The Rent is Too Damn High

Being a writer means living in New York....or does it?

Memoirs by writers are my catnip. They are my window into versions of my own life; chances to sympathize with people experiencing familiar problems (the publisher hated my title, and now I hate the one they picked! The cover for my new book is terrible, but the Barnes & Noble buyer loves it, and my publisher won’t budge!) 

I nod when I read stories about the pleasures and perils of bringing babies on book tour. I shake my head when they’re remembering questions -- from women journalists, no less -- about why you’re on book tour and your baby’s back at home, and who is WITH your baby, and don’t you feel AWFUL that it isn’t YOU? (Someone actually asked me that, and I thought, Well, lady, I didn’t feel awful until right this minute!)

These books fascinate me. They captivate me. And, sometimes, they turn me into an unpaid employee of the Philadelphia Tourism Board. Because, after the recent clutch of writerly memoirs and essays I’ve read, I am convinced that the biggest trick the devil ever pulled was telling writers that they needed to live in New York City. 

God knows, I grew up believing it. I blame Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. Or maybe it’s Dorothy Parker’s fault. I could go back generations, to James Baldwin, or Susan Sontag and Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote in the Chelsea Hotel, and all the writers before them who famously made New York City their home. 

But I especially blame Tama Janowitz. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, Janowitz was the only female member of the so-called literary Brat Pack. I was in high school and college when this glamorous crew, all about 10 or 15 years my senior, was tearing it up in New York. Their book parties were legendary. Their exploits and romances were chronicled by the tabloids. They were glamorous and famous! They hung out with Andy Warhol and at Limelight! Tama Janowitz appeared in a DiSarono ad, and was a regular guest on the David Letterman show! 

If you were an impressionable young person who dreamed of being a writer in the 1980s, the message was clear: real writers lived in New York City. There was no other way to do it. No cities but New York City. No day but today. 

And that myth was persistent. If you made a list of writers today who live in Manhattan and Brooklyn, it would be a long list. Which means, I suppose, that, somewhere, there are teenagers reading books by Gary Shteyngart and Jonathan Letham and Jennifer Egan and thinking, Someday, that will be me.

But there are also other books, telling different stories. Books by women who are also mothers, struggling to keep body and soul together in New York.

Sometimes, these books are nominally about some other topic: a marriage falling apart, or being opened up; the difficulties of raising children, the flawed, failing US healthcare system – but, in the end, they’re all, at least in part, stories about money, and a lack of money; about the horrors of late-stage capitalism and the tragedy of how little our culture appreciates and, thus, pays, artists. Specifically, they reveal how impossible it’s become for a writer – even a relatively well-known, relatively successful one -- to keep her head above water in New York.

After she and her husband and their two sons got booted from their apartment, Emily Gould kept a diary about her desperate apartment-hunting, in New York magazine. Gould and her husband, Keith Gessen, had 60 days to find something nearby, affordable, and comparable to the two-bedroom, two-bathroom place they were leaving; a task that seemed impossible from the outset, and somehow got even harder as it progressed. 

Emily Gould is a well-known novelist and essayist writer who writes frequently for New York. Keith Gould is a novelist and one of the founders of n+1. He writes for The New Yorker, and teaches at Columbia. In terms of talent and fame, these are two people who should be toward the tippy-top of the writerly pyramid.

And yet.

Gould chronicles her visits to the various contenders.  There’s a place that’s listed for $4900 a month (plus first and last month’s rent, security fee, and a 15 percent broker’s fee), and features “rickety wooden stairs leading down to the shared backyard” or that some kitchen appliances are “obscured by a pile of planks.”

There’s a place “that was so small you couldn’t actually open the refrigerator door all the way, nor could you fit a dresser in the master bedroom, nor was the dishwasher full size.” That one cost $5200 a month.

Finally, a reader tips her off to a place that checks most of the family’s boxes, with “amazing light” and “commanding views of the neighborhood. The kitchen was separated out by a counter with cupboards to the ceiling,” Gould writes, and there was even “a window-topped nook in one of the bedrooms perfect for a home office,” plus space for “bikes and strollers and all the rest of our assorted dross.” (When Gessen points out that it’s “kind of far” from the boys’ school, Gould hangs up on him). With four days to spare, the landlady agrees to accept $4500 a month for this unicorn. Crisis averted! 

Gould is a very funny, observant writer. Reading her work is always a delight. But reading these stories was also like watching a horror movie, when the Final Girl descends into the basement, where you know that the serial killer is waiting. Don’t do it! you want to shout, knowing that your shouting will do no good. It was zero percent surprising to learn that the hunt took a toll on Gould’s mental health and, eventually, her marriage. 

Nor are the Gould/Gessens alone. Ladyparts, the most recent memoir by Deborah Copaken, author of Shutterbabe, details the author’s myriad health issues, the intractably awful US healthcare system, and her struggle to find consistent, decently-paying work as a writer, after her divorce leaves her as the sole supporter of her three children. Like Gould, Copaken had to find a new apartment in a hurry after her landlord raises the rent, with an eye toward selling the place to some millionaire. Like Gould, she ended up scrambling, desperately searching for something big enough that she can afford. Like Gould, she eventually lucks into her current digs through happenstance. 

Like Gould, the place she eventually finds is…imperfect. “I will love my new home, let’s be clear, and I remain grateful to it today for its sudden appearance – literally – out of nowhere, but while living in it I will also be inundated with roaches (and I mean thousands of roaches, not just a few); sickened by mold; and frozen on multiple subzero days by a lack of heat and hot water. My bathtub will emit noxious, brown, poop-smelling sludge that shoots straight up from its drain. The drinking water will constantly turn brown or stop running altogether. Rain will leak through loosely installed windows, transforming two of my windowsills into moldy, paint-flaked pulp that, no matter how many times I inform the management with photos…will not only never be fixed, they continue to worsen.”

Read these stories and one thing is clear: not even being talented, well-known, well-connected, hard-working, hustling, not even having published books and become some degree of famous, is enough to guarantee an NYC writer a decent place to live.

It’s easy to understand how both women, and many more like them, ended up in their predicaments. You go to New York because that is where writers live. You get a job. You fall in love. Your life unfolds, and your history’s all there, along with your entire community. Maybe, because writing alone does not pay the bills, you get a day job, where you are expected to, you know, show up every day. And then you have kids, and their entire history and community is there, along with their school. You can’t leave! And even if you could leave, you don’t want New Jersey, and you don’t want the ‘burbs. 

I understand the importance of community and consistency, especially as it relates to kids in the wake of a divorce. Still, I think it would take me precisely one of those things Copaken describes happening exactly one time before I’d be high-tailing it to safer, cleaner, more affordable accommodations, whether or not they were in my preferred corner of Brooklyn or Manhattan. Especially now that I am no longer a starry-eyed teenager with a Village Voice subscription and a dream, and I know that it’s rare for a writer to support herself with words alone. When you read about literary writers living in New York, I know now that, frequently, there’s more to the story – family money, a spouse with health insurance, a teaching job or a magazine contract. Something other than writing that makes a writing life possible.

It’s hard to keep your head above water in New York. 

But then there’s my hometown.

Even though I grew up believing that real writers lived in New York City, I spent exactly one summer of my life there, in between my junior and senior years of college. I lived in the Barnard dorms, and worked as a research assistant at Hunter College, taking the subway, walking everywhere else, using my student ID to visit museums and buy cheap Broadway tickets. I liked it, but it felt crowded, and overwhelmingly fast-paced, and very, very expensive. 

And so I followed a path that, I am sorry to say, is not as readily available to aspiring writers as it was to me, back then. I became a journalist, so I could write every day and get paid to do it, and wrote fiction in my spare time. I worked at a small newspaper in central Pennsylvania, then a medium-sized newspaper in Lexington, Kentucky, then the Philadelphia Inquirer. I was also freelancing for places like Mademoiselle and Lucky, and other magazines that don’t exist, for Salon, which still does. I pitched editors by snail mail, and over the phone, and I used email, as soon as email was invented. 

I was having an actual writing life, right here in Philadelphia. I wrote fiction and nonfiction and, eventually, a novel, and I found my agent, and signed a two-book deal, all without ever leaving the 215.

Then I got married, bought a house, had a baby, then another baby, and I was as locked in to my city as other writers are in New York, and I never looked back, or considered moving anywhere else. 

I can’t give myself too much credit for it. Was there a version of my life where I might have moved to New York City eventually? Maybe. So much of what happens to everyone, but especially writers, is the result not just of hard work, but also timing and good fortune. The Random, in other words.

I know how lucky I’ve been. I got a version of the big-city life that every writer dreams of, with culture and community and connection and car-free, walk-everywhere living in a lovely, historic neighborhood with great restaurants and culture, beautiful streets and public parks and plenty of artists and writers and colleges and universities. 

I just got it somewhere that was not New York.

These days, when I read about writers struggling to find safe, clean, big-enough places for four or five thousand dollars a month, all I can think is, come to Philadelphia. For three thousand bucks a month, you can live like a king in Philadelphia! You can rent an entire rowhouse, or a lovely, spacious, three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment, and have money left over. You can live in a great school district, right near museums and parks, and maybe you’re not riding the subway with New Yorker editors, or going to cocktail parties with literary agents…but those aren’t the only ways to connect with editors and agents and publishing professionals.

Photo by Master Wen on Unsplash

Maybe, in our post-COVID world, some of the New York City-based magazines and publishing houses that required their workers to show up in person five days a week have gotten more flexible. And maybe, today’s teenagers dreaming of being writers will have, in addition to the roster of all of their favorites, stories like Emily Gould’s and Deborah Copaken’s in their minds. Or maybe they’ve read Tama Janowitz’s 2016 memoir (bleak, funny, highly recommended) and discovered that even the ultimate New York City writer isn’t living there any more.

AM READING: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new memoir, SOMETHING BORROWED, in advance of our conversation together here in Philadelphia on October 10!

AM WATCHING: “Nobody Wants This,” which, at this point, is devolving into a hate-watch. I love the main couple – Kristen Bell is adorable in everything – but wow, the Jewish women are awful! Pushy and controlling and mean and just awful!

AM TRYING: To run a 5K a little faster. It’s interesting: you go to 5K’s and people assume that you are there because you’re training for some longer distance. Well, joke’s on you, Random People at Race, because I have no desire at all to do a half marathon or an entire marathon, or any portion of a marathon at all! I just want to see if I can get my time under 33 minutes. So I found an eight-week “run a 5K in 30 minutes” training plan, which I am adapting for my humbler goal. Stay tuned! 

AM EAGERLY AWAITING: Charles Bock’s memoir, which is called I Will Do Better: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting and Love. Bock, of course, was an early-aughts literary It boy, subject of a Sunday New York Times magazine cover profile, plus the then-obligatory two reviews, the author of Beautiful Children and Alice and Oliver. More importantly, he’s the ex-husband of Leslie Jamison – the one who’s identified ‘C’ in Splinters, where he does not come off well. (I don’t know either of these people IRL, but I’ve read their books and the articles about them and I am super invested. This stuff is my soap opera and Hallmark movie, all rolled into one). Alas! Per the Kirkus review, “Bock doesn’t mention his relationship with Jamison, who documented their brief, stormy marriage in her recent memoir. Given the tone of that book, this seems like an admirable choice.” Sure…if by ‘admirable,’ you mean ‘annoying.’ Give the people what they want!

AM PREPARING: To get new author photos taken: aka, my least favorite part of the job. That’s in a few weeks. I’ll report back. And I haven’t forgotten about the book club idea! Lots of you are interested!

Wishing a happy, a healthy, and a peaceful New Year to my fellow members of the tribe. May this year bring you every good thing your heart desires, and may the world see peace.