By emily

Grade: see below

Last night I went to see rich and famous author Amy Tan do an Inside the Actor’s Studio-style interview with Geling Yan, a Chinese author who is Black Diamond Cheddar to Amy’s Velveeta (or Cararra marble to Amy’s plaster, if you aren’t into cheese analogies). These are the things I thought about during this cultural event, besides being hungry and having to pee:

a) I am never, ever getting Botox, even if my jowls eventually dangle all the way down to my shoulders. Amy looks like one of The Witches from the movie, except scarier. Also she is no longer capable of expressing some of my favorite emotions, such as ‘angry’ and ‘confused.’ The ugliness of her scary mask face was trumped only by the ugliness of her shoes: an unholy cross between tevas and mallgirl wedges. Her questions were self-aggrandizing, stupid, and Oprah’s-book-clubby to the max.

b) Being a successful author (or even just a highly-regarded author) has some great perks. I wonder if authors ever feel sorry for all the publishing peons who spend their nine to fives making semicolons into commas and ensuring that royalty checks get sent out on time. Probably not. I doubt that I would.

c) If you want to be a writer and have a tendency to be crippled by jealousy and insecurity, working in The World of Publishing ( where the only thing that matters about a book is how many people will buy it) could potentially be a little bit disheartening. In fact, it might kill any chance you’d have had to be genuinely inspired by anything, ever.

d) As it turns out, successful writers really do sit in coffeeshops in the West Village all day, free to fret about the state of their skin and their love lives now that the question ‘Will Anyone Ever Know How Brilliant I Truly Am?’ has been answered, once and for all, with a resounding ‘Yes.’ As a Lifestyle Choice, being a successful writer is the biggest A+ of all time. There is no possible downside of this career option, except that maybe you will write something that makes people hate you. But I do that all the time for free anyway, so it doesn’t really count.

e) Keep in mind, though, that those coffeeshop habitués are one in a literal million. There are so many people out there who feel that being a writer – of fiction, of nonfiction, of advertorials about lipstick – is the one and only thing that they are meant to do. A scant handful will make it, but the rest, including some really talented ones, will fail and be miserable for the rest of their lives. And they’ll fail for stupid, unfair reasons, too, like not being able to afford an MFA from Iowa or not being egotistical enough to relentlessly self-promote or just plain being terrified of rejection. These people may spend the rest of their pitiful lives writing internet screeds while the Amy Tans of the world make enough $$ to buy every man, woman, and child in america a pair of platform tevas and a big jade doorknocker necklace. Needless to say, being a 'struggling' writer gets the biggest F- of all time.