I decided the way to go about it was to write every day, no matter what, and keep track of the number of words I was writing. Isn’t that what every famous writer ever always said, that the only trick to writing was to write every day? That way, even if what I wrote was total dreck, at least I’d be able, I thought optimistically, to be proud of writing thousands of words. It would be my New Year’s resolution. I called it my January writing challenge.
I started by creating a character, a twentysomething guy living in New York named Nilay whose startup had just failed. The New York startup world was one I was pretty familiar with, both from working at BuzzFeed and writing about New York tech startups when I was freelancing. It was a funny little world, kind of a junior-varsity Silicon Valley, although of course no one there thought of themselves that way. I was particularly interested in the ways in which the New York tech scene was continually trying to establish legitimacy and power in a city that already had a lot of powerful industries.
I’d never written fiction before, except briefly in a short story class I took in college. I was a journalist, someone who observed the real world around her. But I found a certain liberation I wasn’t expecting in writing fiction. Creating characters reminded me of the acting I did in high school, when I would have to embody a different person and try to understand their needs and wants and motivations. It was even more fun, I found, to actually make up these people myself and try to invent their needs, wants, and motivations.
I started to look forward to my morning writing sessions, especially to having something else to focus my thoughts on besides work. The house would be dark and quiet as I’d pad out to the kitchen in my slippers, make a cup of coffee, and take it into my office with me. I stretched out on the love seat in my office, my computer perched on my lap, and just let the words come as I sipped my coffee. I started thinking about what else could be going on with Nilay besides having a failed startup, and then I came up with another character named Katya, who was a reporter at a tech blog, and then I decided there should be another company founder whose company was successful, or at least seemed successful on paper, who was hooking up with a subordinate of his.
I kept track of the number of words I wrote each day on a spreadsheet. The numbers kept ticking up, and when the month was over, I had around forty pages of…something. Was it a novel? Was it something I should shove deep into my Documents folder and never speak of again? I wasn’t sure.
My agent, Alia, had reached out to me a few years earlier after I’d written an essay for Slate about feeling like I was in a generation between Gen X and Millennials. I liked her right away—she was supersmart, no-nonsense, had good ideas, and seemed committed to developing my career long term. But we hadn’t actually sold anything together yet. Now I emailed her and asked if she would mind reading something. “It’s fiction,” I wrote, “which I know is surprising, but it just sort of happened.” I was nervous. What if she thought it was ridiculous that I had even attempted to write fiction? But she emailed me back right away that she would love to read it.
I prepared myself to hear that she didn’t like it, and if that was the case, so be it; it had been a fun exercise, and it felt like an achievement to have written all those words either way. I realized that I had been able to put aside what other people might think and done something for myself, something that felt right in a way that my job didn’t.
Alia got back to me a couple of days later. “I really like this,” she said, “and I think you should keep going.”
I had been so ready to hear that she didn’t like it that I hadn’t even let myself think about what I was going to do if she said she did like it. Of course I would keep going, but now I had to actually come up with a plot and see it through. And in a couple of months, I would turn thirty-eight. If I finished it, and it sold to a publisher, and it was published, I would be forty when it came out. Which didn’t feel old, exactly, but the words debut novelist tend to conjure an image of a person in their twenties who just finished an MFA program, not a forty-year-old journalist. Even though I had told myself that I was writing this book for me, I still worried about conforming to the outside world’s idea of what a debut novelist should look like. But even as I recognized that tension, I knew I had to move past it. My voice deserved to be heard as much as anyone’s, whether I was forty or twenty-five. I was ready to take up space.
I recalled some advice I had given years ago to a friend who was contemplating starting an exercise program but was worried he was too old: You’re going to be thirty-four no matter what, so you might as well just do it. That was how I felt about attempting to write a novel. Unless something horrible happened, I was going to be forty no matter what. I might as well turn forty having written a book.
Writing a novel reminded me of the time I spent training for the marathon. It was a long-term goal that I’d set for myself in large part to see if I could do it. And in the same way that in marathon training, three-mile runs turn into five-mile runs turn into ten- and fifteen-mile runs, the few hundred or so words that I managed to write each day gradually started to cohere into something resembling a narrative.
Then I got stuck. It was exciting to create these characters and to shape their inner lives and their moods and motivations, thinking about how they all interacted and writing scenes from my imagination. After around a hundred pages or so, though, I realized that what I had put together was essentially a series of scenes and character descriptions. The story itself was going in circles. I knew where I wanted it to end up, but I wasn’t sure how to get there.
So I texted my friend Kate Spencer. Kate was a writer who I’d originally met through the internet—we’d both had Tumblrs in the early days of the site, when it was more of an old-school blogging platform than a home to memes and fan pages. A big theme of Kate’s Tumblr was about coming to terms with her mom’s death, and I’d found her writing to be simultaneously funny and poignant—a tough combination to pull off, but she managed it. We didn’t meet in real life until years later, when we both had moved to Los Angeles from New York, not long after she’d given birth to her second child. I immediately liked her. Sometimes people have an online persona that’s totally different from what they’re like IRL, but Kate was the same hilarious, kind, thoughtful person I’d met on the internet so many years before. But she lived in the ’burbs and was busy with two small children, so we rarely saw each other.
But now, I wondered, maybe she would be interested in a writing group, made up of just the two of us? There were other people I was better friends with whom I could have approached, but I think I reached out precisely because we weren’t superclose friends. I figured she’d be more likely to be honest with me about my work, and vice versa. She said yes, that she had been thinking about writing an essay collection centered around her mom’s death and grief in general, and that she’d love to get my feedback on it. So we started meeting a couple of times a month, sharing work with each other beforehand and sending feedback.
Our two-person writing group was perfect. It was just the amount of accountability I needed, but I also loved reading Kate’s work, which—like her Tumblr—managed to balance being funny with real emotion, without veering into sentimentality.
A couple of months after we started meeting, I was at an impasse: Through no fault of Kate’s feedback, the book had somehow ballooned into being told from a total of seven characters’ perspectives—it was unwieldy and confusing, and the plot didn’t totally make sense. I knew I still wanted to finish, but how? I worried that my book writing was going to end up being like my marathon training—I’d work really hard at it, and get superclose to the finish line, but ultimately wouldn’t be able to complete it.
One afternoon, as Kate and I sat in a coffee shop near my house that was inexplicably reminiscent of the all-white decor in A Clockwork Orange, I told her I was struggling with plot and pacing. “I still feel like the middle of the b
ook isn’t there,” I said. “It’s too slow. I feel like not enough happens to move the story along, like I’m getting bogged down in description and characters.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Do you know what a beat sheet is?”
“You mean, like for screenplays?” A beat sheet is an outline of the “beats,” or plot and emotional turns, of a movie. Most screenplays follow a very specific formula, even as the stories are different.
“Yes,” she said. “I think it could be helpful. Just go back and try to write a beat sheet based on what you have, and then think about where you need to add plot.”
I hadn’t ever considered imposing this kind of structure on my work—it almost seemed like cheating. But there’s a reason, I realized, that most movies follow the same three-act narrative structure. As audiences, we’re used to it; it feels familiar, almost comforting to know that at the end of the second act, it will seem as though everything is going disastrously for the protagonist—the café she owns is going to fail, her boyfriend isn’t speaking to her, her roommate has told her she’s selling their house—when suddenly, she receives some new information and figures out a way to turn everything around! One of the restaurant’s longtime patrons, the crotchety old man who sits in the corner and nurses the same cup of coffee all day, turns out to be a secret millionaire, and he’s going to save the café, because the protagonist is the only one who’s ever been nice to him! Her boyfriend realizes he was wrong, and her roommate is still selling the house, but now that the café is saved, she can afford her own apartment! The story then reaches its satisfying conclusion. Thinking about my book in these terms helped me realize where the pacing felt flabby and where I needed to put in more plot elements. I didn’t need my book to be told from seven characters’ perspectives—it made more sense to tell it from three. And I streamlined the story so that it wasn’t veering off in a thousand different directions.
I also started reading page-turners—Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies and The Husband’s Secret, Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, Jessica Knoll’s Luckiest Girl Alive—and studying their techniques. I wasn’t writing a mystery or thriller, but I wanted to understand how these authors managed to hook their readers and keep them interested. I knew that I was never going to write a serious work of literary fiction, the kind written by MFA graduates who win prestigious awards, because that’s just not the kind of writer I am—although a part of me wanted to be that writer, to get the respect and the accolades that come with writing a book like that. Ultimately, though, I had to write the book I wanted to write and that I felt the best about, and I wanted to write a book that people devoured, that they couldn’t put down.
I was worried that studying technique and using a beat sheet template would make me feel like a hack, but instead, it was freeing. Once I had a structure, I was able to be more creative, and eventually, Alia sold the book. I was going to be a debut novelist, three weeks before my fortieth birthday.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Matt and I got engaged in February 2015, a little less than a year after we met. We went ring shopping together, to an antique jeweler in Beverly Hills, and I selected a beautiful but understated Edwardian-era ring. Picking out the ring felt surreal. Ten months ago, I’d been grappling with the idea that I might be single for the rest of my life, or at least the foreseeable future. And now here I was, getting engaged.
The honeymoon phase of strolling around New York hand in hand may have been over, but there was still so much I loved about Matt. He was kind and generous, someone who always thought about other people before himself, and I loved that he was a nerd in a way that was wholly foreign to me—a true enthusiast, someone who had deep and abiding obsessions with things I had almost zero knowledge of: guitars, Star Trek, the Dave Matthews Band, comics, the Beatles.
It occurred to me that this was how he’d approached our relationship, too. It was like from the moment he met me, he had decided that he was going to be passionate about something new, and that something new was…me. In the past, someone being so into me might have freaked me out. I was wary of being put on a pedestal, but because I reciprocated Matt’s affection it didn’t feel weird.
No one seemed surprised that we’d gotten engaged so quickly. In my twenties and early thirties, people got engaged after being together for years; an engagement in less than a year was unheard of. But now, all I had to say was “when you know you know,” and everyone nodded sagaciously—which confirmed, in its own way, that I was outside of the norm. I was more surprised that Matt, at thirty-one, didn’t feel the need to wait. I thought about where I’d been at thirty-one: working at The New York Observer, living with Jon, and just starting to think about how maybe, one day, we would get engaged. I also thought about how different this felt than when I’d been with Jon, especially toward the end of our relationship, when I was despairing over his wishy-washiness. Jon had made me question myself. Matt made me feel secure.
* * *
—
LOOMING OVER OUR engagement like a fear-mongering women’s magazine coverline was my biological clock. I had spent my twenties and early thirties ambivalent about whether I wanted to have kids. Matt was the first person I’d been with whom I could actually envision having children with—and the desire to have kids specifically with him manifested itself. And then, suddenly, I really wanted kids.
Even before I met Matt, though, I’d had an inkling that I might want to keep that option open. Nearly four years earlier, during the summer before I left New York, I had gone to the fertility clinic at NYU to get information about freezing my eggs. The doctor sat across the desk from me with a pen and piece of paper. “Here’s how your fertility decreases in your thirties,” he had said matter-of-factly. “Did you know that even with medical intervention, a woman your age only has a twenty percent chance of getting pregnant each month?” I gulped. This seemed to directly contradict everything I’d ever learned—or not learned—in sex ed. In high school, our teacher’s version of sex ed consisted mainly of implying very strongly that all we girls had to do to get pregnant was approach a penis, like probably we just would have to be in the same room, but definitely, definitely if we were to ever get naked with a boy, pregnancy would be instantaneous, and it wouldn’t matter if we were nowhere near our ovulation window: PREGNANCY WOULD HAPPEN. And then, of course, our lives would be over. (Also, since it was the nineties, every teenager I knew, myself included, was terrified of getting AIDS.) I think I knew on some level that this was a slight exaggeration, but there was zero instruction about ovulation or when in your cycle you can actually get pregnant, and I didn’t bother fact-checking it myself.
So there I was, at thirty-five, sitting across from a wolfish doctor who seemed all too eager to get me to agree to pump my body full of hormones in order to have my eggs harvested. “You are born with all the eggs you will ever have,” he said ominously. I imagined how many I had started out with and how many I had lost. The numbers seemed incomprehensible.
I didn’t end up freezing my eggs—the combination of the cost (around $10,000) and stress made me second-guess my decision, and I also figured if I was going to need medical intervention to get pregnant, anyway, I might as well wait until I was more settled.
I’d also never been pregnant, so I had no idea if I could even get pregnant. I’d never even had a real pregnancy scare, just a couple of times when the condom broke and I got Plan B out of an abundance of caution, not because I was actually worried that I might get pregnant. Matt had also never gotten anyone pregnant, a fact that I noted and filed away.
A few months after we got engaged, right around when I turned thirty-eight, we had a conversation about starting to try to have a baby. I’d been off hormonal birth control for years, relying solely on condoms, and I read up on fertile windows and ovulation. I was a little older than was ideal, but there should, theoretically, not be an issue with getting pregnant.
�
��Do you think it’s a bad idea to be pregnant at our wedding?” I asked Matt. “I mean, ideally, I would be out of my first trimester, because of nausea.”
“Don’t you want to be able to drink at your own wedding?” he said.
I shrugged. “I think I could still have, like, a glass of champagne. It just seems like given my age, every month counts, so I don’t want to wait until after the wedding.”
“Makes sense,” he said. “Although it probably won’t be as fun.”
But it would be worth it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I was not pregnant at our wedding, but a few of my friends, and my sister, Karen, were. I was excited for Karen’s baby, her first; a few months earlier, my brother’s wife, Alyson, had given birth to their first child. In my family, we did things in reverse order: My younger siblings had both gotten married and had kids before me. We all do things on our own time, I reminded myself.
But getting married last in my family also took some of the pressure off. My parents just seemed relieved that I was getting married, period. So they didn’t protest when we told them the wedding would be in Las Vegas, or that Matt wasn’t Jewish and we wouldn’t be having a Jewish wedding. I was also one of the last of my friends to get married, and I had learned a lot from the weddings I had gone to. The most extravagant weddings were often not the most fun; my friends who had stressed the most about their weddings beforehand had been fixated on things that I just didn’t care about, like the color of the napkins. Matt and I were in agreement: We just wanted to have a big party where our friends could get together, get a little tipsy, and dance a lot. (Also, we were paying for it ourselves, so we were trying to keep costs down.) The ceremony would be in a chapel at the Venetian Hotel; the reception would be on the large patio of one of the restaurants in the hotel; almost everything, including the decor, the flowers, and the food, were either predetermined or things we could pick from a small menu of options. I didn’t want to be overwhelmed by choice or feel like I needed to throw the Best! Party! Ever! I was just happy to be marrying Matt.
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