Tough Titties – Excerpt
Tough Titties – Chapter Excerpt
When I was rounding forty, my husband and I had dinner with our friend and his new girlfriend, a dewy-faced, twenty-nine-year- old Condé Nast worker who’d come straight from her spin class. Twisting her shower-fresh hair into a perfect knot, she sighed.
“All I do in my career is move up and up and up. It’s like every time I walk into the office, I get promoted.”
Shaking her head no to the server’s offer of bread and smearing a fingerful of Vaseline on her plump lips—at that age, a complete beauty routine—she added, “I’ll probably be publisher in the next couple of years.”
I remember thinking (as I buttered a second sourdough roll, thank you), I’m ten years older than this glowing go-getter and have never in my life moved “up and up and up.”
If you don’t know me, and however you found yourself with this book in your hands, I know I’m supposed to inspire you with how far I’ve come from my disadvantaged or troubled beginnings. How I’ve turned lemons into lemonade, or some boozy, sassy version: skinny margaritas, limoncello, Patrón Silver lemon drops. I know this from sampling influencer books and their intros. Not that I consider myself an influencer. I’m too old for that now, I’ve graduated to “thought leader.” (You’re never allowed to call yourself either of those things, by the way. But other people can.) Just like in acting, where the stages for a woman are ingenue, mom, district attorney, the online phases are influencer, thought leader, sea hag. I’m hoping to stay comfortably in the thought leader category for as long as possible before sprouting a tuft of hair from my giant face mole, living in an underwater lair, and eating children who frolic in the waves.
But anyway, I have to tell you what my existing audience knows: I’ve carved out a pretty great career, allowing for a #NoHomeworkLife that makes people say, “I want to be you when I grow up.” Because somehow, they got the impression I’m a grown-up. Supposedly, you’re one of those when you can drive. When you’re a parent. When you review your monthly cash flow on a spreadsheet. When you can open a bottle of wine. I check none of those boxes. Despite having waitressed and bartended, I’m even scared to pull out a cork. I fear the leverage will fling me across the room and I’ll break everything and spill the wine. I picture my husband sighing, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” I do have a grown-up marriage, unless you ask our building staff, who have seen us on the elevator camera punching each other’s crotches. We imagine them editing our antics into one extended “sizzle reel.”
In addition to hitting basic milestones of adulthood like creating new life and knowing how to roast a chicken, you’re now expected to: know your “Why,” face your fear, be a boss, unlock your purpose, live your passion, live your best life, be your best self, be of service, yet put yourself first—actually, that one, I’ve got in the bag! I should be more selfless but I’m told I should also stop “shoulding all over myself.”
If you don’t check the usual boxes either, or you’re far from the person you know you could be but are too resistant or just plain lazy to become, this book is for you.
It’s for you if . . .
. . . you’ve ever tanked relationships or sabotaged your career because something in you recoiled from success or being a responsible, fully developed human.
. . . you say “unpopular opinion” at the start of a post you hope will be wildly popular.
. . . you want to be your authentic, unselfconscious, live-outloud self but catch yourself kissing the ass of someone you don’t like, or fake-laughing too loud, then thinking about it all day—whether everyone noticed, is now discussing it, and is taking turns reenacting it at a secret party you’re not invited to.
It’s for you if . . .
. . . you hate-follow old nemeses online, hoping they get enormously jealous of you.
. . . you’ve ever measured your worth by how many bartenders found you sexually attractive enough to let you blow them. (Just me?)
. . . you’ve ever joined a cringey self-help thing where you felt very much not yourself.
. . . or, you wake up with your mind racing about everything you should be doing but know you probably won’t do any of it.
I see you. I wrote a book for you.
No, I wrote it for me. Because I always wanted to write a book. But the fact that I actually did, and followed through to completion, should give you hope.
Born five days late, first make-out at fifteen, sprouted big tits at twenty-one, entered “slut phase” also at twenty-one— coincidence? First job-job at twenty-three, left the nest at twenty- six, first and last drag on a cigarette at twenty-eight, “rebellion boyfriend” from twenty-nine through thirty-two, married at thirty-seven, had kids at—wait for it—never.
I tried (and dropped) yoga in 2017, found my career groove at around forty-eight, and, at fifty, earned my first million dollars within a year. A mark I know most people never hit, but one I’d always drooled over and had seen many colleagues in the online space sail past by their thirties. Also at fifty, way later than most authors named as “late bloomers,” I sold my first book, which you’re reading. (Thank you!) In some fugue state of thinking I was a different me, I expected to crank out this puppy in a few months. LOLZ.
I’ve always felt behind, like I’m scrambling to catch up and can’t do life the way you’re “supposed to.” The signs were there at my preschool interview, where, my mother tells me, I sat on the floor saying, “Oh ship, oh ship” (Baby’s first obscenity) while trying—literally—to jam a square peg into a round hole.
And that’s why it blows my mind that I’ve “made it”—without hitting the right achievements at the right life intervals; without wearing pantyhose, climbing a ladder, running ideas up a flagpole, or any of the other corporate rituals I was so unsuited for in my first jobs, working in my shrunken baby tees. (Hey, it was the ’90s, it was cool to dress like a seven-year-old with knockers.)
Essentially, I now get paid to be myself.
But I’m still a flaming hot mess of a human.
I miss deadlines. I pretend I missed your text. I’m late. Late to the Zoom call, late to the party—metaphorically and literally. (Unless I thought the party started an hour earlier. In that case, I’m practically on time.) I’m still forever teenager-weird about food and body image and rigid about my workout schedule. I still want my sixth-grade bully to see I’ve made it. I don’t clean or take care of things. I have sneeze marks on my laptop screen, sticky fingerprints on my glass desk, and coffee rings on the insurance paperwork I was supposed to do in 2018. I don’t get waxed. My nails are shit. And before you say boo about needing self-care, NAIL CARE IS NOT SELF-CARE. Neither is getting your pubes ripped out by the root. It’s a public service, a courtesy. One I rarely extend. I take a stand in my business about being fully me, like it or don’t, but desperately hope you do like it because being disliked, which I have been, leaves scars, the raised keloid kind that make people say, “What happened there?” I’m a coward. I still say yes, let’s get together, when I want to say no, let’s not. And then I try to wiggle out of it. (Rumi said, “We’re all just walking each other home.” I say, “We’re all dying for the other person to cancel so we can stay home.”)
If you’re raising your hand (and checking for a pit stain), you’re who Tough Titties is for.
And why “Tough Titties”?
First, because I say it a lot. Because, basically, I’m twelve.
Second, it evokes late-’70s, early ’80s, dirty, scuzzy New York, which I consider my point of origin, the shell out of which I rose in all my nerd glory. It gives top notes of terry-cloth halter top and roller skates, the waka-waka of Pac-Man, fear of getting mugged, vintage comic-book stores, Bloomingdale’s with Mom, hot sidewalk with a touch of urine.
Third, tits. I haz them. They’re a whole chapter. The titular one, if you will. (Told you I was twelve.)
Finally, “Tough Titties” is my favorite non-apology, the original “sorry not sorry.”
Want me to work nine to five? Tough titties.
Want me to have kids, like you do? Tough titties.
Want me to watch less TV? Tough titties.
Want me to close my eyes, take a deep breath, and then massage the person next to me at this conference? Yeah, hell no. Tough titties. Being touched by strangers who make intimate, piercing eye contact: one of many awful things I don’t love but am supposed to.
It turns out my stubborn refusal to be a “supposed to” person has gotten me right where I’m supposed to be, and, if you ask me, the same can go for you. That’s right: you can get ahead while feeling like you’re a giant step behind. And you can live your best life . . . even if you’re sometimes the fucking worst.
If you’re thinking my “it all works out” perspective comes from a place of privilege, you nailed it. White, cis, hetero, able-bodied, now dealing with crepey neck skin and other horrors of aging but still cute enough under good light and filters and, hello, camera angled from above, please. I also need to cite clean water, not living in a war zone, access to feminine hygiene products (though CVS is always out of the pantyliners for your thong). Plus, I had loving parents who put my finger paintings on the fridge and kept me on their insurance ’til the cutoff at age twenty-six. Lotta cushion for making questionable life choices and blowing opportunities, not to mention all those undeserving guys. (Yes, they get a chapter.)
Tough Titties is not an epic triumph of the soul or an instructional book. It’s less a how-to than a how not to, a permission slip to be your bad self if you don’t, can’t, or won’t follow the rules or timeline of “being your best self ” and are tired of pre- tending to. What a strain.
My only instructions are, go ahead: screw up, take your time, go down that weird and windy path. Treat “supposed to” as a serving suggestion, not a federal law, and be who you are. Even if “who you are” doesn’t always fit in, and changes as often as the ports and charger inputs of your Apple products. (Seriously, Apple. What the fuck.)
And to you, the go-getter running laps around us, right on. You go! Get your gold star, check all the boxes, rise up and up and up. Order without me. I’ll meet you after.
