How to live well on a $100,000 advance
After graduation, Darren failed to find employment in his chosen career (journalism), so he moved back to his parent's house. He had looked for a job in government, but then, unexpectedly, he sold an article to an opinions site. And he just kept doing that, selling articles occasionally, for a few hundred dollars. He didn't necessarily have an angle or a big idea: he just tried to think "What are people interested in?" And then he wrote some take on that.
All along he was working on a novel. He was going to be some literary genius. And he didn't have student loans, he didn't pay rent. He never quite needed to ask his parents for money, because of these $300 checks from these articles. And he would tell them, "I applied for a staff job, but I didn't get in." He hadn't thought he'd truly be competitive.
All of his efforts were on this novel he was writing. And after many years of stops and starts and near-misses, he finally managed to sell this novel to a well-respected press.
And during those two years before the book’s release, he started carrying himself better. He had a book coming out from a well-respected press! And after years of being too ashamed to seriously look for love, he went on the apps, and he met someone. Darren was thirty-two, and this woman was a bit older.1 She was a doctor, an attending physician, at a local academic medical center.
He lived, in contrast, in his childhood bedroom, which had a snowboarder painted on the wall for reasons he was hard-pressed to explain to this woman when she asked.
He said the previous owners of the house had done it for their son. And she said, "But that was twenty years ago."
Priti was the kind of person who, in twenty intervening years, would've wanted to repaint the wall. Like, she could understand if he'd picked the snowboarders, but they weren't even for him.
"You slept for twenty years in a room with murals someone else painted? And you never changed it. This is so not you. There is a snowboarder! This other guy is playing basketball. You have no idea how weird this room looks."
"I mean...fair," he said. "But is that a deal-breaker?"
"It should be."
Honestly, the moment she saw the snowboarder and didn't walk out on him, he had her. He was in love, yes, but he'd also never really dated before. He'd had sex with a small number of women, never had a serious relationship. And this was an objectively attractive, desirable woman.
He was upfront with her. "This book advance," he said. "I don't know if anything more will ever come. I don't know if I'll ever earn anything."
She didn't seem particularly fazed when his book came out to zero attention. He didn't even get the brush-off 'beautiful writing' reviews that everyone got. He felt a bit hurt. Nobody had even bothered to evaluate if he was good or not. He was just overlooked.
He sent another book to his agent, but the agent wasn't terribly enthused. People kept saying, "Are you working on a follow-up" and sometimes Darren wanted to be like, "I wrote the follow-up. It didn't get published. My editor turned it down, and then my agent wouldn't even send it out."
But with his kind of agent, they don't level with you and say they're simply done repping you. Instead, they pretend this book doesn't have the magic of your first book, or whatever. But of course they claim to be so excited for whatever you come up with next!
Meanwhile, Darren had a child. His parents had given them a loan, so they could put a down payment on a house, but otherwise his wife paid the utilities, groceries, mortgage, property taxes, daycare expenses. She was an OB, and she earned so much money—it was insane—he hadn't thought doctors could earn this much.
He had tried to explain to his wife that it wasn't going to happen for him. That he wasn't going to sell another book.
And she said, "It's okay to take a break. Or write short stories."
And he realized...it was threatening. She'd married someone with a vocation. She'd believed in him because the world had believed in him. Now her mind was set—she was impressed, like a baby duck—so she still believed in him, even though the world had moved on.
And his whole job was not to upset that impression she had formed that he had something going on! It was just like his parents, when they'd asked about the staff jobs. He hadn't really been applying, and he hadn't been competitive for these jobs. But he's at least been confident that something might change. And his parents might not have totally believed him, but the pretense had been convincing enough that they hadn't called him on it. Which maybe was the same dynamic now with his wife.
So...Darren worked on his writing projects, trying his little schemes. Lately, he'd started a newsletter, and it'd gained a number of subscribers. And he hoped that the newsletter would turn into something, but, more importantly, it was at least a plausible vesssl for his ambitions. It gave his wife a story about what he was doing.
He had never worked. He had never held an actual job for a day in his life. It'd always been freelancing, which was respectable, yes, but he'd never freelanced at a level sufficient to pay the rent. His book advance had been a hundred thousand dollars. Pretty decent. He earned enough, between stories and articles and his newsletter, that he never had to ask his wife for money. They had a joint account, but he didn't use it for personal stuff. Because that was just his self-interest, honestly! Penny wise, pound foolish. You start asking for $100 to pay for dinner, and suddenly she's wondering why she's married to a man who doesn't even have $100.
It was an uncomfortable situation, but surely not a very uncommon one. He'd been trying lately to turn this relationship into a television show or stand-up bit or a novel.
He had ambition. He still believed something would happen for him! That was the insane thing.
Even though he knew, objectively speaking, that he was finished, and that he was going to be the doctor's husband for the rest of his life, and he consciously that this was a fine, good life...he also thought he could produce something better. Something that could succeed. And he knew this ambition was exactly what allowed him to remain the doctor's husband. That his wife needed him to believe in himself.
And, honestly, he was quite happy to oblige. He understood on some level that his sole accomplishment in life was that he'd convinced three people—his parents and his wife—to underwrite his lifestyle. That all of his so-called accomplishments were really downstream of that fact. And that if he'd possessed his level of talent, but hadn't been indulged by his parents or wife, then he'd have long ago done something more productive for society. Like become an English teacher. Or gone to law school. Or learned to code. Or just done something else. But because they had enabled him, he had persisted in this field, year after year, and now his very longevity gave the impression to others that he was some kind of success. That he'd achieved something.
But maybe he had! Like, he'd convinced this woman to believe in him. And he'd been smart enough to snatch her up as a good thing. That was more than a lot of men could do. There was a genius there, no? Or at least some sort of cunning. Maybe he could tell a story about that.
P.S. On most Thursdays, I post a short tale. This is the second in a series of tales about Darren. The first is here.
Vanity Fair
The title of this story is drawn from William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a 19th-century novel about a scheming social climber. In the chapter “How to Live Well on Nothing a Year”, the narrator explains how it’s possible for so many people to put on a grand show despite not having the income to match:
I suppose there is no man in this Vanity Fair of ours so little observant as not to think sometimes about the worldly affairs of his acquaintances, or so extremely charitable as not to wonder how his neighbour Jones, or his neighbour Smith, can make both ends meet at the end of the year. With the utmost regard for the family, for instance (for I dine with them twice or thrice in the season), I cannot but own that the appearance of the Jenkinses in the park, in the large barouche with the grenadier-footmen, will surprise and mystify me to my dying day….What is Jenkins? We all know --Commissioner of the Tape and Sealing Wax Office, with 1200 pounds a year for a salary. Had his wife a private fortune? Pooh!--Miss Flint--one of eleven children of a small squire in Buckinghamshire. All she ever gets from her family is a turkey at Christmas, in exchange for which she has to board two or three of her sisters in the off season, and lodge and feed her brothers when they come to town. How does Jenkins balance his income?
Many people wonder the same thing about their favorite authors. At some point there was a spate of viral articles about authors who found it impossible to live on their six-figure advances (the best was by Emily Gould, who is the queen of messy, confessional essays).
But what’s more interesting are all the authors who do manage to live on those advances without any other visible means of support. In most cases, the money comes from the parents or spouse, but the nature of that support, and the ways that prestige is exchanged for financial support, can take various forms.
The article of mine that has aged the worst
Last weekend, I wrote my first paid article in a long time. It was about a crazy experience I had recently, at a panel, which made me realize that I was content to just be an influencer and content creator:
This article went live on Saturday morning, and, as you may know, on the next morning I was launched back into the prestige economy.
But the post still stands as an accurate reflection of my thoughts on the value of writing for this platform.
Astute Darren-watchers will remember that in his last appearance, I mentioned he was already married when his book sold, but I ret-conned that line and removed it from the original text. Also, I should give a shout-out to
for convincing me that Darren’s brilliant maneuver at the end of the last story was actually quite foolish.
feeling kind of called out by Darren tbh
I remain steadfast in my initial evaluation, that Darren needs a real job. In fact, I would add to what I said earlier: not only would his writing improve, he would enjoy it more too.