I have something on my computer I dub “source list” (as it rapidly expands, I change the name to “new source list,” “hot source list,” and, eventually, “BEST NEW HOT SOURCE LIST”), which contains the names of a hodgepodge of people I meet, from strangers on the subway to old college acquaintances. I email them all asking if they know any women who might fess up to the maneuver.
One after another, I make new friends who tell me their stories of suffering through boring-ass business guys who get them into Michelin-rated restaurants and how they feel no qualms about taking them for a $300 meal because the guy is getting their company.
But no one wants to go on the record.
Then I realize I’ve had the answer within me all along. Just like I was rediscovered through my self-published blog chronicling all my adventures, there have to be plenty of fame-seeking young New York women who would love to go on record who are self-promoting via their blogs.
I google “New York,” “dating,” and “blogspot,” and a million combinations thereof and eventually hit the jackpot when I discover belleinthebigapple.blogspot.com and a blond, bubbly young lady who after several emails back and forth eventually identifies herself as Brooke Parkhurst, a former Fox TV intern (who pals around with Gawker’s favorite target, Julia Allison) who’s just landed a literary agent who is trying to sell her book. This, I soon learn, is key. When someone has something they want to push, they will work with you. Big-time.
As I develop the story, I still fear everything will fall apart. Will Brooke and the other women I interviewed back out last-minute? Will the pics the photographer snaps not be Post-y enough? Will everyone realize I am a fraud and ought to be back in Chicago, still writing about science grants and languishing in an unhappy marriage?
Wait—no. That is my impostor complex talking.
Fake it until you make it. Fake it until you make it. Repeat it until you believe it. Tattoo it on your fucking forehead if you have to.
During these early days at the Post, I think a lot about a fellow intern I worked with at the Washington Post right after graduating in 1997, one of the biggest name-droppers I’ve ever met. His tales usually involved a celebrity or politician he had just lunched with or, oh, here’s a funny coincidence, did you know the son of the newspaper’s editor actually lives in his dorm at Harvard, too? But that guy, man. He had more get-shit-done confidence than any young person I’d ever met. He just did not apologize. He walked around the newsroom like he owned it.
I, by contrast, would go to intern parties; get drunk; look at my short, stringy, dishwater-brown hair in the mirror; then return to the party and proceed to kill the entire mood. Here’s a good recipe for how to do that in case it ever comes in handy: Say a bunch of unfunny, radioactively self-loathing (beyond the normal level of light self-deprecation) bons mots like, “I look like a drowned rat.”
Everyone will proceed to shift uncomfortably, staring down at their Grey Goose. The other intern, meanwhile, would find a way to work in that he had just grabbed a meal with David Foster Wallace.
So now, as I returned to newspapers after a long-ass, marriage-filled absence, that dude became my spiritual guide. Here’s an actual non-sarcastic helpful trick: If you suffer from debilitating low self-esteem and crippling shyness most of your life, just pretend to be someone who has what you want instead.
It was actually the year 2000 when I first really tested out the pretend-to-be-someone-else trick, during my first major impostor-complex experience, after having been hired by an Internet company called MarchFirst to fill a questionable position called “content strategist.” (I believe that job title went bust right when the economy did.) Formed a few months before the dot-com bubble burst, MarchFirst hired me after I rewrote my résumé enough times to make it look like I spoke Internet. My annual salary shot up from $32,000 to $47,000, and soon I was being flown from Chicago to Philly to talk to middle-aged chemical industry executives to justify my $200-an-hour bill rate.
My boss at the time was a perky blond twenty-seven-year-old named Stephanie, who gesticulated wildly in front of the ever-present whiteboard while using made-up words like bucketizing.
“We need to bucketize content!” she’d say, making exaggerated motions of what it would look like if content were physically plunked into imaginary buckets.
So on my business trips, wearing my cheap Clothestime business suit that I got dry-cleaned until it had holes in it, I just pretended I was Stephanie. I was scared shitless. Stephanie knew how to take that scared shitlessness—and just bucketize it!
Now, at the Post, I think back fondly to Stephanie, the confident intern, and every other prophet of big, brash, seemingly unwarranted confidence (not a dig—a necessity: Any performer you can stand to watch on TV for more than thirty seconds possesses it). And when Steve returns to talk to me about my pitch, I do not offer up the terror I feel inside. No self-loathing asides like “I look like a drowned rat” or “Oh God, my story sucks, doesn’t it?” Nope. Just chill.
“I like ‘dinner whores,’ ” Steve says with a smile. “It may take a little selling on the ‘whore’ part, though.”
“Awesome,” I say.
I turn to Katherine, sitting behind me, and grin genuinely. “Rad.”
MY FIRST MAJOR celebrity piece for the Post is a profile of Star Jones. As she prattles on to me in the pristine confines of the Core club about how she is an inspiration to victims of Hurricane Katrina, I see a dead woman walking. As she talks, she has no clue she is hanging herself with her own words. That’s how tabloid journalism works.
There are a lot of sacrificial
