What I Was W as Doing Doing While You Were Breeding A M e m o i r
Kristin Kr istin Newman Newman
Three Rivers Press New York
Copyright © 2014 by Kristin Newman All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company Compa ny,, New York. www.crownpublishing.com Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-inCataloging-in-Publication Publication Data is available upon request. ISBN 978-0-804-13760-7 eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3761-4 Printed in the United States of America Book design by Donna Sinisgalli Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright Br ight Cover photography photography by Martin Mar tin Westlake/Gal estlake/Galley ley Stock 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Prologue
“I’ll Have the t he Hou ouse se Special”
I am not a slut in the United States of America. I have rarely had a few fewerer-thanthan-fourfour-nigh nightt stand in the Land of the Free. I don’t kiss married men or guys I work with, I don’t text people pictures of my genitalia, I don’t go home with boys I meet in bars before they have at least purchased me a couple of meals, I’ve never shown my boobs for beads. I do not sleep with more than one person at a time, and, sometimes, no more than one per year. year. In America. A merica. But I really love to travel. Now, having sex with foreigners is not the only whorish thing I do: I also write sitcoms. For the last fourteen years I’ve written for shows like That ’70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, Chuck, The Neighbors, and shows you’ve
never heard of that nonetheless afford me two over-theover- thetop lucky things: the money to buy plane tickets and the
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poorly dressed men, telling dick jokes and overeating and, sometimes, sitting on the floor with Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, and a chimpanzee (before all three found the age difference insurmountable). In the writers’ room, we talk a million miles a minute, tearing each other apart for sport and, often, out of love. Sometimes someone makes me cry, and I pretend I’m doing a “bit” where I “run out of the room to cry” even though what I’m really doing is running out of the room to cry. If I’m lucky enough to be fully employed, I get about nine months of this and then a three-month threemonth hiatus—unpaid hiatus—unpaid time off from this weird nonnoncorporate grind. Most days, the writers’ room feels like I’m at the most enterta ente rtaini ining ng dinner party part y in the world. world. Other times, it feels like I’m at the meanest, mea nest, longest one. I keep both versions in perspective with my real life’s work—running work—running away from home to someplace wonderful. And then, sometimes, having sex there. Throughout most of my twenties and thirties, in the hiatus months (or years) between bet ween shows, shows, I spent sp ent between a few weeks and a few months months a year traveling t raveling.. When money was tight, I took road trips t rips with a tent, and a nd when it it wasn’t, wasn’t, I got on a plane and went as far as I could, to places like China and New Zealand, Jordan and Brazil. To Tibet and Argentina and Australia and most of Europe. To Israel and Colombia and Russia and Iceland. In the beginning, I took these trips with girlfriends, but soon my girls started marrying boys, and then they started making new little
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What I Was Doing While You Were Bree Breeding ding
after a divorce for a trip or two, but then leave me again when they got married for the second time before I’d managed to do it for the first. (When ( When I complained to my friend fr iend Hope that she had lapped me in the marriage department, she replied, “I’m not sure the goal is to do it as often as possible.” I love her.) Anyway, everyone around me was engaged in a lot of engaging,, marrying, engaging marr ying, and breeding while I remained resolutely terrified of doing any of it. I did want to have a family someday . . . . it was just that “someday” never seemed to feel like “today.” I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul. That wrestling match threatened to body-slam body- slam me into a veritable Bridget-JonesianBridgetJonesian-sadsad-girl girl singlehood, which I was resolutely against, both personally and as an archetype. And so to ward that off, I kept moving. Pretty early on in my travel career I discovered two vital things. First, that I’m someone a little different on the road, and that vacation from being my home self feels like a great sleep after a long day. Second, that you can have both love and freedom freedom when you fall in love with an exotic exo tic local in i n an exotic loca locale, le, since there is a return ticke t ickett next to the bed be d that you by law will even eventual tually ly have have to use. These sweet, sexy, epic little vacationships became part of my identity—I identity—I was The Girl with the Great International Romance Stories at dinner parties, and around the writers’ room table. And I began to need my trips like other people
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to sexy people in sexy places really rea lly grew out of a nonsexual obsession: I love to do the thing t hing you’re you’re supposed to do in the t he place you’re supposed to do it. That means always getting getting the specialty of the house. That means smoking cigarettes I don’t smoke at the perfect corner café for hours at a time in Paris, and stripping naked for group hot-tubbing hot- tubbing with people you don’ don’t want to see naked na ked in Big Sur Su r. It means ridrid ing short, fuzzy horses that will throw me onto the arctic tundra in i n Iceland, or getting getti ng beaten with hot, wet wet branches by old naked women in stifling banyas in in Moscow. When these moments happen, I get absurdly happy, like the kind of happy happy other people report experiencing during the birth bir th of their children. And getting romanced by a Brazilian in Brazil, or a Cretan in Crete . . . this, to me, just happens to be the gold medal in the Do the Thing You’re Supposed to Do Olympics. I love that I am but one of millions of single girls hitting the road by themselves these days. A hateful little exboyfriend once said that a house full of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but now it’s a house full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures. He said it derogatorily: Look at all of this tragic overcompensating in the form of of tribal masks and ra rain in sticks. But I say that plane tick-
ets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women’s progress as a gender. I’m damn proud of us. Also, since I have both a cat and a lot of foreign souvenirs, I broke up with that dude and went on a really great
