the tyranny of forever striving

on Andrew McCarthy, book promotion and middle-aged ambition

“Just be prepared, you’re not going to list,” a plugged-in publishing friend tells me, referring to the New York Times bestseller list. “The summer is packed with nonfiction books, a lot of celebrity memoirs. You’re going to have to fight for every bit of attention and press.”

“You OK?” a well-intentioned family member texts after a somewhat mixed review of my book comes out. “I was mad on your behalf,” explains another. “How do you feel about it?” enquires a third, in a tone that suggests maybe I should feel bad.

“Have they given you numbers yet? How’s the book selling?” asks the partner of a friend just days after I’ve published, unintentionally feeding me panic as if with a spoon. “I hear the first week for books is crucial — after that you’re screwed.”

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I’m sitting in a hotel lobby on the 24th day of the book tour for Ambition Monster while a Kendall-Roy type paces back and forth in front of me, speaking loudly and un-self-consciously into his airpods, visibly agitated, on the phone. I’ve crossed the country four times in the last three weeks, sat and worked in multiple faux-cozy spaces like this. The tour is mainly over, but I’m not home yet. Instead, I’ve extended the trip, added a leg with my 14 year-old, trying to be present and fun for a person I haven’t seen much of in the past two months, trying to be a good mom even when I want is to close the hotel blackout curtains, crank the AC and find my center again in a deep, restful sleep.

A book tour is outward celebration, even joy, but there’s also — whether yours or on your behalf — a twitchy, ambition-addled undercurrent, a high-frequency quest for signs that this thing you made is, to the outside world, an unambiguous success. Like the amped-up dude in front of me, my own brain has been pacing for weeks — on one side, I’m fine, I’m me, contented with what I’ve already achieved. On the other, I’m bombarded with thoughts that it’s not enough, I haven’t done enough, that it should be more. That in my success — as the world seems to be telling me — I’ve somehow failed.

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It was in this state of mind that I encountered Andrew McCarthy’s broody, self-directed, art-therapy project Brats. Brats is a documentary about the Brat Pack and the spate of 80s teen/young adult movies they starred in, movies you once loved and maybe felt horny for like St. Elmo’s Fire and the Breakfast Club. But it’s more about how Andrew McCarthy, a man with the face of a soft handshake, feels about the word “brat” and, even more, how he feels about a career he believes he was entitled to and did not get.

The main issue seems to be that, all these many decades later, our milky friend is still miffed about journalist David Blum’s 1985 New York Magazine story which coined the phrase “brat pack” and depicted McCarthy and his crew in a (slightly) less-than-flattering light. McCarthy believes being characterized in this way — as privileged “brats”— had a negative, stunting effect on his and his cohort’s entertainment industry prospects, that it shut them down at what should’ve been an ongoing apex of their careers.

He lays out this argument while sitting in fellow packer Demi Moore’s sprawling lanai, a space so over-the top luxe I at first thought they were in a resort. He bemoans it while interrogating world’s chillest near-senior-citizen Rob Lowe at dude’s ocean-front Malibu compound and even more while pressing Emilio Estevez in the Mighty Ducks star’s private ranch/bespoke wood/rich man lodge. McCarthy even tracks down Blum himself, cross examining/whining/pleading with the writer to admit he had ill intentions when he wrote the article all those years back, that in doing his job, he’d somehow done these successful actors wrong.

I don’t want to shit all over Andrew McCarthy, but come the fuck on.

Sir, you’re a 60+ man with the swagger of a bandaid and yet LOOK AT YOUR LIFE. It’s by all accounts better than most all lives! You once got to be a Hollywood leading man! Next to zero percent of men in an entire generation get that! You’re ruminating over what you didn’t achieve, instead of appreciating all you did! You’re comparing and despairing, blaming others for your (still quite good) lot, turning success into failure, perpetually striving for more. It’s exhausting, it’s unsatisfying, it never ends. We’re all too old for this shit.

As much as I felt annoyed by Brats, I was grateful for it too. McCarthy’s whinefest landed at the perfect time to serve as a cautionary tale; to mirror back exactly how I hope to never be about whatever it is I’m lucky enough to achieve.

After watching it, I spent the last days of book tour mostly off social media, off my laptop, away from other peoples’s perceptions about my success, recalibrating and remembering my own. Instead of taking to my bed, I simply slowed down; strolled with my kid through Manhattan, ate dessert for dinner, talked and laughed about South Park for hours, watched the sun set fully over the west side.

Back home in Los Angeles a few days later, close friends I hadn’t seen in weeks invited us for dinner on their patio. In their backyard is an ancient cactus with a single flower that only blooms once a year. When we arrived, my friend told me she thought this would be the night. We sat around and caught up, drank wine and ate cheese. When our friends asked about my book, I didn’t discuss lists or reviews. Instead, I told them about the events for Ambition Monster, how genuinely happy I’d been, how delighted to meet new people and catch up with old friends. How in every room I was in, I’d felt profoundly loved. How the whole thing felt like a success.

My friend put her arm around me, kissed my head, hugged my shoulder tight. “I’m so proud of you,” she said and I felt that too. Sometimes, when we stop longing for what we didn’t get, we see what we have more clearly. Sometimes when you stop seeking, you can be found.

Before we left, just as the sun was setting, the cactus flower fully bloomed.

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Hello, I am back! I will be here at least once a week! Thanks for sticking by during the break. And thanks to everyone who came out to Ambition Monster events. I loved meeting you all. ICYMI, here’s what else I’ve been up to:

• I got to write a thing for the New York Times about the connection between trauma and workaholism which made me feel fancy and smart.

• I did an interview about toxic ambition with MarketWatch — the reporter asked good questions, which always helps these things turn out well.

• I answered

  Sari Botton
  ’s Memoir Land questionnaire and got dorky about writing process.

• Christy Harrison, MPH, RD
  had me on for “Taming Your Ambition Monster, Healing from Overwork, and the Role of "Practical Woo" with Jennifer Romolini”

• I had the pleasure of speaking with one of my favorite people

  Emma Gannon
  for her new podcast, Creative Coffee.