was inspired by something kinda-sorta real that actually did happen to my friend Kitten after her mom died, and even though I broke Rule #14 and kept the True Love Interest off-screen until page twenty-five, I thought it had a lot of potential. In retrospect—now that a certain Meryl Streep movie has come out and made a bazillion dollars at the box office—I can see that it probably wasn’t the smartest idea to dress my heroine up in baggy sweaters and have her carry a tote bag. Duh, right? What was I thinking? Once again, I seem to have underestimated how much people seem to give a shit about really expensive shoes.

  But whatever. Moving on. That’s all you can do, right? As penance for this mistake, I broke down a couple weeks ago—like a prisoner with Stockholm syndrome—and bought myself a new pair of $210 shoes to wear to the insane cocktail party that I am required to go to tonight at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena. My only consolation is that my new friend Jill will also be attending.

  Jill is the other female TV writer on the show who does not wear $500 shoes or sleep with actors, and somehow, over the course of the past month, she and I seem to have become friends. In romantic comedy terms, this is not as good as having an actual Love Interest enter the picture, but a workplace best friend is clearly a major step forward (e.g., Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Expensive Shoes).

  Jill’s slightly older than I am, which makes her almost ten years older than the shoe girls, and instead of being a pithy gay man, she’s a married-with-kids straight lady from the Valley. When we first met, she asked me if I was married—which totally threw me for a loop. I always assume my spinster thing shows, but maybe it’s only detectable to other spinsters. I’m not quite sure how I managed to secure Jill as a valuable addition to the cast of my personal, private rom-com, except that at the end of my first day in the writers’ room (after she’d already been working with the shoe girls for an entire week, and I was still really jet-lagged because I had just gotten back from China), she walked right up to me and she said…

  JILL

  Thank god you’re here! Now they can make fun of you for being square.

  That was our Meet Cute, and since then we’ve been going to lunch together every day at the commissary just outside the lot, the one with the better salad bar, where we chatter away for an hour about books or people we both know or other jobs we’ve had before that were better than this one.

  Jill seems to have had a lot of those.

  Me, not so many.

  No, all of my previous jobs in TV have been pretty much exactly like this one: strange cliques in the writers’ room, bosses who don’t acknowledge the existence of your outline, actors who don’t want to say their lines, etc., etc., &c. Back when I was just starting out, back in my long-lost early thirties, I tended to get super upset about stuff like that—but, god, that’s exhausting. And time-consuming. Who’s got time for that, plus a brain tumor and a fibroid near my left ovary—which, by the way, is exactly what that gynecological thing turned out to be. Unlike the brain surgeon, my gynecologist didn’t really give me any “options” for dealing with it. She basically told me to come back in six months and have another ultrasound. More watch and wait. More driving to Beverly Hills. Which I have to do again next Wednesday for the brain tumor; only now I’ve gotta do it from Burbank, on my lunch hour. So, that led me to tell Jill the full and complete truth about the brain tumor.

  And I also kinda told Dave, the writers’ assistant.

  But that was mostly just an accident.

  You see, Dave is very quiet. After six or seven weeks now of knowing him, I think I can safely say that’s his main defining characteristic, and so as Jill and I were finishing up our brain tumor walk ’n’ talk, I didn’t realize at first that he was sitting right there in the writers’ room, dutifully waiting for us all to come back from lunch. So I just kept talking about the brain tumor—how it was discovered, how I have to have another MRI on Wednesday, what a pain in the ass it is to drive to Beverly Hills, should I take Coldwater coming back, etc., etc., &c. You know, as if Dave weren’t there. Which is an incredibly rude thing to do, and it’s even ruder when the person you’re doing it to is an assistant, which I used to be and so was Jill, and so that makes one more thing we’ve bonded over: being nice to the assistants, relatively inexpensive footwear, and a conviction that it’s just nicer if the showrunner acknowledges the existence of the outline you turned in. He doesn’t have to love it or anything. He just has to acknowledge that it exists. Like I always try to do with other human beings, except in this one instance when I was kinda rude to Dave, the writers’ assistant, who is the last person in the world I would ever want to offend because of my personal credo about always being nice to the assistants and because—well, I can’t quite explain this, but I feel sort of strangely drawn to Dave. He is not as young as I first thought when I met him back in June, and he seems to have read a lot of books written before 1900, and it makes me cringe whenever our boss turns to him every five seconds in the room and says…

  SHOWRUNNER

  (panicked, urgent)

  Did you get that, Dave?

  Because I know, having talked to him a couple times after work, that he is incredibly well-read, extremely intelligent, and amazingly overqualified for the job he currently holds, so I just assume that he’s gotten everything down. After all, it’s his job to sit there all day and type up everything we say, and most of the stuff we say:

  a) isn’t that brilliant

  b) gets repeated a zillion times, an
d

  c) could easily be reconstructed on the off-chance that he did not get it down because he was instant-messaging with the PAs about the coffee order or buying concert tickets online.

  So, that’s odd, right? This inexplicable pull I feel toward Dave, the writers’ assistant. Or maybe it is not so inexplicable. Maybe it’s totally and completely one hundred percent explicable. Because even though it’s not really fair to generalize about people based on how they look and act and talk and dress and where they went to college and what sort of concerts they buy tickets to—well, if we’re going to play that game, then I guess I would have to say that Dave, the writers’ assistant, looks and acts and talks and dresses just exactly like the sort of person who might have gone to college with me at the less-famous Ivy League school I attended. Most likely, he would have lived in one of the cool dorms that didn’t have air conditioning, and during college he would have dated one of my friends, and then after college he would have come with her to one of the parties my roommate and I used to have back in Brooklyn, and guess what?

  He is that sort of person.

  In fact, he’s exactly that sort of person, and I’m not just imagining that and projecting all this stuff onto him because I am:

  a) crazy

  b) brain-tumor-ridden, and

  c) filled with nostalgia for the days before I moved to LA and got ahead in the entertainment industry.

  No, I know this for a fact because one of the times we were chatting after work, he said, and I quote…

  DAVE

  My girlfriend knows someone who knows you.

  And this turned out to be one hundred percent true.

  His girlfriend knows my friend Leila, who knows my friend Ed, who used to date my roommate when I lived in Brooklyn. And even though I didn’t actually know Leila back when I lived in Brooklyn, Leila also happens to be really good friends with Ed’s old roommate, Harry. And you know how Harry and Leila actually know each other? You know what socioeconomic force brought them together?