I'm 75. I think about my last days, and I’m terrified I’m going to be found dead in my IKEA bed wearing my schmootzy tank top that slips down my too-large breasts, and my baggy sweats. Plus, my hair gets all kinky and I drool. Every night I spray the bed with Chanel perfume. I do this in case I die during my sleep and I don’t want to smell bad. Poor Mrs. Wilson across the hall was dead two days before someone noticed a foul smell coming from under her door and there she was still sitting on the toilet and dead. It’s time to get up and start writing. Before I hit the bucket, I want to write a bestseller, and find undying love. I’m sick of everyone looking at me funny when I say this. Thirty—five years I’ve been writing and publishing novels and dream of writing a bestseller like Fifty Shades of Gray. So far I’ve had movie and television options but everything has turned to shit. Still, I dream that I’ll write a bestseller, and at eighty I’ll be on Charley Rose with my slightly thinning curly hair and glasses and cashmere shawl, murmuring that Jane Austen is a Goddess and that you have to keep your faith. All that horseshit. I’ve been through the mill with the rotten industry.
Anyway, between the career, and the lousy men, not to mention the daughters bossing me, it hasn’t been a walk in the park. Until Viggie my NY agent sold my latest novel The Viagra Diaries to Starlight Publishers. I was out of my mind. I got this huge advance and the book went to thirteen countries. Then to top it I got a film option with Lion Studios. Two years went by. The head writer wrote a shit script, and the option was canned. Then the shit hit the fan. First I was diagnosed with uterine cancer, had surgery, got through it without chemo, then my poor sixty-five year old brother was sick from heart failure and on the street and I had to put him into a State owned home near me. So the money went. Anyway, then another network bought the rights, and now I have another option. Between the rotten industry and the decrepit men I’m in a state.
I drag into the kitchen and make coffee in my new Costco espresso maker. I drop the little pod into the slot, and the espresso comes out with foam and everything. Wowie. I sit by the window, listening to the CNN lousy news, all these Isis creeps beheading people. It’s really awful. I look out the window, loving the San Francisco fog. I hate the sun. Everyone running around worrying about their friggin melanomas and wearing baseball caps over their hair extensions.
The rest of the day, I write. I’m working on The Rise and Fall of a Jewish American Princess, a novel that I resurrected from the sixties. It’s the story of my life and about the louse who married me when I was a nineteen year old virgin and then refused to touch me on the grounds that he made a mistake and didn’t love me. I love writing. Problem is I use life for material. Writing is my real life, and my real life is my book life. Talk about fucked up. All the therapy and I’m still fucked up.
For the rest of the day I write, and then I go for my walk, along the hills, huffing and puffing and dreaming that one of these days one of my internet boomer plus schleps will be my prince charming.
Hang on. I’m bringing you with me. I’m taking you into my story.
Anyway, between the career, and the lousy men, not to mention the daughters bossing me, it hasn’t been a walk in the park. Until Viggie my NY agent sold my latest novel The Viagra Diaries to Starlight Publishers. I was out of my mind. I got this huge advance and the book went to thirteen countries. Then to top it I got a film option with Lion Studios. Two years went by. The head writer wrote a shit script, and the option was canned. Then the shit hit the fan. First I was diagnosed with uterine cancer, had surgery, got through it without chemo, then my poor sixty-five year old brother was sick from heart failure and on the street and I had to put him into a State owned home near me. So the money went. Anyway, then another network bought the rights, and now I have another option. Between the rotten industry and the decrepit men I’m in a state.
I drag into the kitchen and make coffee in my new Costco espresso maker. I drop the little pod into the slot, and the espresso comes out with foam and everything. Wowie. I sit by the window, listening to the CNN lousy news, all these Isis creeps beheading people. It’s really awful. I look out the window, loving the San Francisco fog. I hate the sun. Everyone running around worrying about their friggin melanomas and wearing baseball caps over their hair extensions.
The rest of the day, I write. I’m working on The Rise and Fall of a Jewish American Princess, a novel that I resurrected from the sixties. It’s the story of my life and about the louse who married me when I was a nineteen year old virgin and then refused to touch me on the grounds that he made a mistake and didn’t love me. I love writing. Problem is I use life for material. Writing is my real life, and my real life is my book life. Talk about fucked up. All the therapy and I’m still fucked up.
For the rest of the day I write, and then I go for my walk, along the hills, huffing and puffing and dreaming that one of these days one of my internet boomer plus schleps will be my prince charming.
Hang on. I’m bringing you with me. I’m taking you into my story.