Thanks for Waiting is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2021 by Doree Shafrir
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Ballantine and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780593156742
Ebook ISBN 9780593156759
randomhousebooks.com
Art by iStock/Nata_Slavetskaya
Cover design: Donna Cheng
Cover photograph: Christina Krutz/Getty Images
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Two
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Also by Doree Shafrir
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
I recently came across an email inviting people to my thirtieth birthday party. I wasn’t taken aback by the location (a karaoke studio in Manhattan’s Koreatown) or the guest list (practically everyone I’d ever met), but I was shocked by the start time: ten p.m. I tweeted about it, writing, “Truly was I ever so young?”
The responses surprised me. My friend Caroline wrote, “My 30th birthday started at 5 p.m. and it was on a Monday and my invitation clearly stated, ‘I am leaving the bar and going home at 7 p.m.’ ” Another woman said hers started at noon. Yet another—who has a baby almost exactly my son’s age but is ten years younger than me—said, “I was literally never that young.”
And then it hit me. Thirty was “old” to have a late birthday party! But how had everyone else gotten these parties out of their systems when they were twenty-four, if they’d ever had them at all? Meanwhile, on the night I turned thirty, I was blissfully shrieking into a microphone, drunk on cheap beer and too-strong vodka sodas in plastic cups. I wasn’t engaged or married or pregnant. I lived in a small basement apartment. I had a job, but less than a year before, I had been an intern.
At the time, not having achieved any of the milestones I associated with “being an adult” didn’t bother me, but as my early thirties turned into my midthirties and then my late thirties, I started to feel like I had been left behind, that everyone else’s lives had moved on and progressed, and I was still the female Peter Pan singing a slightly off-key version of Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” (deceptively tough karaoke song; still brings down the house every time). For men, there’s just not as much pressure to do things on a timeline; the image of the man who takes an especially long time to “find” himself is one that has long been enshrined, even venerated, in our collective cultural consciousness.
But most women aren’t afforded the luxury of doing things on their own time. The paradox of femininity is that we’re always either too young and inexperienced, or too old and washed up. As my friend Maris Kreizman once put it on Twitter: “You’re told you’re young until you turn 35. By the time you’re 40 you’re over the hill. I had no idea at the time that I would only have 5 years to be the age when I was just a person.”
Statistics do, in fact, point to the late thirties as being this turning point, where suddenly, more of your friends will be married, own homes, and have kids. So for those of us who don’t hit that trifecta—what then? What if we want those things, but they just haven’t happened for us, for whatever reason? Or if we don’t want those things, but we feel like we should?
I’ve wrestled with all these questions. I got married at thirty-eight, had my first kid at forty-one, and undoubtedly will be renting in the very overpriced city of Los Angeles until the end of time. I also feel like I very much did not have my shit figured out at thirty, or forty. Even now, at forty-four, I’m still figuring “it” out, whatever “it” is.
Long after my thirtieth birthday party, I realized that I always had been, and probably always would be, “late”—to dating, to sex, to marriage, to motherhood, to finding the kind of work I truly like to do, to being comfortable in my own skin. And so I wanted to write this book as a gentle corrective to the idea that we’re supposed to do things on a schedule. I’m only just becoming the person I was meant to be—and that took a lot of self-reflection and more than a little reckoning with the person I have always been. (And to be clear, that person is still a work in progress.)
But this book is not just about coming to terms with being a late bloomer; it’s also about how I came to deeply appreciate it. Because sometimes coming-of-age happens on our own time—and that’s okay.
CHAPTER ONE
It was the beginning of June 2009, and maybe the only surprising thing about the layoffs was that they hadn’t happened sooner. The economy had tanked the previous fall, the United States was now officially in a recession, and The New York Observer, the newspaper where I’d worked for almost two years, was struggling. Its longtime editor, Peter Kaplan, had just quit, and the rumor was that he had chosen this moment to leave because he knew layoffs were imminent and he couldn’t bring himself to execute them.
The morning of the layoffs, I went into work with a creeping sense of dread. Peter’s replacement was his deputy, Tom, whom I didn’t have an especially close relationship with, and I worried that as he had made up the list of who would stay and who would go, I was on it.
What would I do if I got laid off? I was thirty-two—not old, certainly, but old enough that I was no longer a cheap hire. And besides, we were officially in the worst recession since the Great Depression. “They’re calling people into Peter’s old office,” I Gchatted my boyfriend, Jon. “I just don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out,” he responded.
But I didn’t want to “figure it out.” I wanted to keep my job—not just because getting fired in the middle of a recession is not exactly ideal, but also because gettin
g hired at the Observer had been a dream come true. When I was in college in Philadelphia, I had become obsessed with the paper, an oversized, salmon-colored weekly (Henry Rollins, perhaps apocryphally, had once called it “the curiously pink newspaper”) where Candace Bushnell had written the “Sex and the City” column that had become the TV show. The paper, written in a droll, knowing, literary style, portrayed an alluring New York of socialites and magazine editors and hedge funders. I wasn’t interested in actually being one of the people they wrote about—I wanted to chronicle and interpret this world, as a kind of Harriet the Spy of exclusive New York.
I got to write about pretty much anything I wanted: profiles of intense and weird politicians like Anthony Weiner, columns about what it was like when your deadbeat boyfriend got his life together after you broke up, trend stories about nerds who were actually jocks. Since I was a kid growing up outside of Boston I’d always been enamored with New York—for my fourteenth birthday, my mom and I drove to Manhattan and had lunch at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center, which I thought was the height of sophistication; it felt like being literally on top of the world.
Now, thanks to my job, I had been given the keys to a New York world that felt exciting and exclusive, and, often, borderline absurd, like a party for a line of wine-related clothing accessories hosted by 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl (yes, this was an actual event that occurred). Most of my friends worked in media, too, and even though the scene could sometimes feel claustrophobic—you did tend to see the same faces at the book parties and the dinners and the launch events—it was also satisfying to feel like I had made it. But even outside of work, I just loved existing in the city. Everything was here, and I got to be a part of it.
* * *
—
I’D GOTTEN THE job a couple of summers earlier, when Peter, then the editor in chief, had emailed me to ask if I wanted to get coffee. At the time, I was working for the media gossip blog Gawker. Peter was a legend in New York media; it felt like I’d been summoned by the literary gods. He was known for hiring the best young reporters, writing the snappiest headlines, producing a must-read paper each week on a shoestring budget. I was dying to work for him.
“So how are things going over there?” he had asked when we sat down at Friend of a Farmer, a café down the street from the Observer office. He was wearing his trademark tortoiseshell glasses and a loosened tie, and khakis. His hair was graying, but he had a full head of it. The overall effect was rumpled professor.
“Well, Choire is a genius,” I said, not really answering the question. Choire was Choire Sicha, the editor in chief of Gawker, who had left the Observer to take the Gawker job; he had previously left an earlier stint at Gawker to take the job at the Observer. He and Peter were still close. It was all very incestuous. Was Peter trying to get back at Choire for leaving by hiring me? And if he was, did it matter? I liked working for Choire, but I didn’t feel any particular loyalty to Gawker, which was a notoriously difficult place to work, and after less than a year there I was already feeling burned-out. Still, I was mindful of performing the delicate dance of signaling my interest in a job, while not trashing my current employer, while also not wanting to appear desperate.
“Well, listen,” Peter said, after we’d sipped our coffees and chatted for half an hour or so. “You’ve been doing terrific stuff with Choire. But—I think you should come to the Observer.”
I tried to keep my face looking pleased but not overly excited. “What kind of job are you thinking?”
“I’d put you on the ‘Ideas’ beat,” he said. “Literary stuff, academia, the intellectual scene in New York. You’d have a lot of freedom. Think about it, okay?”
“I will,” I said. “Before we go, I do have a question—I know most of the reporters are, like, twenty-four. I don’t mean to put this indelicately, but can you afford me?”
Although I wasn’t making a ton of money at Gawker, I was making more than twenty-two thousand dollars a year, which was what I had heard was the starting salary for Observer reporters. There was no way I’d be able to survive on that in New York—I didn’t have a trust fund or family help, and I couldn’t stomach the idea of going back to live in a crappy apartment with multiple roommates just to take this job.
Peter seemed embarrassed at the mere mention of money. “I think I can work it out, yes,” he said.
I started a couple of months later. I was one of the older reporters in the bullpen, but it felt like I was finally where I was supposed to be.
* * *
—
AND THEN, in the fall of 2008, after I’d been at the paper for a little over a year, the economy crashed. The papers ran photo after photo of shell-shocked Lehman Brothers analysts leaving their offices with their company gym bags after they had learned the company would be shutting down. At first, it felt surreal: Surely the whole economy wasn’t crashing? At the paper, we published a piece about “Crash Virgins,” aka people who had never been through an economic crash before. But clearly, the economic crisis was running much deeper than just being a cute trend story. We just didn’t yet know how deep, or how our lives would change.
The owner of the paper, Jared Kushner, the son of a disgraced New Jersey real estate magnate, long had been an infrequent but anxiety-producing visitor at work. But now he seemed to be showing up more often, wandering around the office and stressing everyone out, especially Peter. By January, the parties dried up, even more so than the usual post-holiday-party slump. Things at the paper were also getting more dire financially. Advertising was way down, and the shoestring budget that we’d been operating on got even more shoestring. I was now editing the paper’s social column, “The Transom,” but the paper’s freelance and expenses budgets were slashed. I had to make the case for why my one remaining reporter should be reimbursed for the cabs she took home late at night from covering the few parties that were still happening. Still, even now, months into the crash, I wasn’t overly concerned; the Observer had always operated on a shoestring budget, and I was confident that this, too, would pass.
But it didn’t. And then Peter announced he was leaving, and there was a big farewell party at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side bar and restaurant that had been a longtime gathering spot of a certain milieu of literary New York; it was festive but melancholy. The next day, people started getting called in to Tom’s office.
After I Gchatted Jon, I messaged my former boss, Choire, who had since left Gawker and had started a new website called The Awl. “Tom wants to see me in his office at 12:30. What do you think that means? Do you know anything?”
“There was a list that I saw, but I don’t think you were on it,” he wrote back.
“Argh,” I wrote. I wasn’t sure if I believed him—if he had seen me on the list, would he tell me? But I just wanted it to be over, whatever it was.
Finally, it was noon, and I went into Peter’s old office. Tom was there, along with another executive, Barry, whose job was nebulous but seemed to encompass HR functions. Tom was holding a folder; his hands were shaking. “We’ve decided to let you go,” he said. I nodded and didn’t say anything. He said a few other things, but I wasn’t really listening; I was just thinking about how I wanted to get out of the office, which suddenly felt very hot, as quickly as possible. When I got back to my desk, there were cardboard boxes there to pack everything up.
Twelve people were laid off that day. After I packed my things, I stared at my desk, which until that morning had been messy with books and papers. It was now empty for the first time since I’d started. That morning, I’d woken up, gotten dressed, taken the subway in to work. A normal day. What would my days look like from now on?
“So long,” I whispered, and walked out the door, trying not to cry. It felt like when someone breaks up with you and even if you’ve kind of been thinking that things hadn’t been going great, you didn’t think they had gotten all that bad, ce
rtainly not breakup bad, and then the person who an hour ago was your partner and is now your ex leaves and it’s just over, and you think for a second that they’re going to come back and tell you that it was all a mistake, they still love you, and then you have make-up sex and they bring you coffee in the morning. I didn’t want to have make-up sex with the paper, but I half thought—hoped—that as I got on the elevator, someone would come running after me, breathless, to tell me it had all been a mistake, they meant to lay off Tori Macfrir, they just got confused, and could I just come back to my desk and work on a trend story about elaborate birthday parties?
* * *
—
AFTER YEARS OF grad school and jobs that never felt quite right, the Observer had felt, if not perfect, then something close to it. Now I was out of work, and at sea. I was slightly reassured by my boyfriend, Jon, telling me that we’d figure it out, but he worked in politics and didn’t make much money either.
I felt like I was on the precipice of a Real Adult Life but it kept being just out of reach: I’d had a job, and now I didn’t; Jon and I had been together for two and a half years, but we weren’t engaged like I was hoping we would be by now; we lived in a brownstone apartment in a beautiful neighborhood in Brooklyn, but between the two of us and our dog, it was cramped, and it also had mice. (Our landlords, who lived upstairs, advised us to get a cat. I’m allergic.)
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