The Spinster Diaries

by Gina Fattore

  And this was not any sort of sex scene.

  I know because I wrote it—or at least I wrote the first draft of it, before it got rewritten by the showrunner and possibly one or two of the shoe girls. I’m not totally clear on how the rewrite process works around here, but whatever. Some shows you get to be involved in your own rewrites. Some shows you don’t. I’ve worked both ways, and while there is a certain amount of artistic satisfaction that can be derived from having actually written the thing that says “Written by You” in the opening credits, in a way I think it’s better—if you happen to have any sort of tumor—to be working on the second type of show. That way you don’t have to be too involved with the proceedings past the first round of notes. Sure, there are meetings to go to: production meetings, tone meetings, casting sessions. But the main thing you, the professional TV writer, have to do at these meetings is pretend you actually wrote the script and answer questions about it, and nowadays I’m an old hand at that kind of stuff. I can do it in my sleep. That’s what makes this particular job such a good one for a girl with a brain tumor. Because at this job, once you turn in your second draft, you can—in good conscience—wash your hands of the whole thing and start concentrating full-time on your list of questions to ask the brain surgeon.

  The brain surgeon predicted this might happen.

  Not that I would get kicked off the set. No one could have predicted that. I swear I was just standing there doing nothing wrong. No, he said that people tend to realize in the car, when they are driving home from the brain surgeon, that there were a zillion questions they totally meant to ask, and so he told me I could call him if I thought of any. Originally, I was going to do that. I was just going to call. But when I tried that, Cynthia, the very nice lady who answered the phone, said that it would be better if I faxed the questions. So that set me back a few weeks, because I don’t know if this is true of the general population of brain tumor sufferers, but if you are a professional writer who is used to being graded and judged and criticized and “noted” and sometimes even openly mocked for the things you put down on paper—well, sometimes it can be very hard to put things down on paper.

  Except when you’re Journaling for Anxiety™.

  Then naturally you can just write whatever the fuck you want in a totally stream-of-consciousness style with no rules you have to follow and zero percent chance of getting fired.

  Of course, now that I think about it, that’s also true in my current job. I actually can’t be fired right now. I mean I can, but since I have that pay-or-play clause in my contract, it’s pretty unlikely. It’s not like my first script went over that badly. I got rewritten, sure, but some of it is still me—some romantic banter on a rooftop, a few lines here and there—so I should probably seize this moment to do a quick TV-writer victory lap. Apparently, there’s this condition called Imposter Syndrome, where you walk around all the time feeling like you are not the successful doctor, lawyer, or co-executive producer that people within your industry widely perceive you to be, and that any second now, you will be exposed as a complete fraud. I think I’ve got that. You know, in addition to a fibroid on my left ovary and a brain tumor pressing on my frontal lobe. That’s why I turned to leave this morning when the first AD asked everyone to clear the set for the “private” rehearsal. Leaving was my first instinct, my gut reaction—but then she stopped me and said…

  FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR

  Not you. You can stay. You’re the writer.

  And an actor who happened to be standing nearby jokingly agreed with her. She was all like…

  SUPERSWEET ACTOR-GIRL

  Yeah, you’re the writer.

  So for about ten seconds, I felt kind of cool.

  Confident.

  Capable.

  In charge.

  Until another one of the actors crossed the set, walked straight toward me, and for a split second I thought maybe—just maybe—she was going to say “Hello” or “Good morning,” but instead she just asked me, point-blank, to leave.

  So I did.

  In the end, they weren’t very good.

  My questions for the brain surgeon.

  Still, they had to be asked.

  They had to be asked because once you break down like a crazy person and start telling everyone in your immediate vicinity about your brain tumor—everybody at work, your old college friends, your married sisters in the Midwest—well, then you start to get a lot of advice about your brain tumor. Serious conversations start to happen. Tons of emails fly back and forth. And after about, let’s say…I don’t know…five weeks’ worth of these serious conversations, you start to think maybe—just maybe—you should go ahead and have brain surgery and get the fucking thing removed because either:

  a) it would go fine, and then you could put all this behind you, or

  b) you would die, and then you could put all this behind you, or

  c) you would end up a vegetable attached to a bunch of machines somewhere in the Midwest.

  But in all these scenarios, the serious conversations would stop.

  And what a relief that would be.

  They all start out exactly the same. The first thing everybody wants to know is how I found out about the brain tumor. That’s usually when I try to explain to them about Hannah and Her Sisters, the big band music, the series of tests leading to a brain scan, etc., etc., &c. But a surprisingly large number of people can’t remember the plot of Hannah and Her Sisters. Often, they confuse it with Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is also good but doesn’t have any TV writers or brain tumors in it, just a rabbi with a degenerative eye disease. Of course, in Hannah, Mickey’s “tumor” isn’t actually a tumor; it’s just a spot on his X-ray that freaks him out and causes him to reexamine his life and think about becoming a Catholic. I, sadly, am already Catholic. Not practicing or anything, but it’s safe to say that I am currently in possession of way more confirmation names than a neurotic-writer type generally has in a Woody Allen movie. Plus, my tumor actually is a tumor, and in retrospect it is kinda surprising that I found out about it, because I’m not a well-known hypochondriac who goes running to doctors at the drop of a hat. The only reason I broke down and called my ridiculously suave ENT last December was that my ears got all clogged up—like when you’re on an airplane—and they wouldn’t unclog even though I took an antihistamine, and then I began to be plagued by these weird vertigo incidents. Plus, that same week, while I was co–executive-producing the last episode of an already canceled TV show, getting tons of network notes on my pilot, and trying to figure out how the fuck I would possibly rewrite it for the nineteenth time, I threw up in the private bathroom attached to my gigantic office on the Sunset/Gower lot. That’s when I finally cracked and called the ENT. But he’s in complete agreement with Brain Surgeon #1 that a tiny little benign brain tumor pressing on my olfactory nerve wouldn’t actually cause any of those weird things to happen. Nope. Apparently, throwing up in your fancy office and vertigo are both signs of stress. That was a new one on me. Throwing up, sure. People are constantly throwing up in Hollywood, not just the actresses with eating disorders. But vertigo?

  Anyway, that’s question number one about the brain tumor: origin story. After that, people always go straight to cell phones and Diet Coke. Seriously, Diet Coke comes up all the time, and if I were the people who make Diet Coke, I might want to look into that. Me, I’ve always preferred coffee. Or, if not always, at least since the early nineties, when I moved from New York to Chicago and developed an obsessive crush on a goateed latte guy who worked at the Starbucks on Diversey. Before that, I did drink my fair share of Diet Coke, but it’s never been my drug of choice, so I highly doubt it caused the brain tumor. In truth, I will probably never know what caused the brain tumor.

  Although I suspect it may have been season three of the teenage melodrama.

  Kidding. Totally kidding.

  Season three of the teenage melodrama really wasn’t that bad. For instance, no one ever asked me t
o leave the set. That never happened. Although, once someone asked me how much money I made. Very pointedly. In front of like a zillion people. And that was worse, in a lot of ways, than being asked to leave the set, because at least when you are asked to leave the set, you get to leave the set. And what a glorious treat that is. I mean, I know it sounds glamorous and all, but in my experience, the set is basically just a place where people walk right up to you and criticize your work in an incredibly blunt, inelegant manner, and sometimes they even ask you to redo your work right there, on the spot, while the entire crew is standing around staring at you and waiting to shoot something. Plus, there is often an out-doorsy, camping-type element to the proceedings. Like maybe you’re in a field somewhere and there’s a creek nearby and the weather’s probably shitty, so you better be wearing sensible shoes, wool socks, etc. Basically, the whole thing is just not very me, which is why I’m still sitting here Journaling for Anxiety™ even though it’s after 8 now. The crew is probably done lighting, and I’m sure the actors have been through hair and makeup, and pretty soon they will start shooting the scene that has been privately rehearsed. Presumably the actor who asked me to leave feels good about having made her point—whatever that was—and it’s not like she expects me to not return to the set ever again over the course of my episode.

  Or maybe she does.

  Now that I think about it, that very same actor also came to see my boss last Friday and let it be known in no uncertain terms that she really hates my script.

  But for a wide variety of reasons, I didn’t take that too personally.

  You see, it’s really not all that uncommon for an actor on a long-running American TV show to “hate” a script, and if you’re lucky enough to be a writer on a long-running American TV show, it’s inevitable that one of yours is going to get hated. You would think—because of that law of physics with the equal and opposite reactions, and all that—that the reverse would be true as well. You know, that every once in a while one of your scripts would get loved. But that almost never happens. Being hated is the far more common reaction, and all you can really do when it’s your turn to be hated is suck it up and take it, and that’s pretty easy to do because—well, because they pay you a lot to be hated. Also, if you do a little digging, you will generally discover that the reason the actor in question really hates your script is less about you—your talents as a writer, the nuances of your storytelling, the rhythms of your dialogue—and more about There Is a Dog in the Scene or Why Is the Call Time So Early? or I Don’t Want to Work with That Other Actor or There Is a Party I Would Like to Go to That Night So Could We Cut

  That Scene Entirely? Stuff like that. On the teenage melodrama, I used to file all these complaints under a category called Petty Bitchery, and if you are a person who is not descended from a long line of rich people and you have to, you know, work for a living, then you’ve probably had some doings with Petty Bitchery. It’s very big in offices. Super popular in workplaces all across the country. And so I’m sure that explains why that actor asked me to leave the set this morning.

  It didn’t really have anything to do with me.

  She was just having a bad day, or maybe she wants to leave early today or wait…shit. I think I just figured something out. What if this was one of those “test” situations where someone behaves kind of shitty to you and the thing you’re supposed to do is behave shitty right back to them, and then they respect you? Fuck. This has happened to me before on other shows, and it’s always had to be explained to me after the fact that I have botched the situation by not behaving shitty back to the other person. You’d think that I would learn from these mistakes, but somehow I never do.

  Shit.

  Shit.

  Shit.

  I should probably go.

  Long List of Questions to Ask the Brain Surgeon

  How many times have you performed this exact surgery?

  Is the tumor hard to reach or in any way complicated to remove?

  Does the surgery become more complicated the longer I wait to have

  it?

  Could the tumor be affecting my spelling? Like the other day for a second I couldn’t remember how to spell “knot.” And right now I’m not too sure about “affecting.” Should it be “effecting”? In general, I’ve found it harder over the past couple years to remember how to spell words that sound exactly the same but are spelled differently. Homophones, I believe they’re called. Like they’re/there/their, etc.

  Or—and I think this is the more likely scenario—is the above paragraph just an example of an already anxious person who is obsessed with words becoming more and more anxious because now she knows she has a brain tumor growing inside her head?

  Is the abovementioned anxiety a good reason to have the surgery sooner rather than later?

  At which hospital would you perform the surgery?

  What is the recovery like?

  How long would I need someone to come stay with me? I live alone, and I would have to ask one of my sisters to come from the Midwest—they are non-pros who have many kids, responsibilities, etc.

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2006

  THE HOLIDAYS ARE a bad time to have brain surgery, right?

  I’ve seen what TV writers are like at that time of year. Also what actors, network executives, agents, and entertainment lawyers are like—and I can only imagine that brain surgeons are roughly the same.

  They are all distracted and thinking about their ski vacations.

  So…no. Not happening. I have a well-documented, middle-sister tendency to be weak and indecisive and constantly iffing and butting about things, but on this point I’m holding firm…

  I’m not having brain surgery during the holidays.

  I just can’t do it. It can’t be done. Both my sisters happen to have vacation that time of year, so it makes sense on a purely practical level. The older one is a teacher, and the younger one is a nurse, and so they both, you know, do good things for society for which they receive very little money. Bizarre, huh? We don’t get much of that here in Hollywood. Also, they are both moms, and moms have this tendency to want to schedule shit way in advance. Vacations, major surgeries…they like to pin things down, get them on the books. Spinsters, on the other hand, prefer to go with the flow. Maybe wait till April.

  And the brain surgeon totally agreed with me on this.

  When he called me back to answer all those crazy questions I had faxed him, he did concede that anxiety about having brain surgery might be a good reason to have brain surgery sooner rather than later. Score! But he also thought having brain surgery could easily wait until the end of the current TV season. That was his professional opinion as both a brain surgeon and as someone who was once a brain-surgery consultant on a TV show. Clearly Brain Surgeon #1 gets me. That seems obvious, right? I’m not sure that’s essential to the brain-surgery process, but I don’t think it can possibly hurt, so for a while there I started making these brave, confident pronouncements about how I was going to have brain surgery in April, and that seemed to solve a lot of my second-act problems and move my story forward in an interesting way.

  It’s not a huge plot move, but it definitely counts as a Temporary Triumph (Rule #13) because it put a stop to all the incredibly boring, repetitive scenes I kept having with various supporting players who were pestering me nonstop about having brain surgery.

  My married sisters in the Midwest.

  My college friends.

  My new workplace best friend Jill.

  Even a couple of the shoe girls.

  Emails.

  Phone calls.

  Random encounters in the kitchen while I’m trying to figure out how to work the new Keurig machine.

  Basically, by telling everyone about my brain tumor, I inadvertently created this huge cast of female supporting characters who feel like it’s their raison d’être to pester me all the time about having brain surgery. Like my older, Hannah-like sister keeps pointing out how January is a superg
ood time for her; and my little sister sent me this long email about how she was trying to get pregnant, and if it worked, by the time April rolled around she would be way too pregnant to come stay with me while I had brain surgery. Then, being the youngest sister, she closed with a suggestion that maybe I, the middle sister, didn’t really want her to come stay with me while I had brain surgery.

  Maybe I really wanted my older, more Hannah-like sister to come stay with me.

  Which is totally the kind of shit that happens when a story has three sisters.

  In Chekhov.

  In Woody Allen.

  And definitely in real life.

  So that’s when I suggested February as a compromise position—what were middle sisters born to do except compromise?—and I guess I can live with February.

  I preferred April.

  But whatever.

  It’s October now.

  Or, as they would call it in Hannah and Her Sisters, with white letters on a black title card…“Autumn Chill.”

  Fall isn’t exactly great here in LA. It’s not like there are wharfs you can sit on where the wind gently blows your hair, and it never gets cold enough to wear a super cute navy blue duffle coat, but if you are on a show that’s not completely imploding—low ratings, cast mutinies, entire scripts thrown out by the network at the very last minute—October can actually be a pretty okay time of year.

  In TV terms, it’s when the last of the pilots get pitched and the first of the showrunners get fired. In fashion terms, it becomes possible, if your calves are thin enough, to wear boots with a skirt. There’s a lot to live for in LA in October—particularly, if you are not a showrunner who has just gotten fired or a person who has sold a pilot to a major television network. I feel for those people, I do. Especially the ones who sold a pilot this past development season, because now they all have to start working on the pilots they sold this past development season. They have to do all the super annoying pilot-related shit I was doing last year at this time—writing outlines, rewriting outlines, getting notes, etc., etc., &c.—whereas the lazy, unmotivated, brain-tumor-ridden people who didn’t even try to sell a pilot this year, those people get to actively enjoy October in LA. And if they’re not on a show that’s imploding—or maybe they are but no one’s specifically asked them to do anything about the fact that it’s imploding, and it’s not really their job to intrude on lots of top-secret meetings that may be happening behind closed doors—well, then they can just spend a lot of sunny October days sitting on the front porch watching the studio tour go by, chatting with the twentysomething assistants about their love lives and occasionally, when there’s time, working on their ill-fated, six-part miniseries about Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction.