There was a time when I couldn’t get published to save my life. I sent out dozens of essays and query letters to any publication that I thought might give me a shot, and while most of them didn’t bother to respond, the impersonal rejection slips I did receive were even worse. “Thank you for submitting your work to Crack’d,” I might read. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a need for a piece on ‘Bad ’80s Perms’ right now. Also, your writing stinks.”
Quivering with indignation, I’d crumple up the letter and vow that someday everyone would read me. Everyone I knew! From my mom to my next-door neighbor to… to…Martina McBride!
Well, that time has come. Among others, my dental hygienist, my stepdaughters’ classmates and even my grandmother all have found their way to this column and onto my blogs, and sometimes all these readers are more trouble than they’re worth. Just last week, I fielded a phone call from one of my babysitters, who promptly began sobbing over a piece I’d written for Parents.com titled, “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s a Coked-Up Streetwalker.” “I wasn’t talking about you,” I tried to reassure her. I paused and waited for her to calm down. Something about this phone call was bothering me. “I mean, you’re not a coked-up streetwalker, are you?” I asked quickly.
A few days later, my husband received a voicemail from an apoplectic family member who demanded (to put it mildly) that I remove several posts from my Suburban Turmoil blog. Although I thought the person was overreacting, I removed the offending bits. Still, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be She Who Shall Not Be Spoken To at next year’s Thanksgiving dinner.
But it wasn’t until I ran into Channel 4 mascot Snowbird at a TPAC performance that I realized things truly had spiraled out of control. “I love your blog,” Snowbird said to me, “except for that one post you wrote. You know which one I mean?” He meant, no doubt, the one in which I called him both “creepy” and a “big furry menace.” Surely he’d known I was kidding, though, right? I laughed weakly, but as I backed away slowly from Snowbird, trying not to show any fear, the two eyes peering out at me from the stuffed penguin’s uvula fairly radiated with indignation. Something had to give.
That’s when Neal Pollack came to dinner. Neal has been hipster parenting’s media darling ever since he wrote the memoir, Alternadad, last year (alternadad.com), which major publications from USA Today to Time subsequently fawned over before Warner Brothers optioned it as a potential feature film. Neal and I both write for Parents.com, so when he came to Nashville from Los Angeles over the holidays to visit his in-laws, he brought his wife and kid over to our house for supper.
His timing couldn’t have been better, because if anyone has had to deal with the fallout from writing about your life, it’s Neal. When I asked his wife Regina (a Nashville native and Harpeth Hall grad) what she thought about her own appearances in Neal’s writing, she brought up an essay he wrote for Salon.com a few years ago, which detailed their son’s expulsion from preschool. Regina hadn’t seen the story before it was published, so she was surprised when she started getting nasty emails from Salon readers. “That’s when I finally read the essay,” she recounted at dinner, “and I was like, ‘Neal. You made me look like sort of a bitch.’ ”
Neal toned down the writing about his wife, but more recently, he’s come under attack by New York media gossip site Gawker for blogging about his preschool-aged son. A writer for the site called Neal’s son “the worst,” based on Neal’s stories, and predicted, “in a few years, he’ll be a full-grown horror show.” After some readers (not to mention Neal) objected to the post, the writer argued that Neal’s son was fair game for criticism because Neal chose to make him a literary character in his writing.
It’s one thing for readers to call me a “stale, cheap beer reporter” or complain about my “weekly white girl whine-fest.” (Both of these come from Scene readers. Clever!) The fact is that if someone wrote nasty things about my kids, I’d unload on them like Mindy McCready on a Scrabble player, something that Neal, incidentally, doesn’t recommend. “Don’t attack back,” he advised me. “I’ve done that before, and it always leads to more trouble.” And you know, I think Mindy would agree with that statement.
I’m left wondering, then, how I’m supposed to write about my life and my experiences without pissing off anyone else. That’s when Neal sent me this quote from Oscar Wilde: “An inoffensive life is not worth writing about.” Take that, bitches.
