It's Time for a Change...

It's time to start writing. FOR REAL.

My first book on the Barnes and Noble New Non Fiction table in 2008!!

In eighth grade, my English teacher tasked us with a rather odd assignment—write one sentence that encapsulates you. Maybe my teacher got high off Hemingway (baby shoes and what not) or wanted to enact some form of psychological torture on a bunch of thirteen-year-olds who would rather hollow out their eyes with an acetylene torch than craft a one-line memoir. I struggled with the assignment. Who am I? Fuck if I knew. As if I had considered the notion of my identity. Because until that day I only saw myself through the eyes of a mother who couldn’t love me in the way I wanted her to. I viewed myself as a repeat of her, a bland photocopy of a violent, technicolor original.

But I came up with this: My pen is my greatest weapon and myself my greatest enemy. It was a line my teacher would marvel over and read aloud much to my horror. Could I die now? Could I hide under the desk with all the wads of bubble gum and graffiti of Renee Marino gives good head. It occurred to me that I could write but the attention my work received since I was a child always unnerved me. Face flushed, hands quaked. The students and how they’d turn and whisper about the strange girl who carried a pile of books everywhere she went. Who reads for fun, they’d snicker and say.

And how the teachers would routinely ask me to stay after class. What else was I working on? (Me: I’m writing a story about a girl who hangs herself from a tree. Teacher: Oh.) How my stories had me routinely sitting in the guidance counselor’s office because what child knows the extent of such darkness before her life is even lived? Is there a problem at home? No, no problem (of course, there was a problem at home). What child writes about trauma and death and how you like to watch dead leaves burn?

A few weeks later, I caught this girl handing in a poem she’d written for the school paper. The first line was a version of what I’d written in the memoir assignment, but not as good. (Though I didn’t yet know what good was, or whether I was any good—I just knew her version wasn’t it.) I remember thinking the words she choose were empty. I stood over her and said that looks familiar, and she blushed and folded her sheet of looseleaf in two and ran out of the room.

It occurred to me then that the weird girl’s writing was good enough to copy.

I was a reluctant writer. In high school, my nemesis was Elizabeth. I was always second place to her. Second chair clarinet. Second place to all the short stories she wrote about happy girls doing happy things. Nobody wanted my present tense darkness so I hid it all away in notebooks nobody read. My sophomore year at Fordham, I ran into Elizabeth in a bar by Manhattan College, and we hugged in the way that competitors do—leaning in, but not too close. Embrace, but never let your skin touch. Never get the scent of their hair. And she was drunk, more than me if you could believe, and out of nowhere she said, you won. I didn’t know what she meant and I remember Alanis Morissette’s “You Outta Know” playing in the background and Deidre shouting in my ear that we should go to another bar. But I was in the middle of it, and asked Elizabeth what she meant.

I was a better clarinet player, but you’re the better writer. I’m even majoring in English and I’ll never be as good as you.

It’s not a competition, I shouted above the music (Fee, let’s go, my roommates said). Elizabeth laughed and said, it was always a competition. Your stuff was just too dark for Valley Stream. You’re even going to a better college. I didn’t know what to say, and Alisa handed me my coat and we moved through the crowd when Alisa asked, who was that? Outside the bar I said, a girl from high school. Liz, my best friend at the time rolled her eyes and said, that girl’s weird.

In a gypsy cab back to campus, Deidre asked, you write?

Two years later, the editor of my college lit mag asked, you wrote this? I was coming out of the cafeteria and Liz was the only one who knew that sometimes I wrote stories, and she asked, what did you write? A story about my mother. That story would metathesize into essays that earned my way into Columbia’s graduate writing program, and my colleagues at Morgan Stanley who still didn’t understand MFA stood for master’s in fine arts because no one makes money from writing, and years later those essays would become my first book.

After that book was published, I said I have to stop writing about my mother because what if writing about her was the only thing I was good at. And for years I’d write away from her but she always found her way in, even subconsciously, until one day I wrote a whole other book that wasn’t about her and maybe I was good at this writing thing after all.

I was 40.

This year, I realized machines will replace me. Machines will analyze large volumes of data and spit out the segmentation studies, brand equity analyses, and although I could scream that AI can’t completely replace humans, that machines are tools, companies are lazy and marketing has been reduced to how can we get viral on TikTok? How can we get to profit faster? I care about the next 18 months—who cares about the sustainability of a business? And then there’s marketing to children, which always bothered me, but it seems horrifically worse now. It seems there exists no line or shame. Because children are not children, but customer targets. They are their parents’ wallets. They know their brands straight out of the womb. Stanley Cup straws clamped between baby teeth.

It occurs to me that I don’t know if I want to do this work anymore, so I’ve been quietly taking on writing projects. Writing slide decks and presentations, business school case studies and ghost-writing books. And I like the work because it doesn’t make me want to punch someone in the face when they ask how they can get a million followers on Instagram. I like the work because while there’s some collaboration, it’s mostly solitary. And the writing is about education, entertainment—putting someone’s stories out into the world.

And while AI can be programmed by the finest poets, there’s no program for magic. There’s no formula for individual human imagination. It can mimic, sure, but it’s like that classmate who stole my line and tried to make it her own but couldn’t. It can only take you so far because AI doesn’t have the one thing we all have—life. It can’t write from wonder, it can only copy from the original. It can’t play with language because machines don’t know folly and fun.

For the whole of my life, I regulated writing to the bleachers. It was the hobby. It was the Morgan Stanley peers who laughed and guffawed that no one makes money from writing. It was the cute books I published whose royalty checks can buy me a cup of coffee. But now it occurs to me that writing might be the only thing about me that machines can’t completely replace. That people might just pay for the way I can arrange words and tell a story.

And I’m excited for where this new adventures takes me.