After you say your thing, do your little dog and pony show, they ask you a lot of very smart and thoughtful questions that often feel like a trap. This part is the most interesting to me, because you’re getting insight into both what they’re considering when it comes to their programming and also testing the weak spots in your ideas. I had never done this before, so I had no point of reference and stammered through every answer like it was my first day saying words. They use a lot of superlatives when they speak, which makes you feel like they’re tapping you with a magical TV wand that all but guarantees your massive commercial success. Either way, I don’t care, it’s fine. Even if no one wants to see Fake Sam sweating on an emergency room toilet, I got to fly first class to LA, get cupcakes out of a vending machine, pretend to drink many fancy bottles of water fetched by people from Kansas with Big Dreams, try not to bleed on the pristine couch at Apple, look at lots of Emmys in glass cases, take pictures of Sons of Anarchy posters while stopping myself from asking if I could have one, make the joke “we could just call it Fat Insecure,” which nobody at HBO laughed at, walk through a movie set on the Fox lot, poop twice at Amazon, and maybe at the end of two days of flop sweating in various conference rooms, someone would take a chance on a true moron and offer to buy our zygote of a show.
After it’s all over you don’t have to hand out business cards or leave behind any brochures for their perusal. You do your choreographed dance number, everyone shakes hands and/or hugs (they love hugging!), you stop by the front desk to get your liver back, then you find your way down to the parking garage and you get in your rental car and sit in traffic for an hour and a half trying to get back to the east side of the city where everybody cool lives. Pitch meetings are always mostly good and positive-feeling, at least the ones I’ve been in, which makes it really hard to know what the two to six smiling people on the other side of the table actually thought. I call my Hollywood-specific agent at the end of each meeting to give him the same rundown every time: “Yes, I was very charming. No, no one visibly reacted to my psoriasis. They seemed to really like the voiceover idea. I’m pretty sure I left some condensation on that leather chair. Yep, okay, follow up with them. If they don’t want it, please just murder me in my sleep.” This whole process is so strange and disconcerting; it’s not like a job interview where you follow up or sit by the phone, and no one tells you whether or not you’ve actually done a good job. You just go right back to your regular life. I have gone two rounds through this ringer, and both times my return was met with the people covering my duties at work shrugging while saying, “So what?” No one in the hospital breakroom gave two shits that I drank a coffee across from a dude who worked with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
Our final pitch meeting ended late on a Friday afternoon, and my friends and I drank cans of rosé like good Californians and ate meatloaf like good Midwesterners to celebrate, and then we went to a fancy boutique patisserie with an overwhelming number of ice cream choices that was packed full of wailing children who were frustrated with how long I was taking to decide on my expensive, well-deserved treat. Which I get, but come on, man. I’ve never seen cornflake ice cream before, I need a minute to fucking think about it! Two hours before I had been in a glass-walled suite making a case for queer POC representation on primetime television, and now a child named Salinger was fully standing on my feet to get a better look at cone varieties in a stark white acrylic box crammed with toddlers and cooled roughly to the temperature of the arctic circle. Life is so fucking weird. I’m glad I wore my sweatshirt.
hollywood summer
“Do you want to come to California for a couple months to work on the television show of your dreams?” is honestly the most exciting non-food-related thing any other person has said to me. When Lindy West sold the adaptation of her book Shrill to Hulu and it immediately got picked up to series—which is a dumb Hollywood term that basically means “we will give you money to make several episodes of a show, sight unseen, that we don’t know if anyone will actually watch”—she called me on the phone (a crime), and we unintelligibly screamed high-pitched nonsense words at each other for a full minute and a half.
At that point, I had been circling the drain of my own rapidly disintegrating development project (another showbiz glossary term that essentially means “maybe we’ll let you make a show for our network but probably not. Please enjoy existential uncertainty and a years-long low-grade panic attack as we reject every single one of your slightly different drafts”) for 730-plus anxious, emotionally draining days. I’d sat in many hip conference rooms with sockless guys in boat shoes trying to convince them that my Fat Diarrhea Show would make compelling television, and I’d received almost an equal ratio of meetings/calls from my therapist/agent during which he tried to let me down easy in his gentlest voice by explaining that “[redacted streaming service and/or basic cable network] just really isn’t in a comedy space right now.”
Anyway, wow. Lindy had her very own television show! And it wasn’t on a website or, and I’m just being hypothetical here, acted out by the discarded dolls growing moldy in the playroom in my basement! I was fucking jealous (duh) and wondered, “Maybe my thing really is just too stupid for TV,” but I made myself feel better by remembering RACISM, oh and also by thinking about how I wouldn’t have to worry if someone from E! News would scrutinize my chin hairs on any red carpet premieres. I’m not shaving, I’m tired!
Lindy told me that she was allowed to pick one of several people who would join the Shrill writers’ room that summer in Los Angeles, and she wanted that person to be me. I had zero experience in a writers’ room and zero experience working on a television show other than the soap opera running a continuous loop in my head, starring myself. The only screenwriting experience I had was the pilot I had cowritten for my own optioned book, which ended up being flushed down a FOX toilet with a runaway alien from The X-Files and several unaired episodes of 24, so I was incredibly flattered and 100 percent positive that I was grossly unqualified for this job that I was absolutely going to accept. I’m not going to let a little thing like having absolutely no fucking idea what the fuck I’m doing get in the way of possibly getting a coffee enema at the same spa a Real Beverly Hills Housewife goes to; my threadbare yoga pants and I were getting on that plane no matter what. BUT:
where was I going to live?
how do situationally impoverished go to Hollywood?
does Hulu have a dorm? You know, like a lil’ writer farm? I cannot afford to even think about California real estate!
how do Midwestern people like me get around? Should I just get one of them star maps?
do people still take the bus there or do I need to make friends with someone who owns a plane or what?
can I somehow negotiate a Lyft stipend?
should I just rent a car?
wait, yes, I should rent a car. But will they give me one for two months or do I have to go renew it every week? Jesus what a hassle.
how do I decide which is my new grocery store?
a follow-up: Do the stores there actually sell food with cholesterol in it?
can I make short-term friends as an adult or should I just subscribe to every single channel available on Earth?
people there only drink oat milk, right?
seriously where the fuck was I going to live???
I hadn’t even gotten the job officially and already I was worried about whether or not I was going to find a bed to watch shows in (because meeting people is daunting), whether I would have a tall-enough toilet with many-plied quilted toilet paper, and if California supermarkets carry gluten-based snacks. These are the kinds of things that matter to me, not learning things or being prepared. What was I supposed to do in the week between finding out about the gig and dragging my battered Samsonite full of sweatshirts and pajama pants to the airport: Take an Aaron Sorkin masterclass on the fucking Internet? Join my local improv troupe? Fuck that. I skimmed Lindy’s book again and memorized some surfing word
s and left the rest up to Satan.
I fucking love LA (dog birthday parties! spiritual healers on every corner! unironic oxygen bars!). You might not think so because I’m a misanthropic depressed person with menopause acne whose hips are too wide for every single restaurant chair in Silverlake, but you would be wrong. I’m a Fat Bitch from the Middle West and I love accidentally running into minor celebrities with my cart in the wheatgrass aisle at the Rock ’N Roll Ralph’s on Sunset. I love being in the neighborhood where Vanderpump Rules is shot but never getting out of the car and just cruising around hoping to see Kristen popping into the spray tan shop because when you are on reality television, that is a part of your job. I love walking through the Americana with sweat pooling under my arms as I imagine how great my life would be if I could live in a shopping mall in a place where it never snows. I love witch doctors and blond topknots and designer sunglasses and how everyone is friendly until they figure out that you can’t put them in a movie. I love being served a twenty-one-dollar fresh-squeezed juice with zero irony. I love wearing my gross, real-person clothes to a breakfast meeting at the Four Seasons because that is not humiliating at all! True story: there was a for-real Bentley with a driver sleeping behind the wheel parked in the circular drive out front when my Uber driver’s rusty Toyota Celica dropped me off and I was like, “Wait, am I actually Pretty Woman?” and then the hostess gave me directions to a soup kitchen while beating me about the head with a broom.
I love horrifying all of the miniskirted assistants at my TV agent’s office by eating carbohydrates in public. I love going to a ritzy spa and suffering first-degree burns on my labia while getting my yoni steamed, a procedure I didn’t need that provided no benefits. I love when someone recommends their shaman to me, a mean asshole who won’t even put that astrology app on her phone, in earnest. I love that no one ever talks about how LA is the actual desert, and there’s just lizards and shit skittering around everywhere and everything is actively burning to death in front of you. I love how many adorable ice cream shops and bakeries there are all over a town where nobody eats ice cream or baked goods. I love how, while sitting at a restaurant gazing out at the ocean and casually mentioning that your back has been bugging you, people will offer a little NBD nibble of shrooms the way someone in, say, Milwaukee would go fishing through their bag for a dusty Advil.
*
Here’s a list of things I did that summer in my Fancy Hollywood Office after I took the job:
sat in my chair
turned on the massive computer, got scared when a pop-up window announced “OFFICIAL PROPERTY OF WARNER BROS,” and then turned off the computer
wondered if anyone needed me or if I was missing a meeting or something and they’d forgotten I was supposed to be there
whispered into the receiver when my friend Fernando called me (During my “job”? A hate crime!) because I didn’t want anyone to hear me being all loud on the phone
spun around in my chair
put a plant on my desk that I forgot to consistently water and couldn’t bring back to Michigan anyway so who even knows what happened to that little guy
ordered too many things I didn’t need to make up for not having any friends
watched the valet guys moving around the cars in the lot in an intricate pattern I could never figure out
did my writing assignments while wondering, “Am I doing this right?”
scooted in my chair
diligently wrote while wondering, “Are they going to make fun of me?” every ten goddamn minutes
The first day of my new job as Lowly Staff Writer on an American Comedy Web Television Series, I got to the office and couldn’t figure out how to get into the building until a woman who worked at the reception desk—she must have smelled my bad taste through the walls—came to rescue me and pointed out the unlocked door, which was literally five feet from the locked one I was yanking fruitlessly on while hyperventilating. I was several minutes late and covered with a thin sheen of musky flop sweat at ten in the morning, my palpable impostor syndrome causing my stomach to lurch acid up the back of my throat. That is the perfect way to show up for your first day at a new job! “Nice to meet you, fellow comedy kids! Would you like to shake my damp and clammy hand? My body smells like a dog’s teeth!”
Our office was in a squat, nondescript building in the actual neighborhood of Hollywood, which sounds fancy but is mostly just dusty and hot and unexciting. I can’t decide if you’d want me to go into detail about how it was all set up, or if that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever had. Okay, here’s an abridged version:
I approach most endeavors with zero expectations, which is a skill I have honed after forty years of fairly regular disappointment. I learned early on that if you just expect things to be bad, not even bad but the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone, then, unless someone gets murdered in front of you, whatever it is usually turns out to be fine. Bearable, at worst. It’s a good skill to have, and it makes new things, for the most part, pleasantly exciting? I had no idea what was in store for me, so I packed a sack lunch and brought a refillable water bottle just in case, because I assumed there wouldn’t be food or maybe at best we’d have access to a vending machine that you had to walk up four flights of stairs to get to, and, honestly, I was fully prepared to fill my water bottle up in the bathroom and eat my room-temperature string cheeses while confidently saying dumb shit like, “I’m just pitching here, but what if we sent that character to the moon?”
Everyone else seemed bored and unimpressed so I tried to imitate their nonchalance as we were shown to our INDIVIDUAL OFFICES. A real office! With a desk and some chairs and a couple windows plus a computer and a file cabinet! I farted a giggle out of my mouth, then immediately shut it down because no one else seemed fazed. Oh, sure, of course. They were bona fide showbiz professionals (*jazz hands*) who’d probably had dozens of offices throughout their careers. Meanwhile, I wrote my last book in the handicapped bathroom at my old job during my lunch breaks. “BE COOL,” I warned my inner tuna casserole. Nothing is more embarrassing than unbridled enthusiasm. I was shown to a designated office, I shrugged like I didn’t give a fuck, and then I walked in and set down my JanSport backpack filled with shrink-wrapped portable snack cheese. “This’ll work, I guess,” I said coolly, pretending to inspect this room that was bigger than my last apartment. I snuck a picture, my hands literally vibrating with glee, when I thought no one was looking and sent it to my friends in the heartland, who are all potatoes.
We were led on a tour. From the name tags on the various doors, it looked like there was another show being written on our floor, which didn’t mean anything to me other than that there would be more people to avoid shitting in front of in the communal bathroom. There was an open-plan kitchen with a large conference room off it, and as we approached I saw that it contained a nice-size fridge, a wide sink, a coffee maker, some cabinets, and a tall island surrounded by stools with a bowl of fresh fruit in the center of it. “Whose perfect bananas are these?” I wondered. “Who gets to eat these shiny, unblemished apples?!” my brain screamed. Then Lindy reached out and nonchalantly plucked an orange from the arrangement and began to peel it. I would never do that, because I am self-conscious to the point of paralysis, but I bubbled inside with excitement. Holy shit, Mister Hulu himself buys us produce!!!!!
Coffee, too. And lunch. So much lunch!! Listen, I know you want me to tell you that my coworkers were glib Hollywood assholes and that we spent every day committing microaggressions against one another while daring someone to call HR, but I can’t because maybe one murdered somebody and maybe another burned the building down with us inside and maybe yet another took us hostage and maybe Kate stabbed someone in the stomach, but I never saw it because I was too busy weeping over the menus that would magically appear in the middle of the conference room table at ten thirty every morning.
Do you know that there is not a single Thai restaurant where I live? Okay, no need to cry for me,
it’s not like larb is a basic human right, I’m just trying to illustrate why the fact that we could just, you know, have dishes from Night + Market Song delivered to us in the middle of the day was cause for celebration. I’m a rube, okay? I’m used to living that “packet of expired Swiss Miss cocoa in the break room if you can find it” kind of life. I’ve never had a shared assistant before! And, frankly, an assistant is a lot of pressure, and I would never want to have access to one again. Every time someone young and eager (whose job it was to remember how much Stevia people like in their tea in the hopes that one day that would translate to a writing job) offered to get me a drink, I would be like, “Wait, can I get you a drink? What kind of kombucha do you like?” and then I’d melt into a thick goo of inadequacy. I have never not had a job where I wasn’t the one whose job it was to fetch the ____ or clean up ____ with a mop. I love a cold drink and I hate walking, so what dream to not have to do that, but it felt weird not to give the person who committed to memory that I like that one weird soda a tip or the keys to my rental car. You know, to make it feel even. I honestly cannot tell you shit about how to make a television program, but I can tell you that we got to make a shopping list every week of things to have on hand in the kitchen. This is an unbelievably amazing gift that immediately devolves into the most stressful decision you’ve ever had to make in your life!
Someone would slide the notepad with GROCERIES scrawled at the top over to me and I’d have a complete internal breakdown.
You know, this office would be great with gummy bears. Should I write gummy bears? Is everyone going to know that I’m the one who requested a child’s candy? Is Lorne Michaels going to see this list? Did Craig write “chia crackers”? I am so impressed. That is a person who actually cares about his life, even in the face of complimentary snack foods. What if I put down “yogurt,” and they get the unsweetened health kind? Is it more depressing or less depressing if I write down the specific brand and flavor that I want? Why do I always want the shit called low-fat chocolate cherry cupcake yogurt?
Wow, No Thank You. Page 20