school by partying so hard that by their early twenties they just want to sit on the couch watching TV with the same person for the next sixty years. It was talking about the fear and heartbreak of not finding that person as time goes on and about the realities of biological clocks. Unsurprisingly, the article was eventually expanded into the aforementioned bestselling book and the author became a therapist and highly paid speaker and life coach.
You could see why the author was a highly paid speaker; she was a damn good one. I knew this from watching her on The Today Show and hearing her on National Public Radio debating, for instance, another lady writer whoâd published a long article about her work-life balance in the same magazine and also scored a massive book deal from it. So good a speaker was the bestselling author and so irritating and spurious was the âKnot Yetâ report that I spent many, many hours preparing my presentation. I wanted to earn my $2,500 in good faith and I also wanted to make a meaningful connection with the audience, which Iâd been told would be a large crowd of varying ages and political and religious persuasions from Los Angelesâs well-heeled west side.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
It is typical of my work pattern to devote the most time and effort to projects that have the smallest audiences and pay the least money. This is especially true of public-speaking situations, where my fear of walking up to a podium with less than three times the amount of material I need to fill the allotted time outweighs my commonsense knowledge that Iâm hardly being paid anything and that very few people will show up. I once spent months preparing a lecture on âjournalingâ that I was asked to give as part of a wellness outreach program run by the general hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. I pored over the diaries of Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and Lewis and Clark. I mounted a big argument for âthe journal as the fieldwork of the unconsciousâ and gave pointers for keeping journals that âarenât merely self-reflective but serve as a springboard for inquiry into the outside world.â
I rambled on like this for forty minutes until, during the question-and-answer period, people started asking which had better deals on leather-bound diaries, Barnes and Noble or the local stationers. They asked for advice on what to do if someone reads your diary and then becomes angry with you. I was paid U.S. $0.00 for this presentation, which was appropriate because thatâs about how much value I added to the wellness outreach program. I told myself (and, indeed, had taken the gig because I believed) that I could use the lecture again, maybe even turning it into something that I could deliver on college campuses for generous fees. This is what I tell myself every time I agree to give a lecture, even if the lecture is tailored so specifically to the occasion (see: âMary McCarthy at Vassar: A Centennial Celebrationâ) that I might as well drop my one and only copy of the speech into a recycling bin as I exit the auditorium. I tell myself that itâs okay that I have spent four months researching, writing, and rehearsing this speech because I can do it as a TED Talk someday. Itâs okay, I say, because someday it will go viral on Facebook and people will leave comments to the effect of âThis will f*cking blow your mindâ and âOMG: genius!â
And so it went with my fifteen-minute response to the âKnot Yetâ report, a response born of my âpersonal mythology,â which in turn was born of my family mythology. I guess the operative word here is mythology . The values and assumptions Iâm about to describe are grievously limited in what they suggest about the wrong and right ways to live a life. Nonetheless, they are the values I grew up with and the ones that still shape my attitudes and judgments and reactions. I am
You could see why the author was a highly paid speaker; she was a damn good one. I knew this from watching her on The Today Show and hearing her on National Public Radio debating, for instance, another lady writer whoâd published a long article about her work-life balance in the same magazine and also scored a massive book deal from it. So good a speaker was the bestselling author and so irritating and spurious was the âKnot Yetâ report that I spent many, many hours preparing my presentation. I wanted to earn my $2,500 in good faith and I also wanted to make a meaningful connection with the audience, which Iâd been told would be a large crowd of varying ages and political and religious persuasions from Los Angelesâs well-heeled west side.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
It is typical of my work pattern to devote the most time and effort to projects that have the smallest audiences and pay the least money. This is especially true of public-speaking situations, where my fear of walking up to a podium with less than three times the amount of material I need to fill the allotted time outweighs my commonsense knowledge that Iâm hardly being paid anything and that very few people will show up. I once spent months preparing a lecture on âjournalingâ that I was asked to give as part of a wellness outreach program run by the general hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. I pored over the diaries of Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and Lewis and Clark. I mounted a big argument for âthe journal as the fieldwork of the unconsciousâ and gave pointers for keeping journals that âarenât merely self-reflective but serve as a springboard for inquiry into the outside world.â
I rambled on like this for forty minutes until, during the question-and-answer period, people started asking which had better deals on leather-bound diaries, Barnes and Noble or the local stationers. They asked for advice on what to do if someone reads your diary and then becomes angry with you. I was paid U.S. $0.00 for this presentation, which was appropriate because thatâs about how much value I added to the wellness outreach program. I told myself (and, indeed, had taken the gig because I believed) that I could use the lecture again, maybe even turning it into something that I could deliver on college campuses for generous fees. This is what I tell myself every time I agree to give a lecture, even if the lecture is tailored so specifically to the occasion (see: âMary McCarthy at Vassar: A Centennial Celebrationâ) that I might as well drop my one and only copy of the speech into a recycling bin as I exit the auditorium. I tell myself that itâs okay that I have spent four months researching, writing, and rehearsing this speech because I can do it as a TED Talk someday. Itâs okay, I say, because someday it will go viral on Facebook and people will leave comments to the effect of âThis will f*cking blow your mindâ and âOMG: genius!â
And so it went with my fifteen-minute response to the âKnot Yetâ report, a response born of my âpersonal mythology,â which in turn was born of my family mythology. I guess the operative word here is mythology . The values and assumptions Iâm about to describe are grievously limited in what they suggest about the wrong and right ways to live a life. Nonetheless, they are the values I grew up with and the ones that still shape my attitudes and judgments and reactions. I am
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