I Miss You When I Blink

by Mary Laura Philpott

  “Do you want . . . a picture?” she asked. I nodded.

  “Maybe you should hold that,” she said, pointing at the penguin. I pulled it back. Suddenly, I was doing everything I do not do. I flapped my hair behind my ears again and again. I tried to remember what my younger colleagues had taught me about taking selfies. Was it stick the chin out or suck the chin in?

  My friend took the photo. Mindy Kaling walked away. I stood there holding a cardboard bird, wondering what had just happened.

  I’ve thought about that evening again and again, reliving my embarrassment in waves, and sending my apology out into the universe in hopes it would reach her: I was an idiot, and I’m sorry, Mindy Kaling.

  But there’s something else about that moment that has occurred to me recently. I’ve decided that if I ever see Mindy Kaling again, I’ll make only the most minimal eye contact, and it will go something like this:

  Mindy Kaling’s eyes: Oh no, not you again.

  My eyes: Wait. Remember how I turned into a weirdo fangirl at that party? I didn’t even know that version of me existed until then. And if that person was somewhere inside me, just waiting for her moment to emerge, who else might be in there? Imagine.

  Before I turn away as if I don’t even see her, I’ll nod a little thank-you, and Mindy will understand.

  Try It Again, More Like You

  As soon as the cameras start rolling, I freeze.

  I’m supposed to introduce the guest and say my opening lines, “Welcome to A Word on Words. I’m Mary Laura Philpott, and today we’re talking to . . .” but suddenly my ability to modulate my own volume and pronounce vocabulary in the language I’ve been speaking all my life has left me. I’m yelling: WELCOME! TO! AWORDONWORDS! I’m MARYLAURAPHILPOTT! AND TODAYWERETALKIN! I sound like the robo-voice of a 1990s answering machine on high speed—Please! Leave! Amessage! Afterthetone!

  Matt laughs. He’s operating one of the cameras, and because this is public television and everyone has at least two roles at the same time, he’s also our editor, the one who will later take all the rough interview footage and weave it together into a finished show. I know why he’s laughing. This happens every time.

  He leans out from around the camera.

  “Try it again, more like you,” he says.

  I take a deep breath and start over.

  * * *

  The problem comes when I think about the role I’m playing instead of the thing I’m doing. I can discuss nitty-gritty life-and-literature stuff with anyone, anywhere, all day long. But when I become aware of the camera and of my job as an interviewer, the halting emphasis on random syllables starts up again: “What’s the se-CRET to a great co-MED-ic no-VEL? Today we’ll TALKTOTHEAUTHOR! ANDFINDOUT!”

  We came to an agreement, Matt and I. He understood that it would take me a few rounds of filming the intro before I’d loosen up enough to record a keeper. And I trusted that he’d tell me when I screwed up, so I could fix it. The whole team knew I was inexperienced. They’d known ever since the first time I looked into the camera and spoke my name during the screen test, sitting on my hands to keep from scratching the rash on my face.

  “I’m—wait, where do I look?”

  “Into the camera.”

  It felt strange and impersonal to address the rectangular lens and not the person whose outline I could just make out beyond it. I knew the crew was there in the shadows, but I couldn’t make out their faces. The cavernous Nashville Public Television studio—two stories high and packed along each wall with discarded set pieces—was completely dark, except for the spot where I sat in a tall director’s chair, lit by a beam coming from somewhere behind the camera. The NPT producers had invited me to come do a screen test to be considered as a host of A Word on Words, an author interview show. I’d never done on-camera work before, but the folks who produced the show had seen some of my writing about books and thought I might be a good candidate for a host. I love talking about books, so I said sure.

  The week before the screen test, I’d treated myself to a facial, which I knew damn well was a bad idea. I’ve had maybe four facials in my life. It always takes me a while to forget my sensitive skin’s unforgiving policy on unfamiliar emollients; but then I get sucked into a tranquil-looking advertisement and think, Yes, I would become a relaxed person if I let a stranger massage mystery oils into my face for an hour. My skin started boiling with bumps a few hours after I left the day spa. By the next day, it looked like I’d tried to cure a severe case of acne by rubbing my cheeks with poison ivy. I did not look or feel like myself when I screen-tested; I felt like a raw hamburger patty crawling with ants, being filmed for a nature documentary. That they took a chance and let me come back and shoot a pilot episode is a miracle.

  If you take one thing from this story, let it be that you should never get a facial before recording a television show.

  * * *

  That’s not the only lesson I got from my first television job. In addition, I learned: You must turn off your clip-on microphone before going to the bathroom. It takes professional drag queen levels of makeup not to look washed out under the lights. If you sit comfortably, you’ll look on-screen as if you’re slumped over in your chair like a corpse; you must hold the electrified posture of a startled ballerina if you want to look like you’re sitting up straight.

  Also, when you interview someone, you have to sit very close to them in order to be in the same frame. It looks normal on TV, but in real life it feels like you’re invading each other’s personal space.

  At the end of shooting an interview, there’s always an odd part of the process where the camera guys get right up next to us and shoot footage of our hands and faces. Each person is supposed to smile and nod as if listening to the other talk, but we can’t actually speak. We’re also supposed to make conversational hand gestures—clasping and unclasping, pointing, turning our palms up in a “so, you see . . .” kind of way. Then, when they’re editing the interview, they’ve got reaction shots of our hands and faces they can splice in wherever they need them. But this means that for about three minutes, we’re looking at each other and nodding, while folding and unfolding our hands, without saying a word. Again, looks great on TV, feels super-weird in real life.

  I’ll never forget the time we had the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Elizabeth Strout on the show. I had decided that I’d make the hands-and-faces bit at the end more fun by putting on some music to fill the silence. Her latest book at the time was called Anything Is Possible, so I picked out a song by Ben Folds called “Capable of Anything.” Similar themes.

  What I didn’t foresee was that by playing music I was making the moment not less uncomfortable, but much more so. It’s a surprisingly intimate experience to look into someone’s eyes at close range without speaking for the length of a song, not to mention a song about discovering the hitherto unknown depths of one’s soul. I realized almost immediately that I’d made the whole thing weirder, but once we were rolling, we couldn’t stop. So there we sat, so near to each other that our knees touched, gazing and nodding and hand-waving like mimes to a Ben Folds serenade. She was such a good sport—when the cameras stopped, she said, “Well, we just had a moment!”—but I felt like such a creeper for subjecting her to those three minutes.

  Sometimes fighting the awkwardness just makes everything more awkward. Now I know.

  * * *

  Making art—painting, singing, what have you—is never as easy as the final product makes it look. Take drawing, for instance. You might look at a picture of a dog and think, I’m going to draw a dog, too! And then as you attempt to draw a dog, you realize that this dog you’ve pictured in your mind isn’t quite coming across on paper. You might think, I want this shaggy dog to look friendly and whimsical. But when you put your pen to paper, you can’t figure out how to move your hand to make the ink convey friendly and whimsical. You have to concentrate on so many technical things: the right pressure to apply to make the fur look furry, the properl
y curved lines of the dog’s mouth, the proportion of legs to head to torso to tail. It doesn’t feel whimsical at all as you throw away your nineteenth try and start your twentieth drawing of that dog. These aren’t things the viewer thinks about, but they’re the things you have to do as the creator. You work, work, work on making something that will not feel at all like work in its consumption.

  I knew this already about writing, but I had not yet learned it about television. In writing, you can go off and do the hard, technical work-stuff in sweatpants while hunched over a laptop for hours that turn into years, then step back, put on a clean dress, and hold the final, polished, packaged book out to readers. Ta-da!

  When filming, you have to be the polished, packaged thing on camera AND you have to do the technical work of looking into the correct lens AND you have to talk and have a personality and listen and think and keep the conversation moving.

  Writing has more phases; filming is all at once. But that’s why it’s nice to be allowed several takes.

  Once to look into the right camera.

  Twice to get the words right.

  Three times to slow down and breathe normally.

  Four times to forget all that and just talk.

  You have to blink back the spell the camera casts on you, remember that you’re just a person sitting in a chair across from another person, having a chat. Do your preparation before, yes, but when the moment comes, let go. Don’t think about all the things that are happening at the same time. Surrender to the moment, be open to surprise, and follow where the conversation goes. This is what makes for a good show.

  * * *

  I used to think that if only I could make everything perfect, then I could relax and have fun. If I could just eliminate all mistakes, my life would settle into place—click!—and my mind would rest. If I’m being truthful, I have to acknowledge that on some unchangeable, deep-down level, there’s still a part of me that thinks that. I’m still a first grader at a spelling bee, thinking that what matters more than anything is that I get every single word right.

  But by now, I’ve built up a crowd of selves who can set that little girl at ease. It’s okay, they tell her. Mistakes will happen—they have happened—and it’s not the end of the world. They get her to loosen up a little. They help her see that doing things wrong is part of doing life right. They show her that joy is bigger than fear. It can even be funny when things go haywire.

  * * *

  So scratch the thing about never getting a facial before recording a television show. I mean, don’t get the pre-TV facial—it’s a bad idea. But if you’re going to take just one thing from this story, let it be something much more important:

  You can always start over.

  Sometimes my guests, especially the debut authors who haven’t done much press yet, stumble over their words or forget someone’s name or blurt out a thought they didn’t really mean to share. A look of panic always crosses their face when that happens, but there’s no need to worry, I tell them. I put my hand on theirs and say, It’s fine. We have plenty of time. Try it again, more like you.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you —

  To Kristyn Keene, for whom the word agent is insufficient, and to Trish Todd and the team at Simon & Schuster, for believing in and cheering for this book before it even was a book. Special thanks also to Cat Shook at ICM and to these folks at Simon & Schuster: the amazing Jessica Roth and Wendy Sheanin, plus the brilliant Kaitlin Olson, Meredith Vilarello, Kelsey Manning, Cherlynne Li, Tara Parsons, Susan Moldow, Polly Watson, and the team at Atria. And a million high fives to Beth Parker, of course.

  To friends and colleagues in Nashville, Atlanta, New York, and all over the country—more of you than I could mention here without using up a whole tree’s worth of pages—for giving expert advice, letting me talk your ears off, or generally showing kindness and patience while I worked on this project. (If you think I might mean you, I do.) Extra thanks for the friendship to Brittany Roberts, Susannah Parker, and Laura Balch; to my Davidson gang; and to the Loose Women Book Club, especially Sissy Gardner.

  To my writing group—Margaret Renkl, Susannah Felts, Maria Browning, and Carrington Fox. Every other writing group wishes they were as great as you. Thanks also to the very early readers brave enough to sit through a whole draft, including Molly Schulman, Ashton Hickey, Catherine Bock, plus Emmely Duncan and Kelly Kirby-Piovarcy, who read some pretty rough drafts. And to Keltie Peay for emergency proofreading.

  To Amy Williams for name-dropping me into a conversation that started another conversation that started another conversation that led to my finally sitting down and writing this thing.

  To Carmen Toussaint and Rivendell Writers Colony for space and time.

  To the animals who made the human world more tolerable during the writing of this book: Eleanor Roosevelt, Woodstock, Frank, Thaquine, Leonard, Sparky, Emma, Clark, Millie, Biddy, Tillie, Alice, Faye, the ever-evolving cast of shop dogs, parking-lot cats, and internet bats.

  To Linda Wei, Matt Emigh, and the whole crew at Nashville Public Television for the line “try it again, more like you,” which I’ll be using forever.

  To Roberta Zeff, Rachel Dry, KJ Dell’Antonia, Nadja Spiegelman, Amy Joyce, Towles Kintz, Nora Krug, Ron Charles, and other editors over the years for publishing my essays along the way, including some of the work that would eventually end up in this book.

  To independent bookstores everywhere.

  To each member of my bookstore family at Parnassus Books. Extra thanks to Karen Hayes, who provided endless support as I attempted to cram bookstore work, writing work, and parent work into the confines of twenty-four-hour days.

  To Colin Meloy and the Decemberists for allowing me to borrow their lyrics about a boy band and turn them into an epigraph about womanhood and reinvention.

  To my family, especially my parents, for loving me.

  To WC and MG, for letting me love you.

  To John, the most.

  Previously Published

  Parts of the following essays, published by these outlets, appear in some form this book:

  New York Times

  “Shopping for a Car—and a Teenager’s Future”

  “My Adventures in Accountability”

  “Sing, O Muse, of the Mall of America”

  “Wishing Away the Wish List”

  “And Then the Dog Died”

  “Telling the Kids: We’re Moving”

  Washington Post

  “Teaching Girls to Save Their Own Lives”

  Los Angeles Times

  “How Prince’s Death Stirs Fans’ Concerns for Their Heroes”

  Paris Review

  “The Case for Seasonal Sentimentality”

  Proximity

  “Lobsterman”

  About the Author

  MARY LAURA PHILPOTT’s writing has been featured in the New York Times; the Washington Post; the Los Angeles Times; McSweeney’s; the Paris Review; O, The Oprah Magazine; and other publications. She’s the founding editor of Musing, the online magazine of Parnassus Books, as well as an Emmy-winning cohost of the literary interview show A Word on Words on Nashville Public Television. She lives in Nashville with her family.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Mary-Laura-Philpott

  Facebook.com/AtriaBooks @AtriaBooks @AtriaBooks

  Also by Mary Laura Philpott

  Penguins with People Problems

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  Certain names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2019 by Mary Laura Philpott

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Atria Books hardcover edition April 2019

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  Interior design by Kyle Kabel

  Jacket design by Linda Huang

  Author photograph © Heidi Ross

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Philpott, Mary Laura, author.

  Title: I miss you when I blink : essays / Mary Laura Philpott.

  Description: New York : Atria, [2019] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018030497 (print) | LCCN 2018050689 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982102821 (eBook) | ISBN 9781982102807 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982102814 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781982102821 (ebk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Philpott, Mary Laura. | Middle-aged women--United States--Biography. | Women authors, American--Biography. | Television talk show hosts--United States--Biography. | Women--Humor. | Adulthood--Humor.