The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Emails women love to hate
Don’t worry, guys: Your 2 a.m. response has nothing on party plans.
It sounds simple, even innocuous, as greetings go.
But if an email is sent en masse to a group of women (be they friends or connected acquaintances) and it starts with “hey ladies,” it is sure to require something.
It means an event is coming up — usually wedding-related: a bachelorette party, a bridal shower, or some other girls-only gathering. It means everyone needs to pitch in with their time, money or help — usually all three. It means a slew of emails with a ton of exclamation points.
This genre of correspondence is what inspired Caroline Moss and Michelle Markowitz to write their new book, “Hey Ladies: The Story of 8 Best Friends, 1 Year, and Way, Way Too Many Emails,” which is based on a series they wrote for the humor website The Toast for nearly three years. It’s a 200-pluspage infographic that reads like an extended email thread among friends, one of whom is newly engaged and planning her wedding for New Year’s Eve.
The book satirizes the many ways making plans for big celebrations — the kind in which heightened emotions, complex logistics and considerable expenses collide — easily get out of hand.
It all started in 2013 when Markowitz was included on an email chain that wouldn’t end. “The thread was 80 emails deep,” she said recently by phone. She was so irritated that she tweeted, “the worst part of bachelorette parties are all the emails beginning with, ‘Hey Ladies!’ ” It didn’t exactly go viral. (At the time of this writing, it had one retweet.) But Moss saw it, and even though the two had never met, she reached out to Markowitz to suggest they write something on the subject.
At the time, both women were single and living in New York City. Markowitz, then 31, was a freelance writer who performed in comedy shows at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Moss, then 25, had just started reporting for Business Insider. They were at an age when “both of us had been attending lots of weddings,” Markowitz said. The series “came out of a very real experience.”
They began a back-and-forth conversation over email, inhabiting the aggressively enthusiastic character of a “hey ladies”
bachelorette party planner. Moss’ agent, Kate McKean, who still represents her and Markowitz, suggested passing it along to Nicole Cliffe and Daniel Mallory Ortberg, who had recently launched The Toast.
The first “Hey Ladies” installment published a month later, and it quickly became a regular feature. The website developed a passionate, niche readership that delighted in the particular style of writing that the “Hey Ladies” series fell into: The tone was feminist, happily strange and a little absurdist.
“We definitely felt that we had hit a nerve in a good way, pretty quickly,” Moss said over the phone. Markowitz added, “A lot of people would tweet at us and say they’re on a million threads like that.”
The two women soon established a pattern to their column, and comic guidelines for the quintessential “hey ladies” email: It must have “a million exclamation points to show how excited you are,” said Markowitz. And “throw in a sentence about how excited you are just in case the exclamation points don’t do it,” Moss said.
It should include “some ‘friendly reminders,’ ” written in a passive-aggressive
tone, Moss said, plus a pointless inquiry, like “asking 26 people what dates in June are good for them.”
Through some kind of wedding-industrial-complex magic, she said, someone always owes money by the end of the email.
The authors “always thought a book would be fun,” Markowitz said, but didn’t formally begin planning one until 2016, around the same time The Toast was shutting down. (Their final column for the site, “Take It to Slack,” was published June 30, 2016.) “Writing a book was a good way to keep the ladies around,” she said.
The book — which tells the story of one year in a female friend group entirely through their emails, offthread text conversations about emails, and social media posts — was also a good way to “create a world where these women really are friends, and actually really do care about each other, and want to be near each other, and want to talk to each other,” Moss said. The characters vent, date and debrief, in addition to booking a destination bachelorette to south Portugal, which they inexplicably abbreviate as “SoPu.”
For Moss and Markowitz, friendship is the whole point. “There’s a little bit of an inner struggle” when one receives a “hey ladies” email, Markowitz said.
You’re stuck between feeling “this is going to be a lot of work, and how much is this going to end up costing me” and gratitude for the relationship that landed you on the email chain in the first place. “You want to be a part of something and make your friend feel special,” she said.
And though Markowitz and Moss believe “Hey Ladies” emails persist through adulthood, they say the chains are most intense in that 20- and 30-something stretch. Things calm down as priorities change, and many people age out of feeling pressured to RSVP “yes” to every event on the social calendar.
“As life and more obligations come up and you move into different phases of life, you sort of miss that closeness and being each other’s people,” Markowitz said.
Moss got engaged in October and realized she was facing her own “hey ladies” crossroads. She decided to embrace it. “I’m leaning in,” she said. “If I’ve learned anything from writing ‘Hey Ladies,’ it’s that the best-laid plans usually come within the threads of 6,000 emails.”
“No one is too good for this. No one is above it,” she said. “You don’t want to be one of those people who for years is like, ‘I’m not going to be like that.’ Because you are.”