What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding
Page 1
Advance Praise for
WHAT I WAS DOING WHILE YOU WERE BREEDING
“If Mark Twain was a woman and he had actually done things in the countries he traveled to, he would have been a lot more pleasant. He also would have written this book instead of The Innocents Abroad. This book is so good that, of the many I have blurbed, this is the only one I read.”
—Joel Stein, columnist for Time, author of
Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity
“I have had the pleasure of joining Kristin on some amazing adventures and can say without question that she is as good a writer as she is a traveler. Which is to say, slightly better when she’s had a few glasses of wine.”
—Nick Kroll
“I love my husband and kids, truly I do—but reading What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding makes me want to buy a one-way ticket around the world, or rather two tickets—one for me and one for her—so we could party till dawn, flirt with hairy European men, and break several international laws. Kristin puts the ‘lust’ in wanderlust and makes adventuring and even mis-adventuring sexy, fun, and, at times, even inspirational.”
—Jill Soloway, writer/director
“Since we can’t all sit next to Kristin Newman at a dinner party, it’s a good thing she wrote What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding so we can all enjoy her funny and unexpected tales. Unlike the rest of us, Kristin took the road less traveled and that has made all the difference. Her sparkling wit and adventurous spirit will seduce you just as it did that guy in Argentina … and in Russia … and in Jordan … and so on.”
—Nell Scovell, coauthor of Lean In
“What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding is sly disguised as sexy. It reminded me of George Eliot mixed with a woodshop-safety film.… A complete delight.”
—Stephen Tobolowsky, actor, author of The Dangerous Animals Club
“I wanted to read this book but my wife stole it off my night-stand, laughed at it for three nights straight, and lent it to her friends.”
—Rodney Rothman, author of Early Bird:
A Memoir of Premature Retirement
“Kristin’s book is such an uproarious, sidesplitting, jaw-dropping-while-miraculously-somehow-also-self-reflecting page-turner, it makes me feel like I traded in my own wife and children for a time machine and a spot in her globe-trotting duffel bag.”
—Rob Kutner, writer for Conan, author of Apocalypse How
and The Future According to Me
“Riotously funny, brutally honest, and hopelessly romantic … Newman’s global romps and brave takedown of the dated, divisive dichotomy between happy breeders and desperate singles is one of the most refreshing things I’ve read in a long time and proof that everyone has her own path to happily ever after.”
—Attica Locke, nationally bestselling author of The Cutting Season
Copyright © 2014 by Kristin Newman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-804-13760-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3761-4
Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright
Cover photography by Martin Westlake/Galley Stock
v3.1
To my mom,
who taught me how to get around an airport,
and throw a great party,
and that “Grown-ups don’t just hold hands.”
To my dad,
who taught me about balance, in all things,
but especially when hopping across river rocks,
and who says living my life would give him diarrhea.
To my girls,
who let me write about some of their adventures,
and who have been my de facto spouses on mine,
even when they were cheering me on from home.
And to one more person,
but that dedication has to come at the end,
or it’ll spoil the whole story …
All things in moderation,
including moderation.
—OSCAR WILDE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: “I’ll Have the House Special”
1: “Drugs Make You a Better Person”
PARIS and AMSTERDAM, 2000
2: “If I Don’t Sleep with This Russian Bartender, the Terrorists Win”
RUSSIA, 2002
3: “Two Ferris Buellers Don’t Make a Right”
LONDON and PARIS, 2004–2005
4: “Love the Juan You’re With”
ARGENTINA, 2005
5: “You Can’t Go en Casa Again”
ARGENTINA, 2006
6: “Brazilians Skip Second and Steal Third”
BRAZIL, 2007
7: “Dominican Surgeons Are Not Half Bad”
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 2007–2008
8: “Frodo Is the Hottest Guy in New Zealand”
NEW ZEALAND, 2008
9: “Thirty-Five Is Too Old to Be Sleeping in a Bathroom”
AUSTRALIA, 2009
10: “Even Björk Is Having Babies”
ICELAND, 2009
11: “The Land of Milk and Funny”
ISRAEL and JORDAN, 2010
12: “Juan More Time, with Feeling”
ARGENTINA, 2011
13: “Love Like You’re About to Get Deported”
LOS ANGELES, 2011
Epilogue: “Awesome for Awesome”
About the Author
Prologue
“I’ll Have the House Special”
I am not a slut in the United States of America. I have rarely had a fewer-than-four-night stand in the Land of the Free. I don’t kiss married men or guys I work with, I don’t text people pictures of my genitalia, I don’t go home with boys I meet in bars before they have at least purchased me a couple of meals, I’ve never shown my boobs for beads. I do not sleep with more than one person at a time, and, sometimes, no more than one per year. In America.
But I really love to travel.
Now, having sex with foreigners is not the only whorish thing I do: I also write sitcoms. For the last fourteen years I’ve written for shows like That ’70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, Chuck, The Neighbors, and shows you’ve never heard of that nonetheless afford me two over-the-top lucky things: the money to buy plane tickets and the time off to travel. What this means about my life is that I spend about nine months a year in a room full of, mostly, poorly dressed men, telling dick jokes and overeating and, sometimes, sitting on the floor with Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, and a chimpanzee (before all three found the age difference insurmountable). In the writers’ room, we talk a million miles a minute, tearing each other apart for sport and, often, out of love. Sometimes someone makes me cry, and I pretend I’m doing a “bit” where I “run out of the room to cry” even though what I’m really doing is running out of the room to cry. If I’m lucky enough to be fully employed, I get about nine months of this and then a three-month hiatus—unpaid time off from this weird non-corporate grind.
Most days, the writers’ room feels like I’m at the most entertaining dinner party in the world. Other times, it feels like I’m at the meanest, longest one. I keep both versions in perspective with my real life’s work—running away from
home to someplace wonderful. And then, sometimes, having sex there.
Throughout most of my twenties and thirties, in the hiatus months (or years) between shows, I spent between a few weeks and a few months a year traveling. When money was tight, I took road trips with a tent, and when it wasn’t, I got on a plane and went as far as I could, to places like China and New Zealand, Jordan and Brazil. To Tibet and Argentina and Australia and most of Europe. To Israel and Colombia and Russia and Iceland. In the beginning, I took these trips with girlfriends, but soon my girls started marrying boys, and then they started making new little girls and boys, and so then I started taking the trips alone. Some of these girls would eventually come back around after a divorce for a trip or two, but then leave me again when they got married for the second time before I’d managed to do it for the first. (When I complained to my friend Hope that she had lapped me in the marriage department, she replied, “I’m not sure the goal is to do it as often as possible.” I love her.)
Anyway, everyone around me was engaged in a lot of engaging, marrying, and breeding while I remained resolutely terrified of doing any of it. I did want to have a family someday … it was just that “someday” never seemed to feel like “today.” I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul. That wrestling match threatened to body-slam me into a veritable Bridget-Jonesian-sad-girl singlehood, which I was resolutely against, both personally and as an archetype. And so to ward that off, I kept moving.
Pretty early on in my travel career I discovered two vital things. First, that I’m someone a little different on the road, and that vacation from being my home self feels like a great sleep after a long day. Second, that you can have both love and freedom when you fall in love with an exotic local in an exotic locale, since there is a return ticket next to the bed that you by law will eventually have to use. These sweet, sexy, epic little vacationships became part of my identity—I was The Girl with the Great International Romance Stories at dinner parties, and around the writers’ room table. And I began to need my trips like other people need religion.
But my mom will be pleased to hear that my addiction to sexy people in sexy places really grew out of a nonsexual obsession: I love to do the thing you’re supposed to do in the place you’re supposed to do it. That means always getting the specialty of the house. That means smoking cigarettes I don’t smoke at the perfect corner café for hours at a time in Paris, and stripping naked for group hot-tubbing with people you don’t want to see naked in Big Sur. It means riding short, fuzzy horses that will throw me onto the arctic tundra in Iceland, or getting beaten with hot, wet branches by old naked women in stifling banyas in Moscow. When these moments happen, I get absurdly happy, like the kind of happy other people report experiencing during the birth of their children. And getting romanced by a Brazilian in Brazil, or a Cretan in Crete … this, to me, just happens to be the gold medal in the Do the Thing You’re Supposed to Do Olympics.
I love that I am but one of millions of single girls hitting the road by themselves these days. A hateful little ex-boyfriend once said that a house full of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but now it’s a house full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures. He said it derogatorily: Look at all of this tragic overcompensating in the form of tribal masks and rain sticks. But I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women’s progress as a gender. I’m damn proud of us.
Also, since I have both a cat and a lot of foreign souvenirs, I broke up with that dude and went on a really great trip.
1
“Drugs Make You a Better Person”
Los Angeles International → Paris Charles de Gaulle → Amsterdam Schiphol
Departing: March 24, 2000
The first time I blew off steam internationally was not born of carpe diem. It was born of deep despair.
I was twenty-six, and I traveled to Europe with my childhood friend Hope on a “girls’ trip” in the wake of a breakup with my first and most consequential love, Vito. (This is obviously not his name. I let him name himself, though, so, for our purposes, I had a six-year relationship with a man named Vito.) I handled the heartbreak like many twenty-six-year-olds handled big breakups at the beginning of the third millennium: I pierced my belly button, got a Meg Ryan–circa–French Kiss–style bleach job and haircut, and went to Amsterdam.
First, a little more on the man behind the body-reclaiming piercing: Vito and I met our freshman year of college, had a close friendship sprinkled with drunken make-outs and missed connections for two years, then finally fell madly in love in the way it turns out you only fall in love when you’re twenty and doing it for the first time. (It took me fifteen years of unsuccessfully chasing that first high to understand that. Slow learner.)
We fell in love in the early nineties, and so Vito and I thought a lot of Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder movies were about us. (Also Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy movies. Vito had a goatee and hated The Man, so basically anything with Ethan Hawke.) After graduation, we laughed at our friends who went straight to work at ad agencies and consulting firms, and instead backpacked around Europe for the summer, then spent a dreamy fall, winter, and spring working and skiing in Vail, Colorado. In Vail, we sublet a room from two racist brothers who talked a lot about their Scottish ancestry, and who were trying to become “alpine models.”
“You just gotta be a rad skier and be super good-looking, and I really think my skiing’s there this year,” the younger racist explained.
After Vail, Vito got into grad school at UC Santa Barbara, and I moved to L.A. to try to write for television. It turned out that meant spending eighty hours a week driving around town with carloads of film and fetching coffee for writers. It meant squeezing in time to work on my own writing, only to have a male writer notice and say, “Awwww, you’re writing something? That’s so cute!” It meant spending lunch hours giving a high-level writer ideas for his script that he jotted down word for word, getting more hopeful and proud with each “Great idea!” he gave me, and then being told over the check, “Someday you’re going to make a great producer’s wife.” It meant pitching jokes in a writers’ room and hearing, “Aw, isn’t she pretty?” before being told to pitch it again while doing jumping jacks or, perhaps, sitting on the showrunner’s lap. It meant always, always laughing all of it off.
Anyway, while I navigated the world of Hollywood, Vito moved to jasmine-scented Santa Barbara to learn how to surf, and became a part-time forest ranger and environmental studies grad student who couldn’t wrap his head around ever living in Los Angeles, where TV writers have to live. For the next three years we commuted the hundred miles between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to see each other, and I tried to think of something else to do with my life. I racked my brain—it certainly wasn’t like long hours of drudgery and sexual harassment were so satisfying that they seemed worth losing the love of my life over. But, despite the massive motivation to come up with an alternate life plan, I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do. And, eventually, I realized that meant something.
So Vito and I spent our early twenties planning our retirement. Really. There was no version of the next thirty years that enabled us to both get the lives we wanted and be together, so we just skipped to the part on which we agreed: retiring on an avocado ranch in wine country with a lot of Saint Bernards somewhere around 2035.
But ignoring the reality of the here and now didn’t last, and that’s when the relationship, as Vito said, “became about talking about the relationship.” We went to couples’ counseling at twenty-four, weeping to what must have been a highly amused therapist about our enormous troubles.
“I just don’t picture myself as the type of person who lives in L.A. Plus, it kills me how much fossil fuel we’re burning by driving back and forth every week,” my tortured environmentalist would say to the therapist and me.
“Do we seriously have to
add fossil fuels to our list of problems?!” I would wail.
“I’m just saying, it really bothers me.”
The therapist would pause. “So … you spend three nights a week together, and Kristin lives in Santa Barbara full-time for three months in the spring,” she would say, trying to paint us the ridiculous picture she was seeing. “That would work fine for some people. Do you think there is something about identifying this as a ‘problem’ that is working for you?”
We scoffed at this. But, years later, I would realize it was the truest thing any therapist has ever said to me. Coloring Vito as ultimately unavailable, all six years that he spent telling me he wanted to be with me forever, worked for me. It made it easy as pie to be 100 percent sure about him. I would learn from many subsequent available men that that is probably how Vito and I lasted six years.
But I wouldn’t learn that for a long time. And hence we have this book.
The struggle finally broke us, and Vito and I ended it all one day after Y2K didn’t happen in Santa Barbara. We wept and hugged and said we’d love each other forever, and then he put me on a train to Los Angeles, and I spent the entire ride back crying, knowing that he was The One and that no one would ever understand or love me the way he had ever again. I hoped that he was racing along the road next to me in his car, and would be waiting for me at the train station in the Burbank night. But I got off the train, and the station was empty.
A couple of months later, a girls’ trip presented itself.
Hope and I met on the first day of eighth grade, when we were both new kids at the same school, and so huddled together for warmth in the chilly waters of junior high. We stayed friends when I went to Northwestern, to go to football games and gain a lot of beer and pizza weight, and she went to the University of Oregon, to ride her bike in the rain and lose a lot of drug weight. By the end of college, it looked like I had eaten her. Hope, however, could always keep a lot of balls in the air, so still managed to spend a semester studying abroad in Ecuador, and graduated with a double major in business and Spanish in four years, while some of her fellow college buddies ended up living in boxes in San Francisco. By twenty-six she had grown into an adventurous, sporty, constantly cheerful woman who worked hard and played hard, so when she invited me to tag along on a business trip to Amsterdam for some girl fun she said I desperately needed, it was easy to say yes.