Welcome to "The Grudge Report"

Collectively scream with me.

My late grandma Bobby was spectacular at many things: Loving, worrying, finding the exact right shade of lipstick, over-doing it at lunch, and almost above all: Holding a grudge. I credit this to her steel-trap memory and her incredibly high standard of loyalty. Often the grudge was held against someone who deserved it: A man who cheated on her friend in the 1950s, Donald Trump BEFORE he was president (the enormous Mar-a-Lago flag was an eyesore on South Ocean Boulevard), and Jewish people who drive a Mercedes (“They may as well put a swastika on the bumper!”).

When she ran out of grudges to hold, she would hold them on my behalf. She never forgave a girl who was cruel to me at a Halloween party in the 4th grade. She could list my ex boyfriends and exactly why they should “fall off the face of the earth.” And she wrote off a woman in her Bridge group who said something vaguely homophobic about one of my dear friends. A grudge, in her case, was an act of protection and love and justice. And spite. Delicious, delicious spite.

The Grudge Report is a way of carrying on that legacy. My grandma used to say: “When the world is cracking behind you, put one foot in front of the other and go forward.” In this insane time in whatever the fuck is left of America, it feels like the world is very much cracking behind our feet at an alarming rate.  And my way of putting one foot in front of the other is through comedy and political tirades. So, welcome. Pour yourself a very large drink. And let us go forward together, grudgingly.

However you choose to read The Grudge Report, I am grateful to have a community of readers who feel connected in this insane morass of internet hell. Let this be a place where we can live. We can laugh. And we can shriek into the horrifying abyss together.

Here is what I will be writing, totally for free when you subscribe, which, to reiterate, is a free thing you can do:

The Weekly Grudge. This is where I will take a position from personal experience and weave it into am Op-Ed style piece about a bigger issue. This will range from very serious to very trivial, always through a - forgive me - comedic lens. An example is what I wrote in the New York Times about paid parental leave. 

Here are some upcoming Grudges:

• The Alt Right on Twitter (When you Find Yourself Doxxed Late one Night)

• No New Friends: Socializing With People I Do Not Know After 30

• Goodbye to Dumb Hats: On Leaving Los Angeles So My Children Don’t Become DJs

• Birthing and Pregnancy in the United States: How I Lost a Uterus, But Gained a Bill for $7,000

• Managing a Chronic Illness: As I Lay Dying to Hold Muzak

• “As a Woman in Comedy…” (Or how to leave a male-dominated writers room and make your own writers room)

I will also write a weekly Short Comedy Piece, in the vein of a Shouts and Murmurs. 

Upcoming ones include:

• I Moderate a Panel Discussion With All the Various Medications in my Stomach

• Things it Is Currently Permissible for a Woman to Do Under United States Law

• Quiz: Is It Covid Or Have You Been Watching Downton Abbey for 5 Straight Hours a Night

• What to Expect When You Are Sleep Training a Baby

• Incredible Nordic Zillow Houses and What My Life Would Be Like Living in Them

• My Toddler Reviews Meals I Have Made According to His Exact Specifications

THINGS I WILL NOT BE WRITING ABOUT IN MY SUBSTACK: Details about my relationship.

I married my husband because he is the most unwaveringly good and supportive person I have ever met and is the moral backbone of my life and his entire community’s but also because when we met he was driving a 20-year-old light blue Volvo station wagon. He is also so handsome that when we would go to Hollywood Agency Parties back when parties existed and the idea of being in a sweltering room breathing on pass-around appetizers with strangers was a normal thing to do, twice he was mistaken for an actor and it was assumed that I, the slovenly Jewess in an ill-fitting black dress by his side, was some kind of junior publicist’s assistant. Did I marry out of my league? No, because I am funnier. And as society tells us: There is nothing more sexually appealing than a funny woman. 

When I wrote this sentence I chuckled out loud to myself (I LAUGH AT ALL MY OWN JOKES IT IS VERY COOL) and my husband said “Oh no what did you write?” and I said “Something about you” and he smiled as generously as he could muster and said “Please don’t!” and so that is the last I’ll write about him. Until the next time I do it.

IDENTIFYING DETAILS ABOUT MY KIDS: It’s not their fault that their mom is a writer and so until they can decide to post their own pictures publicly, I do not like the idea of them being picked out of a crowd by a stranger. Especially because due to a series of tweets I wrote about the president in 2016, a lot of insane and potentially dangerous people follow me online and have written about me on message boards. One of my first newsletters will be about getting doxxed by the alt-right when my address was posted on Twitter and I had to go to a hotel for a night. It was a very bad experience BUT I did get a complimentary cookie at check-in. 

Here’s what to expect if you subscribe for $6.

ADVICE COLUMN

 I'm not a therapist, but I'm the child of a therapist, which makes me a therapist. There will be a few advice categories based on my areas of expertise. Everyone can read the column, but to limit the volume of submissions, only paying subscribers can do the asking!

• “Dear Anxious Person” How to navigate an extremely uncomfortable and complicated social situation.

• "Ask a COVID Freak" You can ask me, an immunocompromised mother of two young children under 5, about navigating group/social/travel situations in this weird post-pandemic-but-not-really time we're living in. 

• “Gift Horse” I will do regular gift guides for incredibly specific types of people.

• “Name My Child” I will end every month by naming readers' kids the way I've done here. If anybody asks me for actual advice about caring for babies or children my answer is just "I truly don't know - I'm BARELY doing this. Call your pediatrician." I can't raise your children for you, but I can stop you from naming them Brayleigh.

COMEDY VIDEOS

This is a comedy video series I did on Instagram that I will be continuing on Substack. I also did an imagined phone call with Sally Rooney and a faux influencer house tour of our bathtub.  If you like these, perhaps you will like more of these!

EXCERPTS FROM NEW BOOK I AM WORKING ON

I am writing a book loosely based on a murder in the suburban New York town where I grew up when a prominent lawyer killed his wife and got away with it. It’s told from the point of view of their nine-year-old neighbor and her 6-year-old little brother. Much like my first book, it is told in conversations, diary entries, and recorded transcripts from therapist sessions.

BONUS MATERIAL FROM “NOBODY WILL TELL YOU THIS BUT ME”

I kept writing the book after I finished writing the book. There were more imagined conversations with my grandmother about raising a child, surviving a pandemic, and moving back home to New York. If you would like to follow along with our extended literary relationship, subscribe away.

HOT GOSS

In which I share a very positive experience working with a celebrity. Mostly this will be my way to tell stories about people I have worked with from Fred Willard to Hillary Clinton to Kim Kardashian. This will also include the story of when George Clooney had to talk to my dad about medical jargon for a sketch I wrote for him. I won’t make these public because it feels vaguely illegal to even write them. But what is the internet for, if not dishing?

The paywall will be my way of protecting writing that is not ready for public consumption. It will get very personal and just a lawyer’s breath away from breaking NDAs. Fun for all!

Thank you. Welcome. Away we go.