Fiction is better, the nanny edition

Let's say that you're a nanny for a rich family, and an actual nanny - not one on a slightly-too-chipper Netflix show. You're a creative type, but creativity has never once succeeded in paying an actual bill. Because jobs as one of Gwyneth's kids' white-collar-compensated tutor/nanny/yachting-instructor are scarce, you end up in a position of the very sort people totally end up in after a masters program, and that would really be worth remembering exist when people are all, how can it be that so many more women are getting grad degrees these days, yet the wage gap persists? You try your best, kind of, but the family you're working for is unfair, kind of. The hours are erratic, but you've shown up late a couple times. Maybe you're thinking, this would make a great personal essay! It would make great fiction. The essay format - the default these days, it seems, even for fiction writers like Laurel Lathrop, author of the essay in question (which, for the record, I enjoyed) - seems not to lend itself to the most helpful readings of situations along these lines. Which is to say, ambiguous ones, where the narrator doesn't come across as infallible.

The sentiment of feeling overqualified for a job isn't necessarily matched by a reality of overqualification. And it's possible to be exploited by a job and to be somewhat entitled and inept as an employee. These are all widely if not universally-shared life experiences. It wouldn't be especially hard for most anyone who's, say, been 22 to identify with that sort of sentiment, without necessarily endorsing it. Fiction allows for that ambiguity - for characters you can sympathize with, without applauding their life choices. Fiction permits readers other than tsk-tsking at mistakes that I-for-one would never make, or, conversely, earnest advice intended to help the author not repeat the same mistakes. It allows the reader to relate to someone who maybe got herself into that mess and maybe knows it and maybe hasn't emerged having Learned Her Lesson.

But the personal-essay format puts the reader in the position of someone who knows better and is almost ethically obliged to intervene. It demands this of the reader. (If that's the same Caryatis in those comments, hi!) A short story about this situation would lead to a totally different set of readings. Ones that, granted, wouldn't leave the author with specific, individually-tailored life advice, but possibly more useful ones all the same.

A smattering of the usual

-Parental overshare at its most face-value creepy: Your child's having an age-appropriate tantrum? Publish a photo of your kid in tears, with a caption that implies your own kid is a brat. (And if so, whose fault would that be?)

-Tim Kreider on writing and illustrating for "exposure." It's not that I don't share the complaint - as a naive recent college grad, I wrote this Gothamist post, irony of ironies, for $0 - but it isn't really all that mysterious why someone would think to ask for free writing, but not free dental services. As comes up in the NYT comments, the fault may lie not with trust funds, but day jobs. As in, freelance writing, at least, is something you can do in your spare time, without special training or equipment, and that, unlike, say, accounting, you might enjoy doing regardless of what it pays. It's no coincidence that not one but two (if not more!) freelance writers without another source of income matter-of-factly describe themselves as unemployed. It's work, and it can pay something, but that something may be best thought of as supplemental. But it's not like an unpaid internship, where you're presumably going into some office during hours you might otherwise be at a job that pays, and doing tasks you yourself wouldn't have chosen. The more pressing issue might be that many of the positions that used to be day jobs for writers are now unpaid internships.

-According to Jezebel, Lena Dunham has written something "tinged with privilege." I can't possibly be the only one who's come to the conclusion that coming-across-as-privilege is Dunham's... not gimmick, exactly, but what? Niche? Career-defining motif? Whatever we're calling it, if I were Dunham, I'd keep it up.

Gute times UPDATED

The moment to read Robert Coleman's account of Berlin debauchery is probably not on one's way out the door to make an early commuter train. The essay makes (kind of beats you over the head with) the following argument: an artsy, bohemian environment can, alas, make it harder to create art. Because you're too busy having fun. And so much fun! Hanging out with other "artists," the beautiful and glamorous (or so I, on my way to NJ Transit, assume), all Weimar nostalgia and Uslu Airlines nail polish. All Rufus Wainwright's husband. All "Walk on Water," complete with the Lior Ashkenazi, but maybe minus the aging Nazi war criminal. Parties so much cooler than anything you may have gone to in Brooklyn as a recent college grad, and I lived in Prospect Heights before it was Park Slope.

An argument as old as time, as a little blurb affixed to the print essay, about Paris back in the day, attests. Better to have a day job. (UPDATE.) This is also, I suppose, the Dissertator's Paradox - on fellowship years, one expects to get so much more done than on teaching years, yet without that structure... more still gets done, but not as much more as one imagines.

But it's certainly true - productivity and interesting 4am conversations are not as compatible as we might want them to be, or as fiction about various milieus would have it, or as was maybe once the case in a less competitive age. Academia, for instance, has a lot of people who'd no doubt be fascinating to converse with at 4am, but they're exhausted from all the work they've been doing, or are in fact still working. Often the people with the most interesting things to say are unavailable for chit-chat.

But the new here - or perhaps not new, just now there's a word for it - is humblebrag. I mean, it must be so awful to have so much fun. Life as a constant party, but with engaging friends and no responsibilities. And more to the point, this is how the piece ends:

But the trip wasn’t a total loss. I learned how to roll a joint properly, cut hair, drink whiskey straight without gagging. And of course, I came back with the start of a novel: 13,000 unpublishable words about an Australian musician who went to Berlin, took too many drugs, had a psychotic episode and ended up in a German mental hospital. That last part is fiction, thankfully — what I imagine might have happened if I hadn’t managed to escape my artistic paradise.

It ends, in other words, with a little 'by the way, while having all this fun, I not only emerged unscathed but also wrote a novel, part of which has been excerpted in the NYT Magazine, i.e. what you just read.'