Welcome to the jungle: Part 1

Los Angeles, the first time (cut from BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY)

Back when I was a photography major at UCLA and knew how to use a film camera, develop film, print my photographs and do double exposures like this one. That’s all gone from my brain now :(

As I continue to work through my decision of where to move next, now is the perfect time to share an essay that was cut from BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY. It’s a long one so I’ve split it into two installments. It’s about living in Los Angeles, another city that’s theoretically on my current short list, which is apparently turning into more of a rebound list.

I thought “Welcome to the jungle” needed to be in BYSSH as a chronological bridge between high school and my time in Portland, Oregon where I met my future (now ex-) husband. But when I needed to tighten up the manuscript, one of my readers (ahem) told me that it should be cut, that it wasn’t working in service to the core concept of the book. She was absolutely right.

But looking at it fresh over the past couple of years — which is how long I’ve had it in drafts here — I’ve realized that it would’ve been an excellent foundational piece for a theoretical third book, one where I carried “Teenage Dirtbag” over too. A book about how we form our sexual identities and preferences and beliefs. A book about how, especially for women, shame is a powerful force in what we do and don’t do, who we stay with and who we leave. And it’d be a book about our culture’s love of the phrase “settling down” and all the many, many layers those two words contain. It’d be another memoir-in-essays and that’s why I won’t be writing it. But if I did, I’d examine the cultural and social messaging I had received in my late teens and early twenties, and also how we condition human beings (not just women) to believe that a feeling of wildness, freedom, and wide-ranging horniness are things to get out of your system (!!!for the rest of your life!!!) before getting married.

The only personal bummer about cutting this piece from BYSSH is I had a slight and sneaky thread throughout the manuscript, touching on the way Hollywood writ large — pop culture, celebrity, movies, and music — shaped my sense of what an aspirational relationship, a hot woman, and a good man should look like. It’s how I learned what the role of a woman should be, without understanding yet that these were stories overwhelmingly written, approved, designed, shot, and edited by men. That thread is also why, at the very end of the book, the piece “When Sally Divorced Harry” felt like such a perfect bow on the whole thing. Speaking of sex (were we?), it’s almost erotic when a book snaps into place like a puzzle, and I felt that with this thematic cultural thread. Alas!

Instead of writing that third book, I write this Substack. And trust me when I say a sex book will be coming eventually (that’s what she said), but it’ll be “““fiction”””, babes.

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Welcome to the Jungle

If New York City is where people go to chase their dreams, Los Angeles is where people go to lose themselves. It’s where they set their old selves on fire, but mindfully.

I moved to LA to start my “real life” and to put three thousand miles between my past and future. I thought I was giving myself a little boost up, like jumping on a springboard. Instead it was more like strapping myself to a rocket aimed at a brick wall. Fast, dizzying, a real goddamn mess.

The state college I had been attending in western Massachusetts had begun to feel like a high school with ashtrays. That’s a quote from Jake Briggs, Kevin Bacon’s character in She’s Having a Baby. It’s fitting that I used that quote often back then, uncredited, since most of what I had learned about what I should want and what my life should look like had came from movies. I made assumptions about rich people and proms based on Pretty in Pink. I expected my early twenties breakups and breakdowns to map to St. Elmo’s Fire, even saying in actual conversations, “I’m just so tired, I never thought I’d be so tired at twenty-two” as if it was an original thought I had and not a line I had stolen word-for-word from Demi Moore’s character, Jules. I assumed marriage and having children would be a cross between thirtysomething and She’s Having a Baby, basically a lot of angst and a few fantasy sequences. I had been primed by illusions then moved to the place where creating illusions was the main industry.