nathan’s Reviews > Famesick > Status Update

Somehow, no matter how hard life had gotten, making the show itself had always had a lightness, a joy. Now it was like a nightmare vacation, the kind that starts with food poisoning and ends with someone in jail framed for drug trafficking.

But the thing about standing for something? It’s very tempting, because it makes you feel important. And, as someone who has quit highly addictive drugs, I can tell you: Feeling important is even harder to kick.

I may not have been a person who met Oprah, but I was a person who almost met Oprah, and that was good enough for me.

Getting sick is no different than getting more famous. A maddening circularity, it’s very hard to explain, even to the people closest to you. When you’re sick, one medication causes side effects that must be treated by another, more drastic drug. If you’ve publicly fucked up before, you have to be careful all the time not to reignite a dormant story, to have past mistakes create future discomfort.

I sounded delusional and petulant, like someone who wanted to be able to have every version of my life happening in tandem, with no understanding of the immense privileges of the version I had. And that’s probably just what I was—after all, I was only twenty-seven.

But if I ever wanted a lesson in the way that a willful misperception can escalate and become a funhouse mirror for people’s sense of their own righteousness, for their unbridled rage, this was it. (I did not, by the way, really want the lesson.)

“There are no bad thoughts,” my father had always told me. “Only bad actions.” I extended his catchphrase to mean “There are no bad stories.” As Nora said: Everything is copy. If you had lived it, I thought, surely you could tell it. I believed in that desperately.

“Hey! How are you?” asked my old pal, auteur Noah Baumbach.
“Well, my cousin died,” I said cheerfully. “I actually have to leave after my award is announced. It’s very sad, but at the same time, he once brought a gun to Thanksgiving. These things happen.”

..but this was the first time it occurred to me that some people never come back. Sometimes, they run out of time.

The problem wasn’t just that I was burned-out. I was burned-out and too afraid to say it, as if admitting to the issue would be the confirmation everyone was waiting for that I wasn’t fit for the job. Looking back, I think the main person who had been waiting for that confirmation, fearing that reality, was me.