• I quit my safe job in public relations.
• I turned thirty.
• I got divorced after five years married to my college sweetheart.
• I watched my parents remarry one another (with their divorce lasting the same length of time as my doomed marriage).
• And only a few days ago, I picked up an entire lifetime of belongings, stuffed them into the trunk of a beaten-down sedan, and moved in the dead of night from Chicago to New York to return to the newspaper industry for the first time in half a decade.
It was like I had won the Most Stressful Life Events All at Once lottery. But after ten years with my college sweetheart James, I couldn’t take it any longer. I left him one day after yet another of his indiscretions was revealed. It was somewhere before the bombshell about the group bukkake he partook in with some chick off Craigslist but sometime after his confession about soliciting sexual favors from prostitutes. Somewhere before I woke up to James coming downstairs after getting oral sex from a “girlfriend” whom I’d recommended for a job and sometime after I found out he was fucking a married coworker while we were in marriage counseling.
On the bright side, I stumbled onto this great new diet.
The Divorce Diet is easy, really. You cry. You complain. And you just don’t eat.
I drink in everything around me now, trying to ignore the demons of a raging impostor complex lodged deep in my gut telling me that I don’t belong here. That I will fail. That I can’t do this.
Standing next to the giant snow-covered potted plants strategically placed in between the sidewalk and the entrance after 9/11, my eyes drift heavenward toward the enormous slab of concrete and steel towering above, which is home to not just the Post but also Rupert Murdoch’s expansive Fox News empire. Bringing my gaze back down to the ground again, I catch the shadow of Fox TV host Shepard Smith smoking a cigarette, glued to his BlackBerry while pacing furiously in front of a giant sign that says, WE REPORT. YOU DECIDE.
There is no getting around it. This is really happening.
I force my legs to move, one after the other. Through the revolving doors I go, clutching my knockoff Gucci bag, which I make a mental note to replace ASAP. I check in at the front desk.
“Mandy Stadtmiller,” I relay to the stone-faced black-suited receptionist. “I’m here for Stephen Lynch.”
I wait and fidget with my conspicuously naked left ring finger. That’s another thing. I need to get new rings. It feels too weird not having the gold band there, and I don’t want people to think I am weird, always fidgeting and uneasy.
As if it’s part of a pregame Welcome to News Corp show, I watch a nearly nonstop pageant of bleach and hairspray and red stilettos parading in and out of the lobby past the giant abstract mural at the front desk. I pull out my flip phone and try to look busy as I stare at the 773 number.
Yeah, this area code needs to go, too.
Steve walks down to greet me—looking only slightly older than he had when he was my editor years ago at the Daily Northwestern in the mid-’90s. Short reddish-brown hair, an intelligent smile, and the slightly worn-down look that comes from having a love for all things newspaper.
STEVE HAD FIRST reached out to me nine months ago when our journalism school email-alumni group put our names directly in each other’s in-boxes. I would occasionally sound out idiotic updates about, I don’t know, Big Ten awareness or something while I was working my very safe nine-to-five writing job for Northwestern University Medical School’s alumni magazine. The press release-y environment was a far cry from what Steve might’ve expected from the college student who’d graduated years earlier with a plum internship in the style section of the Washington Post and whom he’d championed for entertainment editor at our college daily.
“Hi, Mandy,” Steve’s email began to me back in March. “I’m on the alums list and got your recent missive, and just wanted to say hello. Also, don’t know if you still write features, but I edit the Sunday features section of the New York Post. So if you’re looking for freelance outlets, would love to hear from you.”
As I read over his message in my tiny windowless cubicle in Chicago, I let out a little yelp of excitement. Every letter in his email seemed to vibrate off the computer like a living thing—overpowering the sad little tropical desert island screen saver that formed the background on my ancient monitor.
I felt like a prisoner receiving a stay of career execution. I wrote back immediately: “Hey, Steve, I would love to write for you.”
Of course, I had nothing in the way of recent clips (my last newspaper job after the Washington Post had been a short stint at the Des Moines Register from 1998 to 1999 covering cops and courts and drunkenly hooking up with fellow reporter Jeff Zeleny before he came out as gay and rose to fame in TV news). But I did have Steve’s curiosity on my side. Like any good Internet user in 2004, Steve had googled me and found something that showed where I was really at in my writing life beyond my oh-so-professional email signature that read “Assistant Director of Publications and Public Relations, Northwestern University Medical School.”
In 2004, I had secretly started a blog.
My relationship with my husband, James, was on the rocks, my career was going nowhere, and so for the first time in years, I tried writing for myself again—this time for fun. During this uncertain period, I somehow stumbled into chronicling the dissolution of my own marriage.
“I learned something disheartening recently,” I wrote in one extremely coded, euphemistic blog post about finding out a woman who’d lobbied hard to be my best friend (“Hey, Mandy, love your blog, let me take pictures of you!”) was actually taking
