50 Tries

Short Hair

Really struggling again to come up with a topic. I had two entire false starts before coming up with the nursery school idea, and while that has a New Yorker feel to it, I may have too much of the mommy perspective.

Anyway, the conclusion I came to is the same one I started out with: it’s all about the premise. For next week I need to choose what I want to say, and then find an amusing way to say it. Just trying to be amusing isn’t enough, and I’m not sure how I keep losing sight of that.

I went to the salon where I’d had my hair straightened in July ($500, natch) to ask them to buzz it all off. I couldn’t take seeing it anymore. The kindly receptionist talked me into just cutting it really short for the time being. I think it was the right thing to do. Even though the hair stylist told me that her cousin and her aunt had had vasectomies, and then leaned in and told me that she’d had a boob job, so she had a really good doctor if I needed a vasectomy, too, she was a very kind woman and I think she did a good job. Anyway, it’s giving me at least another week without a wig, and for that I’m grateful.

2. Oops! My Mom Called the Lawyer Again

Okay, submitted under my own name, more out of exhaustion than anything else. It’s ridiculous, but I’m now checking my mail compulsively and feeling rejected by the lack of response. I was hoping this would lead more to a feeling of hope than disappointment, but I’ve got to stay with this. Fifty times, that’s the point.

My hair is still coming out in every-larger clumps, and my cold is still dragging on. Chirley seemed freaked out yesterday and told me that if my fever spiked above 100.4, that I had to call. I was too busy trying not to cry to ask her what would happen then.

Anyway, the under-a-hat wigs I’ve ordered have arrived, if I have to go get my head buzzed tomorrow. I ordered a Red Sox cap this time. Sort of a patron saint of lost causes kind of thing. Or something.

Work in progress

Very, very tough coming up with this. I’ve had a cold and it’s hard to concentrate, and I don’t want to focus on the war/don’t think it’s funny. But if I give up the second week I’ll just be a cancer patient, so I’d rather write about Britney’s mariage, which I’m sure will be over by the time this book is published.

Now—what to do about this pesky only submit twice a year thing? Use my own name again to try to stand out, or save it for later so as not to arouse suspicion?

1. Upcoming Reality TV Pilots

An odd moment of elation and despair. I’ve submitted my first essay! I think it’s funny, yay me! But also: the web site submission guidelines are as follows:

Submissions should be sent by e-mail to the appropriate department, as indicated below:

Fiction: fiction@newyorker.com
The Talk of the Town: talkofthetown@newyorker.com
Shouts & Murmurs: shouts@newyorker.com
Poetry: poetry@newyorker.com
Newsbreaks: newsbreaks@newyorker.com

We cannot accept submissions that are sent as attachments, so please send your work as part of the body of an e-mail. No more than one story or six poems should be submitted at one time; poetry submissions should include the poet's name in the subject line. We prefer to receive no more than two submissions per writer per year, and generally cannot reply to more. We do not consider simultaneous submissions or material that has been previously published.

Upon reading this, I fell into despair: the foundation of my project had been ripped right out from under me. I then decided that accepting only two submissions per writer per year was unacceptable, and remembered that I have really rather superior computer skills, and should be able to create a wealth of e-mail addresses should the need arise. I am hopeful, however, that the Shouts & Murmurs editor will either a) contact me after my second submission to say, “we haven’t had room for you yet, but you’re funny, keep trying,” or, b) just print the damn thing.
The essay was submitted at 3:00; at 3:42, my inbox displayed a message from the New Yorker—with the Subject line, “Enter to win a fabulous NYC Getaway.”

A Note on the Text

For the reasons described above, I really, really, really want to publish a “Shouts & Murmurs” piece in the New Yorker (though I will settle for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times). While I may be wrong, I think that I have often written funnier things than regularly appear in either venue. But since the Carnegie Hall method (practice, practice, practice) isn’t enough to get me in, I decided to do a study of Shouts & Murmurs.

This study was thoroughly unscientific. As my husband, Adam, always claims that he wants to read the New Yorker when I’m finished, there was a mountainous stack of issues on his bedside table. I took them and scanned all the Shouts & Murmurs (and the Back Pages that weren’t cartoons) into my computer, then printed them out and put them in a notebook. I then drew up a chart and performed an amusement analysis on each one, getting about two thirds of the way through before I got bored and just wanted to get started.

Here’s what I learned.

1. The pieces, (dating back to March 24, 2003), were frequently less topical than I expected, riffing on the media, the absurdity of everyday life, or, often, issues of concern to the middle-aged man. One, “An Appendectomy on the Bakerloo Line,” was simply incomprehensible to me.

2. Many of the pieces, including “Appendectomy,” were written by really famous people. Graham Chapman, Steve Martin, Paul Rudnick—my name’s not exactly going to leap out from amongst theirs, not to mention that they’ve got the middle-aged man thing going for them. Many of the other writers were New Yorker regulars.

3. As with all humor writing, not a whole lot of women authors.

4. Lots of riffs on small news items quoted at the start.

5. Word count generally between 600 and 1000 words.

What did I get out of this? Well, the word count thing is important, and there were at least a few author’s names that I didn’t recognize, so conceivably my goal is attainable. But I kept coming back to something told to me by Andy Borowitz, himself a very funny New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs contributor.

There’s a difference between an idea and a premise.

I met Mr. Borowitz at a humor writing class I took through Media Bistro, in Manhattan. As the possessor of an MFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing, I had made a solemn vow never to cross the threshold of a group therapy session disguised as a writing class again; besides, I was already a humor writer, as the readers of Computer Shopper well knew. But this class started two months after I’d had a baby, it would get me out of the house, and promised real-world contacts. So I took it, and met a lovely group of aspiring humorists, a few very strange authors, and Mr. Borowitz.

What he explained was that for humor writing to succeed, it had to have a premise. “George Bush looks like a monkey” is a funny idea, but you’re not going to get 600 words out of it (besides, it’s basically just a fact). “George Bush is too busy picking nits out of Dick Cheney’s remaining hair to satisfactorily prosecute the War on Terror” is based on the premise that, as a man with the appearance and the intelligence of a monkey, he is incapable of leading the free world. Andy Borowitz made me understand what I like about humor: if something causes you to laugh, you fundamentally agree with what was said.

Or maybe I just like getting attention. Anyway, thank you, Andy Borowitz.

So, what I’ve learned. I have little hope of becoming either a middle-aged man or extremely famous. I need to figure out 50 things I want to say, and make them so damn funny that no one, not even the New Yorker, can possibly disagree with me.

(Why 50? Even though there are 52 weeks in a year, I’m allowing for double issues and unanticipated events. And I reserve the right to, no more than twice, submit absolute tripe to the poetry editor.)

 

A Note to the Reader

I always said that if I wrote my autobiography, it would begin with the words, “I’ve had a hard life for an upper-middle-class white girl with an Ivy League education.”

This isn’t an autobiography, but the words pretty much ring true. I'm privileged in many ways: an incredible husband, a house in the suburbs with an honest-to-god white picket fence, and a perfect daughter. But then there's the rest: abused as a kid, shattered family, strange joint disease that made my hands swell up like Minnie Mouse, and then, at 31, breast cancer. And not “we’ll do a lumpectomy and a little radiation” breast cancer, full-out, hard core inflammatory breast cancer, complete with chemotherapy, radical mastectomy, and six weeks of daily radiation. Stage 3B, to be exact (translation: you might be screwed, but you might not).

Why are you telling me this? You may be asking. Is this a satirical site or not?

Believe me, I completely understand. Throughout this ordeal, I’ve had many concerned parties, personal and professional, suggest very earnestly that I write about it. I try to explain to them that I’m a professional journalist and write for publication, and why would anyone want to read about this? The questioner would then usually mutter some twaddle about it being my own writing, which often prompted me to ask whether they derived therapeutic benefit from their own teaching or their own corporate real estate litigation, which generally ended the matter.

All this leads to the simple summation of why I'm writing this blog. My friend Jennifer came with me to chemo one day, and we were discussing how I was afraid that I might die in surgery and didn’t know whether I’d left any mark in the world or anything for my daughter to be proud of—blah blah blah. While I published a book about the Internet and had some fledgling success as a movie critic, my career wasn’t exactly where I wanted it to be. What I had always wanted to be was a humor writer, and I told Jen that day that I thought I was good enough to get something published in the “Shouts & Murmurs” section of the New Yorker. And that I had a plan that, once I was healthy, I’d send in one submission per week, and after a year I’d know whether I was good enough or not.

“And you could collect them all,” she said, “and sell it as a book.”

“Oh,” I said. “Huh.” It was a much better idea.

Needless to say, when I did get healthy enough (about a year after I finished radiation treatment, as chasing my toddler tended to tire me out), I started a chick-lit novel instead. I wanted to write something I could finish, so I was committed to the novel being bad if that was what it took to get it done. And I had made some good progress on it when the cancer came back.

This time, it’s Stage 4 (translation: you’re pretty much screwed), and I’m back on chemo, and the doctors think they can put it into remission. So what my daughter eventually thinks of me is even more important to me now, and I’m on chemo once a week, which realllly sucks, and may be the game plan for the foreseeable future. Which, unfortunately, may only be five to ten years.

So, one essay per week seems a little more manageable than a novel, a bit more like bite-sized pieces. Novels, even bad ones, require sustained attention. And publishing a humor piece in the New Yorker seems like credential enough to say, “I’m a humor writer.” I mean, I did write for my college humor magazine, the Jester, and I wrote the humor page, Checking Out, for Computer Shopper magazine for the few months that the column ran. But maybe when I’m gone my daughter can tell people “My mother wrote for the New Yorker,” and I’ll feel like I’ve left some kind of mark in the literary world.

And, partly to keep me going, partly to get attention, and partly just because, I'm posting my progress here.