This Is Us
I’m Too Old to Write About My Life
I used to be known for personal writing. Now I can’t bear it.
I’ve recently had a revelation that should have been obvious but for some reason wasn’t; the older you get, the less charming it is to tell stories about yourself.
As someone who spent at least the first half of her career mining her life for interesting/funny/embarrassing/emblematic-of-larger-cultural-phenomena anecdotes that I could write up for magazines or whip out at dinner parties, this sparked a bit of a crisis. Who am I if can’t take my daily micro-dramas and recast them as zany antics for fun and profit? What happened to the girl who could turn a bad date into a 1,500-word women’s magazine article? Why am I no longer inclined to produce endless verbiage about the various rooms of my home? (I wrote an entire book about my obsession with houses.) Is it because I currently live in what is essentially a one-room apartment and have a Murphy bed?
Or is it because I’m old enough to know better?
(For the record, I could write about my Murphy bed if I wanted to. I happen to love it. Murphy beds—now typically called “wall beds,” which is much sleeker terminology—are well-designed space-saving devices that, at least in my case, still allow you to sleep on the…
