When you buy it yourself, you can just scan your own shit at checkout and nobody knows other than you and your debit card. When you’re adding it to a shared list, beads of sweat pop up on your upper lip when the assistant calls on speakerphone to regretfully inform the room that whoever ordered the “Yoplait Whips! Vanilla Crème Mousse” is shit outta luck. You’ll be embarrassed, but you’ll also be a little sad that they don’t have your fucking yogurt.
Wow, this is an inordinate amount of pressure and I am taking too long and looking incredibly weird! I have to hurry up with this. Ha-ha, how mad would everybody be if I just wrote “a single onion.” How do I decide on something that I definitely want to eat, but nobody else will so I won’t have to pee on it so they know it’s mine? How do these people know their snack needs so well? Who the fuck wrote “turmeric tea”? I thought we were here to party. Okay, fine, pretzels and Diet Coke.
Writing a television show is like hanging out with your friends in the same room every day, arguing about what should happen on a show you haven’t watched yet. After the first week, I waited for someone to show up and tell me, “Okay, hoe, it’s cute that you thought we were just gonna let you sit in a chair and get paid to think about imaginary people. Here’s your scrub brush, you remember where the toilets are, right?” And … I would do it. I would scrub those toilets. When I worked at a bakery, I had to mop the floor every night and scrub down pastry cases, and I once burned an entire layer of skin off my arm on a trayful of fresh millet bread. For that I was paid $7.25 an hour, and I gladly cashed those checks. I’m no stranger to thankless grunt work. I almost prefer it. There is nothing to prepare a person who once accepted twenty bucks cash and a gift certificate to the on-campus coffee shop to make three hours of grueling telemarketing calls for the idea that someone with a palm tree outside their office would pay you ninety-two dollars an hour for snarky joke ideas from your tiny, incompetent brain. Every day I drove to the Shrill room in my Toyota Camry—turns out you can rent one for a month at a time in Los Angeles for approximately the cost of an entire car in Iowa—and wondered if that would be the day someone saw through my ruse and ordered me to go pick up lunch or ask me if they could use my back as a table.
I used to pick up dog shit for a living; I had no reason to believe I would ever sit in a room with people who make decisions about what other people get to watch and be taken seriously when I suggested, “WHAT IF WE THREW A FAT BABE POOL PARTY THAT WILL COST A MILLION DOLLARS.”
I wrote my episode, season one episode four, in its entirety in an ice-cold room at the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood the night before my script was due. And I know that sounds glamorous. I know it conjures the sexy image of a sleep-deprived chanteuse with a hint of deep, exhausted purple shadowing each eye, a mountain of wadded up sheets of yellow legal paper on the floor beside the antique desk on which sits a well-worn typewriter and a juice glass with a dried-up circle of wine staining its bottom, and me slumped over the fancy desk chewing pensively on the arm of my glasses.
What really happened was the power had gone out in our rented summerhouse because Los Angeles is a flaming hellscape and it was 105 degrees for many days in a row, and the power grid just could not compete with all those cranked-up air conditioners. GOTTA KEEP ALL THE INJECTABLES FRESH.
Lindy and I were living in Martha Plimpton’s ranch house (bitch, I know!!) at the top of this inconvenient mountain in the Hollywood Hills at the end of a hazardous two-way winding road that was 100 percent blind corners, closer to the sun than I have ever been or will ever be again. The afternoon before my big important television script was due, just before I was about to sit at my borrowed desk and really get to work I swear, the lights blinked off and all the whirring and buzzing and clicking, the house’s steady heartbeat, ground to a halt. I knew immediately that it was my punishment for always leaving shit until the last fucking minute. Give me a week to work on something, I’m doing it the night before it’s due. Give me a month to work on something? I’m doing it the night before it’s due! Give me a day to work on something, I’m starting it at 2 a.m.
I wish I had a more exciting and glamorous answer for the question of how I came to write the pool party episode of Shrill, but it’s pretty simple: I wrote it because someone told me to write it. In the beginning, when we were coming up with the arc of the season, we all pitched ideas to build the narrative for the main character, Annie (“Really, though, should she go to outer space???”).
The basic premise of the series is this: Annie is a fat, single woman in a situationship with a loser, and she’s also unfulfilled at her job, where she is underappreciated. Our goal was to figure out a way, in only a handful of episodes, to evolve her from a whiny doormat (sorry!) to a bitch who owns her shit. Or a bitch who is maybe on the path to owning her shit? Anyway, while talking about a tangible way to shift Annie’s perspective from the beginning of the season (unhappily eating special weight-loss foods and putting up with shit from a shitty man) to where we wanted her to be at the end of it (fat and fine with it, or at the very least on the way to being fine with it, and dumping said piece of shit), all of the writers were throwing out ideas (we didn’t want to resort to a cheesy makeover montage or hit her over the head with an exercise bike), and I said maybe she could go to a fat girl party, and maybe that party could be at a pool, and maybe seeing half-naked fat people enjoying themselves could be the catalyst for this change in her attitude toward her body and herself. In Chicago I would go to these dance parties and clothing swaps and exercise classes that were made specifically for fat women, and I thought it would be cool to see Annie seeing all different types of bodies unabashedly enjoying decadent party snacks while wearing crop tops and bikinis poolside.
Before naked Tumblr models were pervasive in the culture, hanging out with size 28–plus girls at the club dressed in miniskirts with their upper arm fat exposed was my gateway to being like, “Oh, okay, I don’t have to hide or hate myself, got it!” because the Internet wasn’t invented yet when I was a child (probably) and had to seek out my own flesh-and-blood affirming spaces. I was a kid in the ’80s, so Nell Carter and Shirley Hemphill are the two fat women who come immediately to mind when I think about who looked like me on television growing up, and Nell wore billowy caftans (fuck me up, sis) while Shirley preferred bell-bottom jeans and tight T-shirts (absolutely my shit), which was cool, but it wasn’t like I was seeing a whole lot of loud, joyful embracing of their “curves.”
Then along came the Internet, and I’m no longer stuck in 1992 with fashion magazines that would lead you to believe that no bodies above a size 6 even exist. There was suddenly this wide world of fat girls in stylish clothes living their lives and being free and I just *galaxy brain* started to feel like the tide was turning for people with bodies like mine. Just because I had suffered through my tens and twenties in longline girdles and Spanx that came up to my chin didn’t mean the next generation had to.
I showed up for fifth-grade picture day in a business suit from JCPenney because there was nothing that fit me in the juniors section, I went to one middle school dance in a “blouse.” I did it, I crawled in oversize acid-washed denim jumpers with pastel mock turtlenecks underneath so that these girls in their neon mesh crop tops could run, and nothing makes me happier. As I pull my high-waisted jeans up to my ribcage and resign to throw out every bra with an underwire I’ve ever purchased, it’s seriously fucking thrilling to have fat girls in bra tops strut past the bus stop bench on which I have paused to rest because, listen, I’m ninety-four in elder gay years.
I don’t want to LOSE MY FUCKING MIND ABOUT THIS, but do you know how revolutionary it is for a person who once upon a time ate those Olestra chips that made my insides ooze involuntarily to my outside no matter how tightly I clenched my sphincter to stem the tide to click on the Universal Standard website and see a woman modeling size 40 jeans? You hear people talking about the importance of seeing “someone who looks like me” And it’s like “okay, sure, who c
ares, shut up.” It has always been obvious in regards to race, but with size I guess I’d never really thought about it that much because, well, that’s just the way things have always been. Sometimes, it isn’t always clear what you don’t have until Lane Bryant puts on a lingerie fashion show and throws a billboard up in Times Square, and Tess Holliday is on the cover of a widely distributed magazine with her back fat out and then it’s like, HELL YES, BITCH. SHE HAS THIGHS LIKE ME, OPEN UP MY LARGEST VEIN AND INJECT THESE IMAGES DIRECTLY INTO IT.
I wanted to write a moment like that for the show. Frankly, America needs more moments like that. More fat people, yes, doing normal stuff that isn’t “dieting” or “being sad.” But also, more young fat women deserve to look at a mirror image of themselves on a television screen (I know, I know, the youths watch TV on their computers) without the attached self-loathing and parroting of diet culture that we’re used to.
I think everyone involved came to Shrill wanting to tell this story but with a nagging voice in the back of all our heads shouting, “BUT NOT LIKE THAT.” As a consumer of popular culture you can’t help but be exposed to all the typical fat girl stereotypes and tropes: She cries on the scale! She’s a great friend to skinny protagonists! She has a closet full of adorable cherry-printed skirts! But for me, Shrill was an opportunity to put a bitch fat lady who can’t sing on TV, and it made people so fucking mad, and I love that.
We wrote the show in LA over the course of two months. I ate more delicious free lunches then I could count; I went to many, many shows and left early; I saw Jeff Goldblum on the freeway and almost drove my stupid fucking overpriced car into oncoming traffic. I also:
spent a not-insignificant amount of time at chain restaurants in Sherman Oaks
went to a psychic in Santa Monica who got some things so right that it scared me
micro-dosed psilocybin mushrooms every day
got recreational IV treatments
left a restaurant for being both too small and offering no parking, which made me feel like the fucking mayor of the Midwest
saw the dude who played Ryan on The Office at a fried chicken spot
hung out at Skylight and Book Soup too much and had to ship books home
introduced Lindy to Catfish: The TV Show and created another lifelong fan of Craig from the Craig and Zoe episode
went to Sephora in Pasadena and let the handsome salesperson with very smooth skin shame me into purchasing six million dollars’ worth of tiny bottles of oil
slammed my hand in the door of the rental car and pissed my pants from the blinding pain
stocked up on powerful crystals
tried fruitlessly to find a quality bagel
sat in the car listening to “In My Feelings” on repeat in a parking lot in Long Beach while watching other people frolic in the water
ordered tacos a thousand times
pretended I was starring in La La Land and made unironic jazz hands in public
went to several vegan restaurants, on purpose
After all of us writers turned our individual scripts in, we spent a week or so punching up one another’s jokes. I learned so many things on the job, meaning I faked like I knew what the fuck people were talking about then looked it up on my phone when they turned their attention elsewhere, that I am retrospectively quite proud of myself for never obviously shitting the bed during this whole process. I got off the plane in LAX, not knowing what it meant to offer up a “quick pitch” in a meeting, and now I would never fucking say it without fear of looking like a total impostor, but I know what it means if you say it. I didn’t know how to write “this scene happens in the house at breakfast” in a script a year ago but now I know it’s “INT. HOUSE—MORNING.” “Punching up” basically means that other writers go through your script and try to come up with lines that are funnier than yours, and you get to do the same thing to theirs; then everyone submits them anonymously and the producers who get final script approval pick the ones that they like best and they’re probably not yours but whatever, bitch!
When the scripts were all punched up and edited, it was time to leave. We worked June and July, and shooting started in August, and the cast and producers had to dip off to Portland for pre-production and location scouting, and look at me pretending I know all the technical shit they had to do! There was a table read (the actors, some of whom you will recognize from fucking Home Alone and try not to humiliate yourself in front of, read through the scripts while sitting around a big table while other people who aren’t actors watch them and try not to breathe distractingly loud while laughing too hard at the jokes) at Warner Bros., during which I sat thunderstruck by Julia Sweeney as she sat two feet from where I was trying to prop a complimentary breakfast sandwich on my lap while juggling scripts. I mostly spent my last week watching Sharp Objects in the air-conditioning at Martha’s house and avoiding all the Gila monsters prowling around outside. Then I went home, where I no longer had to talk about weed or pretend to understand fashion.
My life snapped right back to whatever it was before I left. I ran my usual errands, picked themed snacks for our monthly book club, and let my muscle memory lead me right to the gastrointestinal distress aisle at my beloved local pharmacy. I didn’t have to learn the layout of a new store anymore!
I don’t ever want to be the kind of person who is not fully blown away by the magnitude of getting to make a big, dumb, shiny thing that doesn’t cure disease or whatever but brought people some joy! I got many positive tweets! I never want to take for granted that a person in a big corporate office pulled out a giant cardboard check for millions of dollars to buy mini hot dogs and fake margaritas, just because I typed it up on my old, junky laptop. It still feels like a fucking coup, like “Do they actually know that they let a person who regularly falls for fake news stories write an entire episode of their television show?!” I’ll never be too cool for all those coffees a kid with a master’s degree had to spend his summer running to get for me. I am a garbage person who has taken a shit in the street before! Do you think that, when I was spreading my frozen ass cheeks open to force hot diarrhea through my trembling haunches as a blizzard raged around me, I could have ever imagined, twenty years later, I’d be wearing those flat headphones you only see around the necks of directors in behind-the-scenes DVD extras of your favorite movies, watching actors read words that I wrote from a monitor? I DID NOT. I thought I would be living in a windowless apartment above a Jamaican restaurant, married to a small hairless dog. I may still end up there, fixing Mr. Little Jeans his dinner as reggae pulses through our floor from the restaurant below, but as long as you keep letting me use your log-in, I will always have my Hollywood Summer.
$$$
Our mailman, Erik, is a very sweet young man. He always appears to be happy while delivering stacks of Amazon boxes and slippery piles of magazines to us and the other people on our street, despite the fact that we live on a hill with an incline so steep that cars just slide down to the bottom of it during icy weather. He does yoga and is friendly and smiles at me even though I get dozens of books in the mail and, like I said, we live on a treacherous ski slope at least three months out of the year. He’s a straight-up delight! We had a horrible winter storm; school was canceled, roads were blocked off, the movie theater app on my phone messaged me to tell me that the matinee I’d planned to see was a no-go since the theater was closing for three days due to snow and subzero wind chills. There was a knock on the front door that I assumed was going to be the Abominable Snowman dropping by on his way home from the indoor farmers’ market to warm himself by the woodstove until the roads cleared up, but alas, it was dear Erik, who’d apparently climbed a glacier forming downhill to deliver a certified collection letter to me from the goddamned IRS.
The first thing I did when I got a paycheck for writing a book, which still feels like a joke sentence the eight-year-old inside of me wrote, was to recklessly spent the entire thing in a week and a half. Maybe. Probably. At least that’s wha
t it felt like. I first did some responsible things: I looked up my credit report and paid off all the old balances for goods and services I didn’t even remember having received, which is particularly painful for me because I do not delight in participating in responsible things. I bought a travel sleep machine, which, while it offends me very deeply to make decisions that are good for my well-being, has come in very handy while trying to live through the night in LA guestrooms and New York City hotels, but was shockingly expensive and also decidedly NOT FUN. I paid for a new hot water heater and a guy to install it, and sure you could cook pasta in my shower, but that’s not exactly my idea of a great time. And who knows what I spent the rest on, normal life stuff, I guess: Amtrak tickets and synthetic oil changes and a Hulu subscription and shirts.
These days people are always like, “Aren’t you rich now? You pick up the check!” And, first of all, no! My books cost, I don’t know, ten dollars (?), and I know from Instagram that you borrowed yours from the library because you tagged me in the photo. And that’s fine, who cares, I support my local library, but we’re gonna have to go half on this pizza. Another thing: I don’t actually have a job! Plus the government gets the lion’s share of everything I make?? My lady is a social worker! Listen, you don’t have to cry for me, but I’m not rich enough to buy you a trip or a nice bag.
I recently met this asshole who wanted to bond with me over our shared impoverished childhoods and while, ordinarily, screaming “GIRL, WE USED TO GET THE BAGGED ALDI CEREALS, TOO!” in a new friend’s face is one of my favorite pastimes, the minute she slipped and admitted that her mom tucked name-brand Jell-O pudding cups into her trademarked Heathcliff lunchbox, I held up a disgusted finger to silence her. “What are you, a Rockefeller?” I cried in disbelief. If you don’t understand what the words “shelf stable Snack Pack” mean, you have to, excuse me, get the fuck out of my face. On the rare occasion I wasn’t forced to settle for the free hot lunch, my mom would take a piece of rinsed-off previously used tinfoil, flatten it out, lay all the components of whatever she was cobbling together for a barely edible meal next to each other on the foil, fold the sides envelope style, then hand me that lumpy rectangular blob to shove into my Inspacktor Gorgett (that’s clearance rack Woolworth-speak for “Inspector Gadget”) backpack where the congealing food blob (canned tuna mixed with boiled macaroni actually touching a slice of stale 7UP cake!! The horror!) would immediately begin to leak all over my homework. I was always turning in worksheets stained with Salisbury steak runoff. Then she’d pull up to the playground outside school gunning the engine on her Chevy Celebrity with an unlit Kool clenched between her teeth, shouting, “Don’t forget to bring my foil home!” as I shuffled, hot and flushed pink, toward the swings.
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