(Before we begin, let's all take a moment to pause and reflect on how, when I was a freshman in college, watching Da Ali G Show DVDs was still considered a cool, sort of arty thing to do-- it was British, it was niche, we were so incredibly hip-- so much so that my extremely esoteric-seeming crush took me on a date to see the Borat movie when it came out in 2006. Time! It does pass! And those catchphrases are just gonna be with me forever, aren't they.

Anyway, on to your regularly scheduled self-reflection + links.)

A couple of years ago I was having brunch with some writer friends, one of whom had just optioned her books to Netflix for what I can only assume was a life-changing amount of money. This was not a surprise; she was a hugely bestselling author, a person whose name I had known and work I admired long before I met her in person. 

It was early January, and we were still in resolution mode, talking GANT charts and goals."Now that this has happened," she said, "honestly, my biggest goal for this year is to figure out how to enjoy it. Because I've watched so many people achieve these things that seem like the peak, like the pinnacle, and somehow, they're still miserable. It turns out that there's nothing so big-- no award, no contract, no amount of money-- that it just, like, transforms you into a person who's satisfied, and who feels like she's done enough. That's something you have to figure out how to get to yourself." 

I think about this... basically constantly. A lot of my friends are #creatives, which means, among other things, that we have jobs where there's no ladder to climb, and no clear metric for success. Worse still, we're supposed to be artists, and artists are never satisfied with themselves and their work, right? We're supposed to reject external validation, and push ourselves to fanatic depths, and hate ourselves, probably because liking yourself and your made-up worlds is one self-indulgence too many to admit. You're allowed to want to write or paint or play music, but only if it's a punishing experience that brings you no peace or joy whatsoever.

As a culture we're obsessed with hustling and grinding and grandiose ambition-- this conversation feels not unrelated to the question of why extremely wealthy people keep working event though they don't have to. So maybe it sounds obvious that you have to figure out how to enjoy success whenever and however it comes-- to even see what's happening to you as success, instead of good, but not enough. 

But even once you've decided that's how you want to do things, it's harder to put into practice than you'd think, at least in my experience. I remember bitching extensively to a friend about this 2015 interview that Taffy Brodesser-Akner did with the Longform podcast, where she talked about how she would interview celebrities in their fancy homes and then drive a rental car to a hotel and hate herself for not also being a rich and beautiful celebrity with a huge, beautiful house. 

"Can you imagine!!!!!" I said. "If the New York motherfucking goddamn Times was PAYING ME to go talk to a celebrity and then PAYING FOR MY RENTAL CAR AND HOTEL ROOM, I would not feel pathetic. I would feel like the fanciest person ever to have lived. I would feel so smug about my accomplishments and my importance that I'd be insufferable." 

"Yes," this friend said very patiently. "Remember when you used to say if you could just publish one book you'd be happy forever, and now you're always crying about whether you're going to publish a book a year for the rest of your life?"

I mean, listen, my moon is in Pisces, so I so have to cry about something; it's my astrological birthright. But actually: it is so hard to know where ambition and drive end, and useless self-sabotage begins. I wanted one thing; I got it; I set a new goal. That's reasonable, right? The problem is when I allow the new goal to make the old ones seem smaller than they were, and are. I've done so many things that, five or ten years ago, would have seemed like wildest-dream material. It's stupid that I let myself forget that as often as I do. 

(But and also this is the best argument for figuring out how to like your work-- the making of it, of course, but also the thing when it's done. Because I've found that the only thing that reliably works when I'm mad that someone got something I didn't, or down on myself for not having done more already, or for not being someone else doing something else that everyone universally loves and praises, is to take pride and pleasure in my own writing. I can't control or even do all that much to influence whether or how people will read it; if I'm seeking satisfaction, it had better be in the work, and not in anything outside of it or myself.)

-

I had a lot of cause to think about what constitutes success when Julie Beck interviewed me and my BFFAE Miranda Popkey about what it's like when you and your best friend have novels coming out near-simultaneously for The Atlantic's Friendship Files. It was really fun and weird to reflect on the forces that formed and shaped my friendship with Mir, and very horrifying to go into the archive of Facebook messages we exchanged in the summer of 2006, a time of so, so much romantic drama and ill-advised drinking, and also M playing the Dolly Parton character in a Santa Cruz community theater production of Steel Magnolias.  

Miranda's book, which Kirkus (accurately) called "painfully sharp," is available for pre-order. My book, which no less an authority than Jessica of The Fug Girls called "a beautifully rendered, nearly tactile sliver of Los Angeles," is also, at last, pre-orderable as well.

& I've been doing some editing for Buffy's editorial site, Soft--Space, and I'm thrilled to have helped this Katie Bloom essay about houseplants and community and resiliency make its way onto the internet.