I don’t want to give that up.
chapter eight
The Rebirth
2010–12
The “pink cloud” is real. That’s a term in sobriety where you float around in a cloud of happiness, redemption, and seeming magic. I begin killing it at work and in my personal life.
One day I’m getting the first American interview exclusive with the Winklevoss twins, who’ve sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing the idea of Facebook. Another day I am splashed in the Post’s pages next to the Guinness World Records titleholder for world’s shortest man—measuring in at twenty-two inches—who is visiting from Nepal. He asks me on a “date” as a swarm of photographers click their shutters to document me literally cradling this man-baby in my arms. (By the way: Never discount the world’s shortest man for his lack of follow-up game. Five years later he messages me on Facebook: “Hi Mandy. You remember this picture?” And then, “You are bad.” And then, “Or are not you?”)
Overall, in my life, I feel largely unstoppable.
I get a sponsor, and I even start to make amends, which is kind of the worst—but hey, I’m unstoppable, right? The hardest one to make is with Hannibal Buress. The thing I have to make amends for is basically just me acting like a drunken idiot, but when I whisper the confession to my sponsor, relaying the excruciating details of it, my head hangs as if I’m confessing to a cross-state killing spree. Why do sometimes the smallest mortifications impact us the hardest? Maybe, in some way, because they are so real and cut to the quick of what we hate the most about ourselves.
What happened with Hannibal occurred near the end of my drinking days. After several hours spent smoking weed and chugging beer, I ran into him at a party. He had by this time gotten a job at Saturday Night Live, and, thinking I was being totally “hilarious,” I approached him and started yelling accusingly, “I know more famous people than you!”
Yeah. I actually said that. With, like, multiple witnesses.
Needless to say, we didn’t speak for months.
Now sober, apologizing to him and eventually making things right somehow represents a tiny redemption for me—and shows me that maybe it is possible to dig myself out of even the deepest ditches, instead of just finding new ones to fall into.
Unfortunately, this profoundly honest moment is also the exception. Getting sober isn’t like a “buy groceries” to-do list where hey, you picked up the chicken so who cares if you forgot the pot to cook it in—you’ll live . . . right? But I treat it that way—with blind flippancy and naïve disrespect. Because, honestly, it feels too painful to peel another layer away from the onion. So instead, I remain superficial about examining all the problems underlying my behavior. Instead of attempting to untangle the many mixed-up addictions at play, I decide to just pretend to be someone else entirely.
Of course, I didn’t realize any of this at the time. But looking back, it’s so completely clear.
I simply slipped from one costume to another.
I’ve now dropped the archetype of cocktail-party-flitting fake wife for Blaine. And I’ve given up the role of coked-up party girl who will do anything for debauched good time.
Now—I decide to be the Temptress. What the Married Man had once called me, I essentially drape on as an identity because hey, I’m sober now—and I’m definitely never going to fuck another married guy again—so it’s okay, right?
Right?
Besides, playing a role protects me—from feeling any hurt I might feel if I was just being myself.
And so, without quite realizing what I am morphing into, I strut around the city and my job at the Post, playacting the jaded, conniving femme fatale. I use sobriety like a drug. It gives me superpowers of cognition and hyperawareness, and I take these enhancements as video game–style “boosts” to sidle up not just to rich dudes anymore—but now to the rich and famous.
Which is how in 2010 I start dating three men in media and celebrity who are all strangely interconnected—Aaron Sorkin, Keith Olbermann, and Lloyd Grove.
While the old nihilistic me would hash out the entirety of this gossip (and I could fill several books), I now realize that’s the same person who didn’t think she was worth anything on her own. This is perhaps the biggest realization I’ve had in writing all of this.
You don’t need to “attach” yourself to anyone. You just need to make yourself someone who you can stand to be with—alone.
So instead of going deep-cut, I will only relay the highlights of this love triangle—and leave it as the final word on the matter.
Before I do, though, I suppose I should explain how I even met all three of these guys in the first place, as I’m by no means normally lounging at the Chateau Marmont or wherever the hell A-listers hang.
So I need to go back a few months to before I finally got sober, when I was a party-hopping maniac, often accompanied by my favorite companion: the comedian Wayne Federman. (If you google him and he looks familiar, you may know him as Garry Shandling’s brother in The Larry Sanders Show or from his arc on Curb Your Enthusiasm or as being the guy from all those Judd Apatow movies. Incidentally, he’s utterly fucking hilarious.)
Wayne and I had a very brief flirtation, but, in the end, the chemistry was off. We came to call it a whirlwind forty-eight-hour romance.
“What do you think is a bigger disaster,” I asked him afterward. “This date or the Titanic?”
“Number one, the movie Titanic,” he said. “Number two, this date. Number three, the actual Titanic.”
And that’s how we became friends.
When I was at my lowest, Wayne always made me laugh. In the months before quitting drinking, I told him how scared I was because I had gotten back test
