Perhaps if I were playing a version of myself instead of myself, I would have had less of a flushed reaction to the line. I was conversant enough in the show to know that a decent number of New Yorkers had made cameos on Gossip Girl, among them Cynthia Rowley, Michael Bloomberg, and Lisa Loeb. A motley but expensively shampooed crew. This roster of past guest stars is part of the reason I was excited. Gossip Girl has been unusually good to Manhattan-based people and industries via name drops, guest appearances, and product placements. Being invited into this world (even as a backup choice) felt like a minor local knighting conducted on national television.
More than that, a surprising number of book-publishing figures and authors have appeared on Gossip Girl. Further reconnaissance taught me that over the course of several seasons, Jay McInerney plays a once-young-’n’-famous writer named Jeremiah Harris. Jeremiah gives advice to young Dan, then interning at a Condé Nast publication and struggling to become young-’n’-famous, too. Jonathan Karp, an editor and publisher at Simon & Schuster, appears several times on the show because S&S is publishing Insider whether Dan is ready for it or not, goddamn it; Blair, another private school queen bee, is close personal friends with Lorrie Moore and invites her to a party; Jeffrey Eugenides and Jennifer Egan get shout-outs; editors at The Paris Review are clamoring to get a look at Dan’s prose.
The thing is, all these people’s roles are proportional to their relevance to the Gossip Girl world. If they are recurring and substantive enough, they have separate character names. When Wallace Shawn plays Cyrus Rose and dates Blair’s mother, it’s difficult to get past his Wallace Shawn–ness, but, in a way, we’re not meant to. Normally we judge an actor by how quickly that actor can make us forget reality. However, the Gossip Girl producers know a significant swath of their fan base will recognize Wallace Shawn and Jay McInerney on sight. So why bother with forgetting when we can appreciate the clever meta-ness of the show’s writers and experience pride at our own cleverness for getting the reference?
Whether you’re playing yourself or a wink-wink persona, the law of cameo syllogism goes as follows (stay with me, here): If you spend a certain amount of screen time playing yourself, you are no longer yourself but a version of yourself—a stereotype of you. Add a bonus layer of confusion if you are playing a stereotype of you in a scene in which all the characters are outraged by the possibility that the fictional characters in a fictional book published by a real publishing house might be based on the real fictional selves they’re playing.
What falls off the conveyor belt? Sloane is the bestselling author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake.
Prior to becoming a full-time writer, I worked for many years as a book publicist. As someone who used to cart around awkward literary geniuses for a living, I tried to imagine a scenario in which introducing an author as “bestselling” wouldn’t go off like a bomb. Deep down, I knew the Gossip Girl writers were doing me a favor. They were trying to introduce me to the people watching the party, not at the party. As we’ll surely recall, I was no one’s first choice. But my appreciation for this kindness was diminished by my next line: “Which I am still in search of.”
Here I am referring to actual cake. This syntax is complicated and awkwardly phrased, and sounds like I’m contorting myself to express a desire in a grammatically correct fashion, even if the result is not grammatically correct. Which I am still in search of. It’s not dissimilar to the reality-TV-show contestant’s ungrammatical attempt to appear grammatical, a quirk of using the subject pronoun after a preposition, instead of the correct object version. So: You have to choose between Brad or I.
In terms of verisimilitude, however, the line rings true. Which I am still in search of. It sounds like I am saying whatever gobbledygook is required to get me out of a conversation at a party. It’s called method acting.
My next line after that: “So if you’ll excuse me…”
I trail off. So preoccupied is this me-version character by the possibility of stuffing her face with cake, she has no mind for small talk.
“Oh, it is so nice to meet you!” exclaims an impressed Lily van der Woodsen.
And then?
Then nothing.
That’s it.
I don’t have another line.
I look Lily dead in the eye, ignore Dan’s father, Rufus Humphrey, and Rufus and Lily’s stepson, Chuck, and scurry away. Rufus opens his mouth and looks as if he’s about to add a pleasantry of his own. Alas, I have already turned my back to him.
The writers of the episode surely did not realize how strangely this would translate once the cameras were rolling. Or, more likely, they didn’t think twice about it, because it’s an expendable moment of civilian bumbling during a show that’s been on the air for years. I am left holding the bad-manners bag. But I am also a guest in the house of Gossip Girl, afraid to ad-lib. I am convinced it’s on the same spectrum as inquiring about my “motivation.” So I stick to the script and say nothing more.
I hear Lily’s words as I flee the scene.
“Oh, it is so nice to meet you!”
You bet your ass it was.
* * *
Gossip Girl calls the Upper East Side home, but the day of my appearance, it was being filmed on the Upper West Side; a minor park-width fudge considering all of the far-flung locales Vancouver claims to be. I didn’t care where I was going, so long as I would be lent something
