When I Was 17 I Wanted to Be Dave Berry, Now I Want to Be Nora Ephron

Today, is the first day back to real life. Real life is for March?. . . (thanks 30 Rock)

No not really, real life is for January 4th.  I am starting this thing today of writing for one hour a day. I am afraid that it will affect my home life.  Yet this is what I want. 

When I was 18 years old, and was about to head off to college, I told my father that I wanted to be Dave Berry when I grew up. He said something to the effect that there are a lot of people who want to be Dave Berry’s in the world so maybe I should aim to be something that will pay the bills.  He also said that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed something to write about.

I do not begrudge him for saying these things. They are true. I am a somewhat practical person who was raised by very practical parents. I understood at the time that I would need to have skills that could pay the bills. Plus, I was the 2^nd of 4 daughters. My father’s father died when my father was 21. My Dad just wanted to make sure that I could fend for myself in the world if he passed away.  

My Dad didn’t know it yet, but less than two years after this conversation, he had a 5^th daughter born, so in some ways he was even more correct about the path my life would need to take then when he doled out that advice. 

I never wanted to be a newspaper reporter though, so I didn’t major in journalism. Sometimes I  wish that I went to one of those high schools where the 12^th grade English teacher makes the students read The Atlantic or something. Instead, I went to a small, rural public school that provided a good education for its size. In college, friends found it hard to believe that I went to a public school bout only I had around 90 students in my graduating class.  

My high school was not without its flaws though. For example, instead of assigning students class sections by course of study or standardized tests, right before I started 9^th grade, my school administration decided to apply a random selection method to assigning students to sections in subjects like English and Social Studies.  This meant that every year that I was in high school preparing for college, I had students in the technical education section and industrial arts coursework in my English classes. Perhaps for this reason, we tended to stick to the basics in English class. No long-form journalism for us. I would have to wait to college to learn about creative non-fiction and explore my love of memoirs.

The only newspaper that I really knew was The Daily American, the local newspaper of the “large town” in our county, Somerset, with its population 5,000 or so. When I looked at the newspaper in late high school, I noticed the names of recent graduates of my high school who got jobs at the paper after graduating from college and they mostly reported on high school wrestling matches and school board meetings. I have never really been interested in attending school board meetings and do not care about wrestling so I decided to majored in biology instead.  

Plus, I saw my older sister J as the writer in our family. Two years before I went off to college, she was accepted into a Pennsylvania tax-payer sponsored, prestigious summer program called The Governor’s School for the Arts. It had rigorous application process that included letters of reference, writing samples, and an interview in Pittsburgh. She did not get in the first time she applied, after 10^th grade, but made it the second year. Former graduates of the acting section of the program include: Kevin Bacon, Zachary Quinto, Tina Fey and Gillian Jacobs. My sister being accepted into the Governor’s School for the Arts was a big deal at the time because as far as we knew, she was the first and only Berlin-Brothersvalley student to ever be accepted. 

Additionally, J wrote fiction and to me that made her a real writer. I had only written assignments for school and though I loved writing them, I did not think this made me a real writer. 

I only have myself to blame for have never read the copies of The New Yorker that accumulated in my older sister’s room after coming home from The Governor’s School of the Arts.  Had I read them, I might have figured out that there is more to writing professionally than small town news papers and novels.  I just never wanted to read The New Yorker though.  Have you ever looked through The New Yorker?  There are practically no ads and I think it was all black and white then.  I did usually read the comic though, but I didn’t always get it. 

So it was Dave Berry that I looked up to.  I read his column every Sunday.  Sometimes I had to go out to the convenience store or pharmacy and buy the other Sunday newspaper that was available for purchase in our area because the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette didn’t run Dave Berry’s column. If my Dad bought the paper on Sunday, he usually bought the Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette not the Tribune-Review because the Post-Gazette had a better sports page. 

I bought Dave Berry books that were compilations of his columns. I was 17 years old and could tell that he had less and less to say as he got older, but I didn’t care, I read them anyway. I tried other humor writers, but at the time I didn’t know any female humor writers and Lewis Grizzard, whose book we had at our house, seemed sexist.  My father always read Pat McManus, and he was very enjoyable, but his subject matter was hunting and fishing which weren’t my hobbies. 

Lately, I have been reading the Nora Ephron book I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman and it made me remember that it was always my dream to be a writer even though, I though at the time, I didn’t have anything to write about.  

I am really enjoying Nora Ephron because when I first started reading her book, I thought that she and I didn’t have anything in common. I asked myself, why she was such a big deal? As I kept reading though, I started to like her more and more. She was around 65 when this particular book was published and she had lived in apartments in New York for most of her life, which is something I know nothing about.  She tells us that in 1982 she paid $24,000 in key money just to move into her apartment, not including rent.  To me, this is completely unrelatable.  Also she seems super-high maintenance in that she talks getting her hair professional blow-dried twice a week because she doesn’t think that she can do it right and she mentions multiple past plastic surgeries.  

Yet, she says really funny and smart  things about love and luck and male-female relationships like, “Love is homesickness” and “It’s much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.” 

So maybe now, I think that she is my guru.

I have also found plenty of other memoir/ columnist/ humorist writings outside of Dave Berry to idolize, which is good because Dave Berry doesn’t write humor pieces anymore. He write children’s and young adult fiction that reinterprets the Peter Pan saga and he plays in a rock band with other writers like Stephen King and Amy Tan. I paid money to see them play once, at the Philadelphia Free Library, because like I should have said before- I’m a real fan girl of Dave Berry.

I don’t really know how to wrap this up. The thing is, I am am going to write every day. I am not going to publish every day. I am going to edit or write every day. So here I am. We will see what happens. 

Stay tuned. 

Also, if you haven’t subscribed yet, you should subscribe and see my growth. It will be fun, I promise.

Katie