Welcome, Avalanche of New Subscribers!

On the price of writing and becoming a summer dad

Hello.

Yesterday as we were driving with two very small toddlers down the famously upsetting-for-toddlers I-95, I got a text from my Substack friend Joanna Goddard who is saved in my phone after meeting her briefly at a party as “Cup Of Jo.”

In the description it says “ask about red orange lipstick shade.”

[Also briefly - because my parents read this it is crucial to note - I was not driving. Our stoic chauffeur (father of my children who I am married to like Lady Sybil?) was. My jobs were “Constant granola bar allocator,” and “Granola bar dispute settler,” and when the screaming became vehicularly dangerous, “Raffi DJ.”]

Cup of Jo’s text pleasantly and professionally proposed that she would like to syndicate a post from The Grudge Report and run it on her EXTREMELY popular newsletter Big Salad, which I am told has 2.8 billion subscribers, and a significant portion of whom do the unthinkable: Pay for her writing.

I understanding vaguely what “I would like to syndicate your post” meant in the sense that I know Seinfeld ran in syndication for years after it originally aired and that is why Jerry Seinfeld currently has an oceanfront house bigger than The Louvre. Here is how I responded:

(Once again, Joanna’s text was professional, and written in paragraph form with correct punctuation.)

ME: OMG!! AMAZING! THANK YOU! What a wild honor!

The piece went up almost immediately,

As my kind and stoic husband drove our Dramamine’d and yelling family down New England’s most complained-on highway, I watched the subscriber count skyrocket like a stock graph (?) in a movie about stocks.

At this point it is worth noting: I give almost all of this writing away for free. I do this because on Substack and in life I do not feel comfortable letting other people pay for things that I could potentially give them. What if there are typos! What if the comedy is too niche for the audience! What if the political take I have OFFENDS someone! What if it’s too obvious and middle of the road and cowardly! Why involve money! It’s UNSEEMLY.

When a good friend told me she was going to buy my book when it first came out, I reacted with shock and frustration. “No!” I gasped on a walk around our neighborhood. “Please don’t! I’ll give you one! I have boxes in the house!”

“Bess, I preordered it moths ago.”

You really shouldn’t have done that.

“Just say ‘Thank you.’”

Ok. But take a copy from the house and give it to your mom.

Since then, thinking of her, I have gritted my teeth and said “Thank you,” to anyone who has told me, as I wince, that they bought my book.

When I started this Substack, my chauffeur/husband actually put a post-it on this laptop that said “PAYWALL” and the therapist that I have seen regularly after a horrific birth has repeatedly told me: “You should charge people.”

These people are unlike me in that they are men and they are sane.

Also, in a bit that went completely over his head, I eventually returned the post-it note to my husband and wrote on the back: “I’m Sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me.”

But here we are, with tens of thousands of subscribers and tiny fraction of them subscribe for the $5 a month upgrade price. So I will now answer the question my grandma Bobby, the first great love of my life, asked me all the time. It’s the question that convinced me to apply to and eventually write for Jimmy Kimmel Live for eight years. It’s the question that helped me hand in the copy edits to my book when my child was 10 weeks old.

“What would a man do?”

“Grandma, that is reductive and gendered and flattening and unfair,” I would protest often.

“Ok, honey,” she pushed, “But what would he do?”

It’s a useful, if fundamentally flawed to the point of cancellation, exercise.

Earlier this summer I texted my best friend that I was, “living like a dad,” while out in Rhode Island visiting family on vacation for a few weeks. She knew exactly what I meant. It meant I would take a walk by myself (!) and let one of the various other family members make the dinner noodles. It meant I would say things like “I’m going to exercise,” or “I have a work call,” and not ask if it’s okay to do that.

It meant I would — I shit you not — take a book to the beach with my children. And read it while everyone else looked after them. I actually took a picture of this because I knew nobody would believe me:

“Oh,” my very funny friend Jess told me a few days later while I bragged about this new vacation philosophy as we watched our toddlers form a new system of government in the sand over a single green plastic shovel, “You’re saying you’re a deadbeat mom.”

Sure. But the great thing about all of this was it was absolutely fine and there were no consequences except the realization that I was unnecessarily doing too much at the expense of my own sanity and health.

I share all of this to say, now that you’re here, after reading through my posts or even after just reading this post and taking Jo’s word for it, I’m going to directly ask for what I want and hope the earth does not implode:

It sustains this whole enterprise and makes me the happiest dad on the block. And every time I get one of those “new paid subscriber” emails, I say what my friend told me to say all those years ago when she bought my book:

Thank you.

Also, Jo - what was that orange-red lipstick shade you wore to that dinner? It was the exact hybrid of Julie Delpy/Jenna Lyons that I know would change my life and finally make me the type of lady people see and say “Wow. I bet she’s lived abroad.”