Not Safe For Work: Author of the viral essay 'My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I am a writer'

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The rare kind of read that made me giggle just as much as it left me gutted." - Zakiya Dalila Harris

Our heroine, a young Jewish Los Angeles native who has just taken an assistant job at a TV studio, is no naïf.He didn’t suggest that I give up writing. He purported to support my ambitions, and I tried to come up with justifications for keeping a private journal. I didn’t counter that maybe he should choose his words as if I’d remember them. I was complimented for having “good energy”, and my “niches” were identified as “women” and “books”. I regularly listened to horrifying conversations on mute. (In Hollywood, assistants listen in on all of their boss’s phone calls.) I was privy for the first time to private conversations among men. I heard sexist and racist comments and fumed silently, exchanging outraged instant messages with other assistants. We were all frustrated, mad, appalled. But so what? Who cared? To whom could we complain? To what end?

Nor is she innocent to the power dynamics of the industry, securing her position through nepotism like many of those before her. Isabel Kaplan’s novel about the “toxic underbelly” of the Hollywood TV system has gone to Penguin Michael Joseph (PMJ). I struggled to understand what he found so threatening about women expressing their feelings. He used to like that I was a writer. He edited the column I wrote for our college newspaper; he came to a reading for my young adult novel when we were sophomores. I remember being 23, anxiously navigating halls where executives didn’t look me in the eye, holding the muted phone to my ear, thinking: if I have the opportunity to speak, I hope I make the most of it. I’m trying my best.Prior to this summer, though I had read quite a bit of her writing, I had never seen a Nora Ephron movie. No, that’s not quite right. I saw Julie & Julia in theaters. I know: what kind of person knows the essay panning the egg white omelet but not how Harry met Sally? I wandered Central Park while listening to Nora narrate I Remember Nothing. I watched When Harry Met Sally, then Sleepless in Seattle, then You’ve Got Mail. I watched her son Jacob Bernstein’s documentary, Everything is Copy. I reread Heartburn. I read Richard Cohen’s memoir of his friendship with Nora, She Made Me Laugh. I gaped at the chapter in which Cohen wrote that he personally would have preferred for Nora to keep the whole sordid business of Carl Bernstein’s affair a secret. I read the critic Leon Wieseltier’s Heartburn review , published in Vanity Fair under the pen name Tristan Vox, in which he accused her of child abuse. This month, when my book was published in the US, he sent me a congratulatory message, saying how thrilled he was for my success. He has definitely not read the book; I don’t know if he has read the description. If he has, he must not have thought my critique of the patriarchy in Hollywood might include him. She has an idea of what she wants her life to be but she is just starting to learn that maybe none of that will make her happy. In addition to her work life we see her romantic life and in particular her regular interactions with her mother, who is paying for a lot of the things our narrator can't afford on her small salary, and who constantly demands her time and attention. Her mother in particular is a fascinating character, and a type we have seen often in the last decade, a woman who knows and understands the structures that men use to assault women, who knows how difficult it is to bring charges up at work or to the police, and a woman who will say "Oh Robert didn't do that," when the man involved is a friend. A Harvard graduate, she’s smart enough to know what is expected of women like her in this world: it’s not enough to be good at your job, you need to also be appealing and attractive, and willing to play the game, whatever that may be. I know how it sounds to suggest my boyfriend dumped me because he’s scared I’ll become like Nora Ephron. You’re thinking: that’s what you’re going with? Or maybe: what’s her name?