THE JOY OF QUITTING
YOU’D THINK PERFECTIONIST AND PROFESSIONAL FUNNYWOMAN MARY LAURA PHILPOTT HAD HIT THE JACKPOT WHEN SHE SCORED A GIG WRITING FOR A CELEB MAG. BUT SOMETIMES, THAT DREAM JOB ISN’T ALL IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE
Sometimes you just have to walk away.
I LOVE TO MAKE PEOPLE LAUGH. And I love approval. So to get the approval of being selected as an official laughmaker by a magazine that presides over grocery store checkout lanes and pedicure chairs across the country felt like a big deal. A funny writer friend of mine brought me on board at the weekly and explained how it works: The editors send us — the writers — a file of celebrity photos every Tuesday. On Wednesday, we each email back a list of jokes to go with each photo. The next week, a few captions for each image are chosen to run in the magazine’s Fashion Police spread.
Analysing fashion is great fun. Take gladiator sandals, for instance. They make your calves looked like pork tenderloin trussed with twine, so how did they get to be so popular? What message is a woman conveying when she wears them? “I love the feel of air on my toes and also want people to know I’m tough enough to stab a lion or errant Roman with a sword in front of a roaring crowd?” I guess.
I figured the job would be right up my alley. I didn’t exactly knock it out of the park at the start. To me, a deadpan, literal description of a garment is funny, but apparently that’s not the style the magazine was looking to serve up to its consumers. “Rihanna emerges from limousine, nipples mashed to twodimensional discs by translucent bandeau compression top.” They didn’t run that. “Hair whipped into anti-gravitational balloon, Adele orders tea from behind fruit-platter-size sunglasses.” Not that one either.
Knowing that we wouldn’t be penalised for jokes that didn’t make the cut, sometimes I sent in rambling captions like this one, on a starlet in a python-and-lace tube dress: “She looks like a very fancy snake going to a wedding where all the other snakes are like, ‘Daaaaamn, girl, dontchoo know better than to upstage the snake-bride?’ but she’s like ‘Bitch, please, I do what I want.’” They did not run that.
I tried studying the jokes that did make the cut each week. I knew some of the other writers. They were wildly talented, but the captions running under their names weren’t as funny as their other writing. It seemed the magazine was deliberately choosing the most bland, punny lines. So I tried toning down the weird, softening my humour a bit. A shredded cape: “The fringed poncho. Froncho, if you will.” A long blazer over apparently no pants at all: “Suit yourself. Or, you know, half-suit yourself. Whatever.” A demure skirt suit with black leather hand wear: “It’s all fun and crumpets until someone puts on OJ gloves.” Tiny red hot-pants: “Ruby slippers take you home; ruby knickers take you everywhere.” A floral gown: “My grandmother had those curtains.” That’s not even a joke. It’s just a statement. It ran.
Eventually, I got the hang of it and got at least a few “jokes” in every issue. I wanted them to come with a disclaimer: “I can be better than this.” But I was on a roll.
I think the only caption they ever ran that I felt really proud of was for Jane Fonda, who, in her late seventies, had no qualms about showing up on a red carpet in a skintight sequined green bodysuit. “The Green Lantern’s mum is looking hot,” I quipped. She did look hot. And she looked like the Green Lantern’s mum.
I didn’t like the jokes I was making to gain acceptance, but there was something else that bothered me more. The role I put myself in to do this job made me uncomfortable. There’s a difference between poking fun at professional ads or photos from a fashion runway, and taking aim at what real people are wearing. No matter how funny or not-funny my captions were, this job, at its core, was poking fun at people.
Sure, some of our subjects were standing on red carpets, posing for cameras, inviting the public gaze. You could say they were asking for it. But how many of them were doing it because they really loved dressing up and posing for public consumption? How many were doing it because it was a necessary part of the job – promoting a movie or an album or receiving an award – and they couldn’t let people down by saying no, or they were afraid they’d lose out on much-needed publicity if they abstained? How many were dressed by a crazy stylist who said, “Trust me, this yellow vinyl bustier is a great idea,” as a manager stood by and said, “It’s fabulous, so fabulous.”
And that’s not even including the people who weren’t on red carpets at all — whose pictures were snapped as they walked, heads down, through airports and in and out of gyms and coffee shops, going about their lives at the end of a paparazzo’s longrange lens. I wanted to look away, to give them a little space. You could say, well, they’re so famous, they shouldn’t complain. You see that line of reasoning all the time: “You’re the one who decided to go into show business.” You asked for it, people imply. It comes with the package.
No, they didn’t ask for that. Not all of them. Some of them just wanted to act — or to sing or to write – not to have a guy with a camera popping out from behind trash cans as they walk down the street. I thought about all the articles and tweets I’d read by celebrities begging the paparazzi to respect their family’s privacy, all the interviews in which they described the relentless way the photogs dogged them, pouncing as soon as they exited a hotel or restaurant, following too closely in traffic, trotting along five steps behind on the sidewalk.
That’s probably the first and last way in which I relate to movie stars, but I do relate. It’s fair to want some parts of an experience but not all. It’s fair to realise that while you did indeed mean to take every step that led you to where you are, now that you’re there you realise you don’t love everything about it. It’s fair to say, “Stop. Not all of this is okay.”
So I had mixed feelings about this Fashion Police thing. But I’m not a quitter. Anyone can give up on something; the trick is staying the course when things get hard, right? Rising to the challenge. Pushing through. When it feels like something can’t be done, a real achiever finds a way. A real achiever doesn’t squander an opportunity.
Or does she? I blew an interview on purpose once. It was eleventh grade, and I’d been contacted by the Governor’s Honors Program — a summer camp of sorts, where kids from all over the state lived on a college campus and took classes in leadership and team-building and the performing arts and calculus and all sorts of other advanced subjects. It’s not something you apply for; one day you just get a letter that says, “You’ve been selected to interview,” and you’re supposed to show up and talk to somebody who will determine whether you’ll be one of the lucky ones.
“I DIDN’T LIKE the JOKES I was MAKING to GAIN acceptance”
Except it didn’t sound so lucky to me. It sounded boring. Four weeks of forced socialisation with people I didn’t know? School in the summer? Oh, hell no.
Summer might normally be a perfectionist kid’s nightmare, what with all that time off from studying and getting grades. But summer, to me, was sacred. Sanctioned by school itself as a break from the classroom, summer existed purely by nature of the school year that surrounded it on both sides. Like the negative white space created by not painting on part of a canvas, the weeks from June through August were meant to stay blank. One could still fill them with accomplishments like reading 50 books or swimming 200 laps or eating a Popsicle every single day for a 70-day streak. But one should not be in school during the summer. I may have been a nerd, but I was a real human kid, too.
But what to do? I’d been chosen. I did like being chosen. My gut churned as my mother drove me to the interview office. The first several questions passed easily. What’s your favourite subject? (English.) What do you do for fun? (Read.) What do you like about leadership? (Leading. And being right. And getting shit done.) Then we got to this one: “What would you do this summer if you weren’t selected for this program?” Huh. That’s when I took a sharp turn. I did what I had never done before and wouldn’t do again for a long time. With no one watching – it was just the interviewer and me in the room – I decided that while I liked being chosen, I didn’t like what I had been chosen for. As Cheap Trick said, “I want you to want me,” but I didn’t want all that came with this “honour”. So I answered: “I’d be pretty happy, actually.” I got in the car. Buckled my seat belt, eyes on the dash. “How’d it go?” my mum asked. “Fine, I guess.” I felt like I’d just committed murder. My heart still races when I think of it.
One Tuesday several months into my tenure on the Fashion Police force, we received in our weekly packets a photo of the singer Kelly Clarkson wearing a T-shirt tucked into a full skirt made of fabric printed with records all over it. A music skirt! It was adorable. Also? Props for knowing how to tuck a top into a skirt, Kelly. People act like that’s a skill women are born with, but I’m here to tell you, it’s not. Every time I try it, the skirt ends up hiked up in the back and down in the front with my shirt blousing out around my belly like I’m Eloise. I couldn’t make fun of her or her outfit. I wanted to send in, “This is how to set a record for looking marvellous, fuckers.” I knew I couldn’t send that in, so I started making a list of music puns instead, rolling my eyes at every stupid phrase I typed. I felt like a faker. It goes against my nature to leave a task incomplete. I’ve only recently been able to let myself give up on a book I don’t like without reaching the last page, and to do so I had to convince myself that because part of my job is reading and evaluating books, I technically am completing the task by deciding which books are worth reading to the end. I’ve set my phone to chime and go dark at 10.20pm, because I know I have a habit of checking Twitter before I go to bed. It’s impossible to reach the end of the internet, and without a reminder to put my phone away, I’m in danger of scroll-scrollscrolling infinitely, scanning screen after screen of tweets as if there’s a last tweet coming, a window that will pop up and say, “All done. You finished the internet. Good night.”
But maybe the trick isn’t sticking everything out. The trick is quitting the right thing at the right time. The trick is understanding that saying “No, thank you” to something you’re expected to accept isn’t failure. It’s a whole other level of success.
It takes courage to quit something, but often you get that courage back with dividends. The novelist Katie Coyle once tweeted: “Last week I killed a book I’ve been writing for three and a half years and now I feel drunk with power.” The older I get, the more I find Katie’s right. A good quit feels powerful. Deciding what you won’t have in your life is as important as deciding what you will have. Trying out something you expect to love, realising you don’t really love it, and giving it back, that takes guts.
It takes letting go of the idea that living right means racking up every honour you can get. It means understanding that success isn’t about nailing every role; it’s about choosing the roles you’ll play and how well you want to play them. It’s about refusing to see yourself as the passive recipient of a life someone else awards you. The Fashion Police accepted my resignation with grace and good wishes. E This is an edited extract from I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott (Murdoch Books, $27.99)