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Word Count 932 One job has never been enough. Sometimes I’ve had two, even three. This is what I learned growing up the oldest of six in an Irish Catholic family: You have to earn your keep. Like a character in a Dickens novel, I got “working papers” at age sixteen, which enabled me to get my first “real” job in an upscale Swiss-owned toy store in a local shopping center. I stocked shelves, making…
Word Count 805 Whenever I tell people I worked as a writer for Vogue for almost twenty years, they inevitably ask, “What’s Anna like?” “Great,” I tell them. Meetings were short, decisions were quick and binding. Wintour is smart, disciplined, with good taste and a wide ranging curiosity. Inevitably, they look disappointed because what they really want to know is, how closely does Wintour resemble…
Word Count 1254 During my entire childhood, my mother worked. She was a broadcaster, a writer, and a TV morning show contributor. I can remember coming home many times and finding her office door closed. If I bothered to make myself known, she would always say, “I can’t stop, Bex. I can’t stop.” And I would usually slink off to the kitchen to make myself some beans on toast. At her memorial…
Word Count 713 In college, I met a blond, blue-eyed, guitar-strumming fellow student who grew up on a working farm. We’d been together six months when he invited me to Sunday Dinner, which punctually began at 1 o’clock. He said we would be staying over for the night so I could meet his parents and admire the property he would one day inherit. It was implied that were we to stay together, I’d be a…
Word Count 360 All my life, I wanted to be a writer, but had no faith in myself. I thought you had to have deep thoughts, an unusual life, important things to say, and worse, I thought you had to know what you were doing. Finally, when I was forty-eight, I took a chance. I signed up for a writing workshop with the perfect teacher, the writer Bill Roorbach. He began every workshop by quoting from…
Word Count 1734 In 1958, between my sophomore and junior years of college, I got my first real job in a big hospital in North Carolina, part of an investigation into cervical cancer in “indigent” farm women. My task was to collect family and medical histories from the participants, patients in the hospital’s Cancer Ward. My boss had a grant to pay them. Every morning, I went in with cookies and…
Word Count 1868 My job was words. The right words at the right time. I started on staff at Time, then became a freelancer, and later, a part-time ghost. My clients produced Oprah and Elmo and Martha and Elle, plus Vogue, The New Yorker, and Kermit the Frog. Then a drunk lady stole a truck and compressed a parked car. I was in the car. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage. My…
Word Count 1614 In 1984, I went to work as a reference librarian at the Central Library in Portland, Oregon, a few blocks uptown from the Multnomah Hotel (now the Embassy Suites), where my grandfather used to go every morning to read the Oregonian and visit with his old friends. When I visited, I would drive there with my grandparents down lower Burnside, then as now, skid row. My grandmother…
Word Count 1728 Sometimes I think I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to wear a bra or pantyhose or go into an office every day. I never liked leaving my nest, no matter how dingy or small; my apartment, my desk, my refrigerator, and the loose clothes I wore made me happy. They were ‘home.’ My first novel, written at age six, began: “It was a good day and a bad day. It was a good day because we…
Word Count 711 When the interview panel of men in suits and a woman from human resources asked, “What language do they speak in Mexico?” I confidently answered, “Mexican”. Not a hint of a smile from any of them. So it wasn’t till I got home and replayed the scene for my husband that I realised that my impeccable logic was, in fact, an enormous blunder. Still, they offered me the job as assistant…
