I Don't Care About Your Band (29 page)

 

I WROTE
this book to make the people who read it feel good. I didn’t write it to make anyone feel bad. I don’t want to be mean, and I’ve never been a bully; I was always the one bullies picked on. And the picked-on are the ones who are able to be funniest when we
are
mean for that very reason: We’ve had plenty of time to think of the best insults, being smart and misanthropic and isolated all. So it’s tempting.

And it was also tempting to wrap up this selective romantic autobiography with a pat story about how I have a boyfriend now.

Because as I write this, I’ve been involved with somebody for a little less than a year—and it’s
great
. He’s a grown-up, he’s smart, he’s kind—he’s fantastic. And I could tell you more about it, in all of the terms of an idyllic destination, but when I was figuring out how to end this book, I had to think about what it was I wanted to accomplish in the first place.

If it wasn’t just notoriety and snark and serving the dish of revenge all hot over dudes’ laps, I figured that the only way I could write it was if I thought the people who would read it would somehow take some kind of solace in what I had to say. That they would relate to the sad stuff that’s funny if I did my job right, and marvel at the stories they’re grateful to experience only from the safe distance of a spectator.

And how on earth would my readers be able to take away a positive message from the proceedings, and feel good, if they—if you!—are single, and I’m not, and we’ve spent all this time together, only for me to end the book with something like, “Hey everybody, good news! Everything’s fine now:
I’m
in a relationship! The end!”

You’d hate me.
I’d
hate me! It would be dumb and false and cheap and easy, and also, it’s just not the point.

So, there it is.

This is not a book about me at all. And who am I to say whether we can’t be satisfied alone, or happy while we’re looking, or whether the destination out-ends the means, or that it was all worth it for the sake of meeting this guy. I wouldn’t tell you to do the same things I did, and I can’t tell you whether they would yield the same result. So, for that reason, it doesn’t matter if I have a boyfriend or not.

Besides, he won’t let me write about him anyway.

 

 

 

I
want to start by thanking my valiant literary agent and occasional rabbi Scott Mendel, who appeared,
Brigadoon
-like, in the middle of a WGA strike to ride sidecar on my trek from writer to author. Thanks also to my fabulous, whip-smart, and golden-throated editor, Lauren Marino, and her wise, charming, and eternally patient assistant editor, Brianne Mulligan, for investing so much time and energy into a book with perhaps one more Oskar Schindler joke in it than you would have liked. Profuse thanks to everybody at Gotham Books, too, especially Bill Shinker, Lisa Johnson, Anne Kosmoski, Cara Bedick, Lisa Chun, Eileen Carey, and Ray Lundgren.

I want to thank the wise and supernaturally largehearted Holly Schlesinger, for guiding me through this project from its inception to its panic attack-laden completion, and for absolutely everything else in between, except for the time she told me that Tootsie Rolls had trans fat in them.

Thanks to real-life rock stars Rachel Dratch, Patton Oswalt, David Rakoff, Jill Soloway, and Sarah Thyre for wading through sloppy early drafts and inspiring me by example.

Thank you Michael Rizzo, Dave Jargowsky, and Cooper Johnson at RZO Management, and Jaime Wolf and Angelo DiStefano at Pelosi Wolf Effron & Spates, LLP.

Thanks to Daniel Jones of
The NewYork Times
for publishing my
Modern Love
column, and to all those who wrote me after its publication to tell me how much they connected with it.

Thanks to the singular and fabulous Liz Phair, for generously allowing me to reprint her lyrics, and Phoebe Gellman, for being so ridiculously helpful in the process, not to mention for sending me the fifteenth-anniversary reissue CD of
Exile in Guyville
.

I want to thank my friend Nate Harris for the kind of enduring platonic love previously only known to me from the motion picture
Beaches
. Thanks also to John Haven, David Ozanich, Jesse Murray, and Joe Reid of
That’s Important!
for being such important collaborators and fabulous friends.

Thanks to pals, mentors, colleagues, and occasional coconspirators Kent William Albin, Mike Albo, Tara Ariano, Scott Brown, Tyler Coates, Bart Coleman, Brendan Colthurst, Gabe Delahaye, Em and Lo, Renata Espinosa, Adam Felber, Susie Felber, Emily Gould, Anne Harris, Cynthia Heimel, Sarah Hepola, Ron Hogan, Sean Johnson and everyone at
Best Week Ever
, Diana Joseph, Colleen Kane, Erin Keating, Anthony King, Will Hines, and everybody at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, including the UCB Four: Amy, Ian, Besser, and Walsh, Michael Kupperman and Muire Dougherty, Molly Lambert, Sarah Larson, Jeremy Laverdure, Jodi Lennon, Todd Levin, Therese Mahler, Chris Manzanedo, Emily McCombs, Michael Musto, Pauline O’onnor, Stephanie Pasicov, Dan Powell, Aaron Rothman, Gary Rudoren, Mike Sacks, Tom Scharpling, and Terre T., Rachel Shukert and Ben Abramowitz, Madeleine Smithberg, Caissie St. Onge, Arian Sultan, Paul F. Tompkins, Bruce Tracy, Conrad Ventur, and Jason Woliner.

Special thanks to Eryn Oberlander for her encouragement and insights.

Most of all, I want to thank my family for believing in my talent and showing me unheard-of amounts of unconditional love with a consistency that rivals the sun’s rise and fall, and my boyfriend, Jack, who is absolutely the best man I have ever met in my life. He promised me from the moment I told him I was writing this book, three dates in, that everything would be okay. He was right.

Julie Klausner
is a comedy writer and performer who has appeared in many shows at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre, and on VH1’s
Best Week Ever
, where she is currently a staff writer. She has written for
Saturday Night Live
’s “TV Funhouse” and
The Big Gay Sketch Show
, and her prose has appeared in
The New York Times
,
New York
magazine, McSweeney’s, Salon, Videogum, and others. Her Web site, predictably, is
www.julieklausner.com
. She lives in New York City.