Screw You Dolores

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Which reminds me, not so long ago I was in an elevator in New York carrying a Nike shopping bag, as I’d bought a new pair of trainers from Niketown. (It’s a town full of Nikes!) A young woman got into the lift, took one look at the slogan on the side of my bag, and started to laugh.

  ‘Just do eet?’ she read, in a thick, foreign accent. ‘This is good. Funny.’

  I don’t know where she had been for the past 100 years, but she was in good shape — so, take that, Nike.

  * We’re teaching babies to google on their iPads, yet no one has thought to invent the no-risk slimming tablet that looks, feels and tastes like kettle-fry crisps? Oy.

  1. I Did It Already.

  2. I Didn’t Do It.

  3. You Do It For Me.

  4. We Did It!

  5. We Did?

  6. I’m Sorry, And You Are …?

  Letter from PARIS, PART ONE

  So, I’m sitting outside a café in Montmartre, Paris, a newly minted 50-year-old who only looks 35, drinking a glass of rosé and typing the first words of my eleventh book — and that’s the truth.

  Well, the bit about being in Paris and being 50 is the truth. And the bit about this being my eleventh book.

  But maybe not the bit about only looking 35. (Although if it was darker and YOU were drinking the rosé …)

  Also, the first time I typed the bit about being outside a café in Montmartre drinking a rosé, I was actually sitting inside my apartment around the corner, eyeing up the cold cup of coffee I had made for myself earlier and hadn’t liked the first time around.

  Eight of those eleven books of mine have been completely made-up (they’re called ‘novels’), and it occurred to me, as I had a little sip of that disgusting cold coffee, that I might be a little rusty at sticking to the facts. They never were my strong point.

  On this occasion, however, there was at least something I could do about it. After writing the thing that was actually a fib, I cleverly turned it into the truth by leaving the apartment, going to the café and ordering a glass of rosé, and re-typing the first words of my eleventh book.

  I know I said I wasn’t going to write a single thing during the Year of Me, but actually I’m not sure what else to do with my fingers. The Devil finds work for idle hands, the nuns always used to say — which reminds me, I have such a bone to pick with those nuns. If they’d thought to tell me that the reason you need to speak French is because one day you might go to Paris and want to buy socks, then perhaps I might have shown more interest in the lessons. As it was I used to sit in the back of the class and play gin rummy. Well, listen up all 14-year-olds: gin rummy gets you nowhere in this town, but speaking the lingo sure would come in handy.

  Oh, my fingers are out of practice on the typing front. I’m a bit tired now. Perhaps I’ll have another little sip of rosé to keep me going. Oh, and some crisps. They still give you free crisps over here! Plain salted. Yum. Oh. Not salted enough. But then we do call salt ‘Lynch Dipping Sauce’ in my family, so most things fall into the not-salted-enough category. Even anchovies. And feta cheese. And indeed some brands of salt.

  So, why am I not making up my eleventh book, I hear you ask? Why am I insisting on telling the truth? Sort of. (I’m making that up, too, of course. You might just as well be asking, ‘Who the hell is she, and how hardened are her arteries?’ Or, worse, ‘What’s an anchovy?’)

  Well, it’s all to do with turning 50, which I used to think was really old but now I think is fabulous. Plus, of course, I managed to wangle a way to have it happen in Paris, which cast something of a rosy glow (rosé glow, more likely) over the whole affair.

  My intention was to not write anything during the trip to Paris, and perhaps for the whole year, because the truth was that I was a tiny bit over it. It’s a funny thing being a novelist, because you’re making up things that you hope other people will believe, which takes much longer than you would imagine. There are no existing facts to guide you, no plot to copy: you’re simply picking details out of thin air and patching them together, which often involves weeks of unravelling and re-knitting plus a lot of chocolate biscuits.

  You, the reader, might knock off a book in a single day and think it is as light as air or deliciously simple, but it might have taken a year to write, and in fact been quite complicated to put together. The character you so loved as a reader, for example, might have turned out to be a real tosser in the first version of the book. The author might have originally killed him off by page 42 for being an utter twat, only for her to get to page 242 and realise he was actually quite essential to the plot, so then she must go back 200 pages and change every single one of them to make him more like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman and less like Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.

  It’s complicated.

  But when you’re not making things up, when you are telling the truth, sort of, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, and no one can turn around and say snootily, ‘Oh, that would never happen’, because it already has. In other words, making things up is hard and takes a long time, but telling the truth is easy and quicker. Also, as it turns out I really like writing, and it’s been quite hard not to do it.

  The difference with this book is that I’m writing it for me — and for you, of course. I don’t, as we speak, even have a publisher; I’m doing it sheerly for the love of writing it. This is a luxury. And it’s one that being 50 has delivered to me.

  Who among us ever gets to do anything just for the love of it? Very few, that’s who.

  I probably have a better life than many, because I can earn a living without going to an office, I have a lovely husband, I’m currently in excellent health, and most of my clothes fit me, if you don’t count shoes.

  But the truth is that as I neared the end of my forties I felt increasingly anxious that I wasn’t enjoying my life enough, that I was worrying more about what I was getting wrong than what I was getting right, that other people kept telling me I had the perfect life when it didn’t feel perfect to me.

  My novels sell around the world, which is indeed a wonderful thing, but they don’t sell in such big numbers that I can retire to Cap Ferrat. In fact, sometimes the numbers get smaller, rather than bigger. Sometimes I only break even on a book, instead of coming out on top, financially. Sometimes I feel the pressure to be better at what I do, even though I’m already trying as hard as I am able.

  I’m not special in this way — I think a lot of us feel like that, and when I was younger it didn’t bug me so much, but by the extreme end of my forties it bugged me big-time.

  On one occasion I confessed to a dear friend and long-time supporter, as he held my hand while I sobbed into my teacup, that I wasn’t sure I loved writing anymore. ‘Of all the things you’ve said that break my heart,’ he said, ‘that breaks it the most.’ What my friend went on to say, as I ploughed through the gingernuts, was that it upset him deeply to see me achieve so much success yet still feel that it wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t good enough. Well, clearly, it upset me, too.

  But the feeling that emerged over the next few days was not one of upset. It was one of laminosity. Yes, I made that word up, because ‘lameness’ looks funny written down, but what I ended up feeling was lame.

  It’s lame to be 49 and obsessing over what you haven’t done. It really is. It’s lame to still be seeking approval from agents or publishers or parents or friends or parents of friends or neighbours or colleagues or bosses or anyone who in the end can’t change the way you feel about yourself. Only you can do that.

  Oh mon Dieu! What is it about Parisians and smoking? Did you know it is still a grown-up and clever thing to do over here?

  Right in my face, you skinny little madame sitting not only next to me but practically on top of me! What, my obvious coughing and comic waving in front of my face does not affect you in any way? It should! It is not lame to be affronted by second-hand smokage! Although your boyfriend is cute, so I won’t chase you away just yet
.

  Where was I?

  More crisps? Oui. Merci.

  So I was disappointed with my overseas book sales, and sometimes only broke even, but on the other hand, that might be because I’d spent one month in Tuscany or two in New York, and did I mention I never have to go to an office?

  Plus, I write two Woman’s Day columns that readers tell me they appreciate and that I actually do love writing.

  Success isn’t about money, I figured out as 50 hovered in the air, or even acceptance — it’s about LIVING. It’s about having a happy life and feeling content and trying to make each day a good one.

  And so, in the year I turned 50, here I am in Paris, not writing a single thing.

  Oh, apart from this.

  And my columns, because they do actually pay the bills.

  And some postcards that will lie in the bottom of my suitcase, and that I will discover only when I am back home again.

  The point is that I can’t be 50 and whine about what I’m not. This is it, people. This is what I’ve made of myself. And you might not like it or you might think you could do better, but this is the best I have to be getting on with and — do you know what? — it ain’t all bad. I’m in Paris!

  The only slight glitch is that you know how I said the Ginger would go home if he got a job but that was unlikely to happen?

  It happened.

  Turns out my second month in Paris is going to be spent on my own.

  It’ll be fine! It’ll be character-building!

  A 50-year-old woman should be able to spend a month on her own in a foreign country far from home where she doesn’t even speak the language despite several attempts to learn.

  What, me? Worried? Non!

  PS: Yes, I do eat crisps quickly, monsieur. Want to make something of it?

  You’re lucky I’m only ‘SCREWING’ you, DOLORES

  Ever since the late 1990s I have been writing a magazine column. To begin with it was for the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, but now it’s for New Zealand Woman’s Day.

  The aim of this column, now called ‘Date with Sarah-Kate’, has always been, simply, to cheer people up. It’s a pretty good target, I reckon, and hopefully I hit it more often than not.

  But because I am not always actually that cheerful, I make up a lot of stuff. For example, despite what I have claimed, I have NOT planted a chip in the Ginger’s neck so I can track him down and shoot him if he ever finds out there is no electric wire hidden underground around the perimeter of our property. (The Ginger: if you are reading this — which is highly unlikely, as you don’t usually read anything I write, which is how I get away with saying such awful things about you — I actually made that last bit up, and you do SO have a chip in your neck and there IS an electric wire, OK?)

  I get in a grump and hate the world as much as the next person, but, because I am paid to not express that, I tend to write my way out of the blues pretty quickly. If you’re told that once a week you simply must come up with a way to look at the world through Elton John’s spangly star-shaped spectacles, well, you’re going to develop the necessary skills.

  (I remember going into a dairy in a filthy mood when I was editor of the Weekly and was at the time starring — for want of a better word — in TV adverts where I played a jolly type with a much put-upon male secretary. ‘Not so smiley now, eh?’ the lady behind the dairy counter pointed out.)

  What I’ve discovered over the years is that cheerfulness is a muscle that needs exercising like every other bit of you — and the older you get, the more you need to find out where it is and work it.

  Also, because even I can only make so much up, I generally start each column, or each week, with something from real life that needs a bit of fairy dust flung at it. Real life seems to throw up the same pieces of carrot and tomato no matter who or where you are, which is oddly comforting, don’t you think?

  I guess that’s the reason the columns seem to have struck a chord with readers. There might be a bit of jiggery pokery at the extremities of each one, but there’s nothing but a universal truth at the heart, because what it boils down to is that we’re all in this together. ‘This’ being life.

  However, there is one thing about the columns — from the very first one all those years ago to the one I finished yesterday — that presents an entirely false perception of me. I’ve carried the burden of this dreadful deception for far too long now. It’s time to relieve my battered conscience and reveal once and for all why I feel like such a total fraud; why the ‘me’ I expose every week to hundreds of thousands of readers is not, in fact, the true me.

  In real life, I am sorry to admit, I have the mouth of a drunken sailor, yet in my columns you will find nary a swear word.

  This is the double life I have been leading, but I have to confess I’m totally with John Campbell when it comes to swearing. When I interviewed him for Woman’s Day, he confessed he thinks ‘f**k’ is one of the most magnificently useful words in the English language but, because the story was going in a family magazine, as previously discussed, he called it the ‘f-word’.

  ‘I mean, what can’t you do with it?’ he says. ‘Drop something on your foot? F-word. Extreme delight when the Hurricanes score the winning try in the Super 15? F-word.’

  So, were you to drop by my house and I had just stubbed my toe, you would hear a string of ‘f**ks’ and ‘sh*ts’ and ‘p*sses’ and ‘b*st*rds’ and ‘b*tches’ and even the odd ‘c-word’, brought out for special occasions. The air would be blue. It would be bl**dy f**king blue.

  But the thing about swear words is that, even when hurled in pain or anger or bitter vitriol, they are still a lot cuter said out loud than they are written down, unless you employ the flossifying addition of a bunch of annoying ast*r*x*s.

  So for the purposes of this book, and in the spirit of basically trying to be a nice person who doesn’t upset people but tells things like they are, only better, I’ve chosen to use the bunch of annoying ast*r*x*s.

  1. Sh*tballs

  2. B*ggery b*ll*cks

  3. You’ve got to be f**king joking me

  4. *ss hat

  5. Screw you, Dolores

  Happiness has nothing to do MICKEY MOUSE

  What you do for a living has a heck of a lot to do with your happiness, because you tend to do it for so darn long.

  I worked as a temp secretary when I first moved to London, and once spent two weeks typing the names and addresses of different world coffee producers into a database. The year was 1989 and I was working on a computer that Noah had found on his ark. The monkeys had invented it, but decided it wasn’t good enough, so had left it for the rats to nest in.

  Every time I finished one pile of address cards, 100 more would magically arrive in their place. I sat in a hallway typing away ad infinitum on said ‘computer’, no one even bothering to learn my name, although once a blonde lady asked me to make tea for a bunch of visitors.

  I didn’t even know where the kitchen was, so I didn’t so much as stir my stumps, and the blonde lady never came back again. But if she had, I would have told her that my feeling, which I could hardly be bothered even having, was that they should have been drinking coffee.

  Only two weeks of soul-less, hard, boring work and my get up and go had got up and gone.

  If you are reading this right now and you feel that way about your job, please, I beg of you, start doing something, right this minute, about extracting yourself from it. Even if it’s just signing up to a photography course or a cooking class or booking a holiday or writing a list of the things you would love to do in an ideal world. I don’t care what it is — a lunchtime manicure, maybe, or a fling with that hot guy in accounts (if there is such a thing). Just please do something to take the first step away from your soul-sucking situation. Life is too short to stay there.

  Oh, that’s easy for you to say, you might suggest, in a whisper, if you have been tricked by my Bitchy Resting Face into thinking I am a bitch.

  But, you kn
ow, it’s not actually easy for anyone to say that life is too short to have a sh*t job. I only know because I’ve had a few sh*t jobs plus some really horrible bosses, and now that I’m 50 I know they’re all Doloreses, so you should take the appropriate action. Otherwise the appropriate action might take you, which is not the same.

  After two years editing the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, I was lured away by a lot of fancy talk (oh, and money) to have fun on the radio (or as much fun as you can when you have to get up at 4.30am) with John Hawkesby and Chuck E Shearer.

  It was a strange job, and I was always a bit perplexed by my bosses; one who had thick hair entirely wasted on a man, another who was short and seemed to me to always be angry, and a third who was fun but wore socks with cartoon characters on them.

  The way they poached me from the Weekly was kind of confusing, with the odd mixed message and botched communication. I couldn’t believe they could be so ditzy by mistake, so came to the conclusion that it must be on purpose.

  In the magazine world, you tend to work with women, and while they have periods and can be bitches (resting face or not) and gossips, you pretty much always know where you stand because they will tell you. Or they will tell their friends, who will tell you. Or they will post it on Facebook, and their friends will tell your friends, who will tell you.