The longest days of the year

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My book, THE FIELD GUIDE TO NEPO BABIES, is out in the world!!!! It’s available at Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and also hopefully your local bookstore. 📓

I am taking a page out of Clare Frances’s book and allowing you to ask me questions about literally whatever: writing, movies, Substack, trying to have a wedding, Stitch from Lilo & Stitch, etc. I am good at giving etiquette advice and bad at giving relationship advice, for what it’s worth.

I have kind of always been obsessed with the concept of a “financial quarter,” because basically no part of my life revolves around this other than freelance taxes. Occasionally in my life I will interact with people who work in business or something numbers where the concept of a “Q1” or “Q3” means something to them in a real way. I can’t say I have ever been one of those people. At an old job, I remember getting a $1,000 bonus at the end of March on my paycheck. “What’s the deal with this?” I asked someone. “If we surpass our metrics goals, everyone gets a bonus.” That’s awesome, I thought. An extra maybe $4,000 a year. The joke was on me: I don’t think we ever surpassed our metrics goals ever again, and I definitely never got a bonus again after that.

I don’t really keep a journal at the present1, but when I would keep a journal during more tumultuous times, I would begin every entry with “sorry it’s been so long since writing,” though the apology was only ever to myself. I will sometimes hear from people that they “never know what’s going on with me,” and I have a hard time developing concise answers to that question. A friend mentioned that because they deleted Instagram and their email inbox is so fucked, they’ve had no clue what I’ve been doing with my life the last 18 months. “You have to just text me to say what’s happening,” they said. We — the Fran Magazine community, for lack of a better word — have all been in touch sporadically across Miss Evelina May2, but as a vague rundown of events:

In April I celebrated my 35th birthday. I went to Los Angeles for a few days ahead of a trip to Disneyland.3 I came home and entered a kind of writing marathon fugue state in order to finish up the draft of my forthcoming novella FINE-TUNING.4 In mid-May I submitted my draft, and the next day THE FIELD GUIDE TO NEPO BABIES came out. I then immediately got sick with the first of two summer flus. We went to Minnesota for a dear friend’s wedding at the end of May. I came back, worked my job three Sundays in a row in addition to the normal days you’re supposed to work during the week, while juggling edits for FINE-TUNING. In the meantime, I’ve said yes to everything: podcast interview for the book, dinner plans, birthday parties. A week and a half ago, likely due to some combination of stress and auxiliary factors, I had what I’m convinced was an EBV flare-up, aka speedrunning Mono 2.0, where my body just kind of collapsed onto itself. I was exhausted and feverish and rendered somewhat stupid and also briefly got viral conjunctivitis and I’m still struggling at times to catch my breath in the middle of the night. I am mostly better now, thanks to modern medicine. On Wednesday, I took what I think was my first sick day this calendar year. Now I’m better, which means, of course, back to work.

It’s been an amazing past few months, and also kind of an awful past few months. It’s all entirely too much, regardless of the quality of the time, which I’m very much aware of. I type this all out not really to complain but to contextualize, to keep an inventory of events, to know what’s happening to my body and why. It has been a completely insane year after what I had hoped would be the most insane year yet, and it’s only half over. I keep telling myself I’m doing all this in part because we have our honeymoon later in the summer — that I’ve basically decided to do all of my year’s relaxing in one go, so the rest of my time has to be turbo-loaded — but I think that’s frankly delusional. There’s a broad insecurity I can’t shake, made apparent with every new opportunity, that it will be the last one. Financial insecurity, yes, but also just a personal one.

It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I have a profoundly toxic relationship to “work” in general — writing, whatever, anything that is not actually pleasure or leisure. In my earliest bout of going to therapy, in addition to complaining about generic topics like how I relate to others, I mostly tried to figure out how to detach myself from the expectation of having to work constantly. At that time, I had a particularly awful employer5 who would routinely gaslight and embarrass me in front of our small team. That was obviously bad, and once I got out from that situation, I stopped trying to figure out why I continued to work overtime for the respect of someone who did not repay me even in kind. I don’t have a situation remotely like that now. I would say I have the opposite situation — a workplace that is often exceedingly respectful and hugely encouraging — but I am for better and worse the same person.

Every longform fiction project I’ve ever worked on is about work in some way or another. The novel I wrote in grad school that never sold was about teachers, the half-written novel I worked on the past couple of years at residencies was about working at an ice cream shop, and FINE-TUNING is set in the world of classical music between two people who share a field, for lack of a better word.6 When I set out to work on this project, the main goal was to write something fun. I think I have written things that “are funny” and possess a kind of vague fun-ness, while also not being especially fun for me to write. I wanted to write and have fun — that could be kind of crazy, no? I wanted to write about two people who have dedicated but complicated relationships to what they do for work, which also happens to be their life’s passion, in one way or another. They are disciplined and dedicated, but they’ve not ever really had to think twice about what they do and why they do it until meeting each other. Because that’s the thing that compels me about work as both a thing to do and a thing to write about: there is an inherent pleasure to it, for me, at least. It is rewarding and it is fun — possibly even sexy — under the right circumstances, and to continue to do it ad nauseam is a little bit like gambling. What would I even do if I won?

Fran Magazine will be around more this summer, though I am planning to take the whole month of August off, French-style. “Didn’t you just take the whole month of June off?” I can hear you asking. Yes, but that was different. Next time, it will be French. I am watching Love Island USA and this is an appropriate time to discuss that, if you should like, in the comments, in addition to any of the above.