Writing About Writing

This is a Substack post in which I talk about what’s going on with my Substack and while it’s been burbling up for awhile, I’ve just smushed it back down because it was drummed into me that writing about writing is awful.

Indulgent. Navel-gazing.

Like podcasts that spend the first many minutes talking about what they’re going to talk about which, hello, I think I do?

But you get the point. Ick and Ew. Barf and puke. Gag me and kill me now. I wouldn’t be caught dead and not over my dead body. Stick a fork in me and also find me at the bottom of the ocean in a pair of concrete shoes. That’s all she wrote and Goodbye, cruel world. Etc.

So here is the thing. I started this to write about the insane story of not knowing I was Jewish until after I graduated college because my dad told me we weren’t Jewish. It’s a fundamental part of my identity—not the being Jewish part which still exists mostly on an intellectual level save for the dumb fights I get into with antisemites on Threads which pings something deep and visceral in me—but the fact that my dad invented a flimsy fiction and passed it off to me as truth AND I BELIEVED IT.

I started writing that after my dad died but before my mom died. That was challenging because my mom was the most private person in the universe specifically with regards to what I was allowed to say, and so we fell into a system where I would send her the pieces ahead of time to make sure she was okay with them.

She appreciated this A LOT and her appreciation made the whole thing feel good to me. Also she was more lenient than I would have expected which I imagine was hard for her.

On occasion though she did take issue with stuff and voiced her displeasure in a way my parents had a knack for: assuming the worst, ascribing malicious intent and making you feel horrible and invisible all at once.

“Dad would absolutely hate this,” she casually texted one day. “I just feel like now that he isn’t here to defend himself you’ve decided to drag him through the mud.”

FUN!

These writings had a small audience of people who were interested but it’s not as if my deeply personal prose was lighting the world aflame.

And then one day I was thinking about how in our house we keep the bathroom door open if there’s no one in there and closed if it’s in use, which is a bathroom code Adam Carolla preached. I wondered how many other things I still do from my time there. I decided to write a piece about life lessons I learned from The Adam Carolla Show. It would be easy to write and I could sidestep the family landmine. Plus I can easily and fondly write and talk about it. There is distance.

That post blew up in comparison with the other ones. My paid subscriber count ratcheted up like a payout on a generous slot machine.

It was CLEAR that people enjoyed reading about my time on The Adam Carolla Show.

I began writing about it pretty much in chronological order, starting with my audition.

To make sense of how much people seemed to prefer this to my other writing, I explained it to my therapist thusly:

People enjoyed the show, they miss this particular era of the show and I’m writing about it in a way that brings them in. It’s nostalgia. And I am enjoying writing about it.

My husband worried that this would hand haters the charge that has been leveled at me since I left: that I’m still talking about it. Jesus Christ she’s still talking about it! Get over it! Move on! How many years has it been?

But the thing is, and I realize this is a distinction probably only to me and people who are inclined to like me, it’s because so much time has passed, because it does not hold any emotional sway over me, that I can freely write about it.

Greg Fitzsimmons with whom I do Childish also worries that I am so much more than just this and to just write about this is limiting.

I get it, I do, but I don’t know that some huge group of people is even aware of me or my Substack or what I’m writing about.

Anyway, I never exclusively wrote about it, I would always pepper in posts about other stuff and those would met a smattering of applause and then I’d watch my paid subscriber count drop and then I’d write about the show and the slots would pour out again. Up and down and up and down.

Writing strictly for money is not the goal and to do so would be to sell out (remember, I’m Gen X!) but it’s hard not to see this as an indication of what people want to read versus what they don’t.

“Is it meaningful to you?” my therapist asked me recently when I talked about feeling a bit aimless.

“Everything I write is meaningful to me when I write it,” I said.

My mom died suddenly at the end of 2024 and at that point it just became impossible for me to write about the Carolla stuff. I felt like I was bleeding and someone asked me what I wanted to do for New Year’s Eve in two years. I needed to stop the bleed first.

Fun fact that is not fun: I published a Substack about my dinner with Adam from the foot of my mom’s hospital bed.

I recently wrote two pieces that are very deeply felt and very vulnerable and while a lot of people personally reached out to say they were moved by the pieces and they appreciated the honesty and they related, my paid subscriber count dropped. I am trying not to care. I’ve also got a piece in drafts about my regrets about my time on the show, things I wish I had done differently, that I’ve been slowly working on for a week or so. But it’s like a cookie you keep on a napkin in the kitchen and eat a tiny bit of every time you pass by. I haven’t sat down to write the piece. I just fire off a few thoughts when I should be doing something else.

And now I’m trying so hard to avoid being productive in a work sense that I actually thought to myself, “Maybe I should go through some boxes.” But really I could sit down and finish that piece.

Or I could write about why I’m not writing about much of anything which is what you’re reading here.

I suppose I could say, “I”m just going to write about what I feel like writing about,” which is kind of the whole point of Substack “and the people who are meant to stay will stay and those who are meant to fall off will fall off” but ugh, I’ve got a hot one in the hand, you know?

I’ve got a beat! Something people will pay for! Something they WANT to pay for!

Anyway, all of this is writing about writing as opposed to just writing but I’m pushing publish anyway because I’m a daredevil.

Oh also when I was cleaning out my parents’ house I found two pieces of paper I wish I still had. One was a performance review from early in my career at a newspaper which said while I was assuredly a good writer I had really struggled to find my place at the magazine recently and there is nothing like finding a beat and then sticking to it. Reading it instantly brought back to the shame I remember feeling at the time.

I lack discipline. I get in my head. I overthink. Instead of doing I think about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it and is there a better way and then I fall on my face. These things were not said in the meeting but they were what my own brain supplied.

The piece of paper was so hot for me, so shameful that I think I decided to throw it away so as not to let it have power over me. I wish I had kept it though because the wording is getting fuzzy.

The other thing was a draft of a letter my mom wrote to someone, dictated by my dad because that’s how they did, that was so accusatory and mean it was like all the evidence I need for therapy in a one-sheet. I know I didn’t get rid of it but I never found it again. It was lost to the filing cabinet that got tossed. Or maybe I do have it somewhere in the boxes except I know I specifically went to look for it and came up empty.

That is what my parents did when they were on the attack which is whenever they felt attacked which was often. They diagnosed you. They decided this is what you were up to, here is why you are doing what you are doing that maybe you are even unaware you are doing. And to defend yourself against that is so difficult when you are a child.

It is to be accused of a crime you didn’t commit by lawmakers who are absolutely sure you committed the crime and they are so angry you would do such a thing in their peaceful town. And the only mercy they will show is if you listen and sign off on this reality which is false.

There was never a simple misunderstanding, a simple mistake. Never the clumsiness of people living in close quarters accidentally bumping into each other’s emotions. Instead if your feelings were hurt it was because someone had deliberately hurt you whether they were aware of it or not.

Okay this isn’t about writing anymore, now it’s just about exorcising residual bullshit from my complicated youth!

And yet I feel that if I stay here long enough I will figure out that it IS about writing. But I have boxes to go through.

Okay if you made it this far, thank you for reading this! I will return to actual writing instead of writing about writing I just had to express this!