33: Notre Dame de la pluie, sacrifices, et le bon café

For the last week I’ve been on a really cool trip with my mom—a trip that began in Lisbon and will end in Barcelona and right now finds me in France! Bonjour!

It’s been such an incredible experience with so many highlights and almost no low points. One of the lower points, I won’t lie, was actually turning 33 on Monday (May 11). I think if I hadn’t been on this trip, surrounded by so many incredible women courageously exploring the world, I probably would have spent the day trying not to cry and then, inevitably, sobbing while I clutched my chihuahua to my chest and blubbered something psychotic like, “promise mommy you’ll always be her stinky, special boy!!!!”

I don’t know why but 33 is such an ugly number to me. I really resent how symmetrical it is for how destabilizing of a time this is for me. Leaving aside the big, obvious things happening right now — collapse of America as we know it, lost my job— this is just a plain old weird age. I feel very confidently for the first time ever that I am not a Young Person anymore. Like, I am absolutely young and probably the hottest I’ve ever been (I looked so good at 29 though, ngl) and my boobs still look incredible, but I am at a point where my youth is mostly felt when I am with people significantly (30+) years older than me.

Here’s a quick, non-exhaustive list of reasons why I don’t feel like a Young Person anymore:

1. I give great career advice — because I have a lot of career experience. Asshole male colleague making you plan a Halloween party? Weird, misogynistic boss making you clean the coffee machine? Creepy head waiter asking you out while staring at your chest? Difficult email you need to write low-key firing someone? I’m here and I got you.

2. I know exactly how many units of Botox I need in my eyebrows to make the wrinkle between them go away.

3. I have many, many thick and dark chin hairs. If I were to stop plucking them, I would basically have a beard. This brings me only a medium amount of shame.

4. I no longer drink or smoke, except for the occasional glass of extremely dry white wine or a digestif. I know exactly what kind won’t give me a headache and I follow up immediately with a glass of water, magnesium, and some sort of snack. The snack is basically as important as the magnesium—not for its healing properties but because I want a snack and so I’ll have a snack.

5. I haven’t been to a club since before COVID. That’s like… seven years of no clubbing. I don’t even have any of the same cells in my body that have been in a club. It’s almost like I’ve never been to a club at all.

6. If you make plans with me that begin after 10pm, I will decline.

7. I look forward to bedtime! Aggressively. I yearn for the sheets and my matching pajamas and my eye mask. I love an eye mask.

8. My bed time routine is long. Very long.

9. I no longer travel light.

10. I don’t care about trends. Unless it’s a trend that brings me closer to my final form: Fat Art Teacher. In that case, I like that trend.

11. I LOVE funky glasses.

12. I almost never hold my tongue. Idc if you think I’m a bitch or whatever. I probably am being a bitch, on purpose.

Is this proof enough that I’m no longer a Young Person? Worth noting, I am also a Sick Person. There’s an X/Y axis with quadrants in there somewhere but honestly, it’s too close to lunch time for me to sort that out. Another piece of proof that I’m Not Young.

I’m not mourning my youth— not at all. I really, really love where I’m at in life.

I don’t want to go backwards, but that doesn’t mean I really want to go forward. I guess I liked 32 too so much I wanted to stay still?

What’s so destabilizing is how little I have… sorted out. I guess I thought I’d have a better sense of myself or… my pUrPoSe by now. I guess I’d thought I wouldn’t feel so insecure about the same things I felt insecure about when I was 14?

I’m having a hard time putting my finger exactly on what it is about 33 that feels so off

Through out this trip, I’ve been reading a lot of excellent books and reflecting a lot on my author career and what I feel might be next for me. Part of no longer being a Young Person is having less patience for superfluous wheel-spinning. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still spin my wheels! But not the same way I did when I was in my 20s.

2024 and 2025 (and 2026 but we’re not even halfway into the year!) have been years of extreme productivity and, unlike this trip, there have been a lot of deep low points. Points where I’ve genuinedly asked myself: what the FUCK am I doing.

I began this trip feeling totally and utterly burnt out on marketing and promo, on the never-ending circular discussions of publishing, and the emotional beating that comes with putting out a book. I’ve been wondering: do I really have it in me to do this every year, multiple times a year? Especially, if it seems, results shall not vary?

Right now the answer to me is so very clear: no, I don’t.

Not because I don’t the skill or the resilience or WHATEVER, but because this pace leaves almost no room for refilling my creative well and I am just… so fucking tired.

The cultural differences between the Portuguese, Spanish, and French have all been very noticeable. The Portuguese are warm, calm, open and speak incredible English to the point of almost sounding like native speakers. The Spanish have the same sort of passionate, manic warmth Italians have while remaining blunt and opinionated. The French are quieter, brusque and blunt and unsmiling and I love it.

I think…I just appreciate being spoken to and treated like an adult. I can’t describe it any other way. Americans are so smiley and giggly and we’re always being shepherded through life like it’s a Disney ride line. Words like epic and awesome are thrown around so much, I’m not even sure I could identify a truly epic experience if it was presented to me. Pair this with the general disrepair of your average American third space and it can kind of feel like you’re being conspired against. EPIC MOZZARELLA EXPLOSION they say about a fried piece of industrial cheese, served on piece of greasy wax paper. Is it epic? Is it mozzarella? There’s no explosion.

Americans are also chronic oversharers. You meet someone in a hotel lobby and they’re immediately like, my husband and I have been waiting for forty-five minutes. And what do you want ME TO DO ABOUT IT, Kathy????

Part of the issue is me. I know that. People tell me everything. My friend Hannah calls it nurse face. Nurse face so bad I can tell you about almost every woman on this trip’s divorce.

Honestly, I’m a really warm person so it can be so nice to have my proverbial freak matched. But also, it’s sort of exhausting. I’m at a point where I’ve set the expectation that I’m a warm and entertaining person so I feel like I have to deliver that. I’ve become the epic mozzarella explosion and I’m not sure how to undo that for myself.

There’s no artifice with the French, just an acknowledgment that whatever transactional interaction we’re having is just that—transactional. There’s no malice behind the attitude. It’s not passive aggressive. It’s true neutrality. It just is what it is.

And isn’t that wonderful?

France is beautiful. The food is delicious. I’ve seen at least ten fat French people.

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Go to France.

I read three really incredible books back-to-back, and funnily enough (not ha ha funny) all of them are examinations of what it means to achieve success as a creative:

First was Famesick by Lena Dunham, a thorough examination of how her stratospheric success as an auteur (at the age of 25!!!) and her multiple chronic illness double-helixed to create an era of drug addiction, anxiety and depression, public humiliation, and ultimately reinvention. I can not recommend this memoir enough, especially for women working in arts with some form of chronic pain or illness.

Next was Cherry Baby by Rainbow Rowell, another book that examines the shallow well that is professional creative and artistic success but through the lens of a woman who is partnered with an artist who “makes it” — and what that means for her, someone who is the subject of his art and, ultimately, his muse. Rainbow Rowell’s adult romances are so good; she writes beautifully, with simple language and so much heart and realism. Her writing always leave me feeling excited, reinvigorated, inspired. I read her books and think — okay, we’re still doing this thing right.

And last was Problems by Jade Sharma, a book actually recommended by Lena Dunham, about a young woman attempting to swim up stream as her marriage falls apart and her addiction to heroin becomes, indisputably, a problem (hence the title!). Jade, unfortunately, passed tragically in 2019 at the young, but not Young, age of 39. I know we are not supposed to hypothosize what pieces of themselves an author has stashed away in one of their books, but Jade’s passing and Maya’s addiction has led me to looking for pieces of Jade on the internet. I guess, selfishly, I wish she hadn’t died so she could have written more books. I bet Jade also wishes she hadn’t died, lol.

I found this interview with Jade and the whole thing is really great, but this passage in particular struck me:

When I went into fiction, no one in my family encouraged me. They pretty much wrote me off as a total failure. Even though I worked very hard on the book, they imagined I was lazy. I literally was told right before the book was realized that I was lazy and should get my act together. Though there is some vindication with the Times review, none of my family, aside from my mother, have said congratulations. They just think I write dirty shit and it’s like a fluke.

It hurts and I hate it, but I also would have never finished the book, or even started it, unless I truly believed in my talent. I met a lot of kids who had supportive families and they were not as good as me. Some of them got good, and maybe some will end up being good, and maybe this is easier to say after getting a rave in the Times. But in hindsight, maybe it was good that no one encouraged me, because I knew from the start that I had to grab the reader from the first sentence. I had to do something special and skillful for the world to care. I got good because I had to get good. I was under no illusion that the world gave a shit about me or any story I had to tell.

There is just so much tangled up inside of us, isn’t there?

When I first started writing books, I felt a bit like Jade. People like me don’t get to do this.

But I quickly discovered…in the world of genre fiction, being a good writer isn’t what matters. It actually doesn’t even matter— at all.

Look, I don’t mean to be a snob, but I’ve picked up romance novels that are so grammatically fucked that they seem written by someone who just learned the language. And I guess… there is…nothing wrong with that? As Joe Biden once said, hurts no one — grows the economy.

But being a good writer has always been so, so important to me. I thought I had to be good at this. I thought I had to study the greats! I thought I had to know how to write a damn good story and then the success would follow! I’d be able to do this like… as a job!

It’s really fucking shitty to say, but Jade Sharma was writing during a different time. Problems came out in 2016, ten years ago (when I was still Young)—before the booktok boom, before COVID, before AI. Before before before.

A different epoch.

It has to be said — people are not picking up the same books they were picking up in 2016.

Would Normal People be such a big hit now, in 2026?

I’m spinning my wheels unneccessarily so I’ll just say what I want to say:

Publishing is contracting. Opportunities are going away and authors are having to work harder for a smaller piece of the pie. My MOST TALENTED peers are losing their contracts or being turned away from publishers because of their “““sales numbers.”””

But the epic mozzarella explosions keep selling. And I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do.

Should I just stay in Frances?

It hasn’t stopped raining in France. I had to buy the cutest rain jacket. It’s a light olive green with a white and navy striped inside. It fits wonderfully and goes so well with my bright red scarf. I feel pretty and classy and chic. People think I’m Spanish when I go into shops.

On the bus ride as we pass from the Basque Country into France, I think about writing a book about a woman who is stuck with her ex-boyfriend on a bus tour. He’s the bus driver. It could be quieter, more literary. No happy ending for the couple. Or maybe a more open-ended happy ending. Maybe they’ll never kiss. Or maybe they’ll do it on the fifth page.

I’ll just write it, how I want to write it, without thinking about booktok or bookstagram or goodreads.

I’ll just write it because I’m a writer and being a writer is like being a Taurus or being a brunette or being short. It’s just what I am.

I’m cold everywhere. Wet and cold and happy.

Our tour guide tells us we aren’t tourists, we’re pilgrims. We get dessert with every meal. Souvenir shops sell hundreds of ugly magnets with the Madonna on them. I secretly google different articles about people who disprove the apparitions of Mary at Lourdes. They say Bernadette was mentally ill.

I daydream about being a mom and being a bestseller and being old. I feel like I can’t really do anything until Trump isn’t president. He’s such an ugly loser. So embarrassing. Bush was also embarrassing and then we got Obama.

Obama. Heart eyes. Americans were chic when Obama was president.

A Sicilian woman sits next to me in a café and I help her order ice cream for breakfast. Why not? She’s old. She’s free. She’s reached her final form.

Beside her, I feel so young.

I’m only 33. I have plenty of time to figure everything out.