*

As usual, Laura isn’t able to do anything half-way. So she spent the morning organizing her brants into categories (see right of brant for complete listing). This should take a normal person an hour or so, but as we all know by now, Laura is not a normal person. It’s taken her two and a half hours and she’s still not finished! Why? Well, see for yourself. Laura just can’t resist the enormous potential for extensive list humor* right on her very own brant!

(*List Humor: This is a touchy phrase for Laura since it was once used in a rejection letter from The New Yorker referring to a piece of hers — “The International House of Hunan Pancake” — they were at that very moment rejecting. The aforementioned alleged “list-humor piece” was a parody of the ubiquitous Chinese Take-Out menus that were constantly getting slipped under Laura’s apartment door or into the foyer of Laura’s apartment building and the International House of Panckes menu with which Laura was intimately acquainted (not to be a tease yet again, but more about her “Resume of Failure” later). The complete phrasing of the rejection letter was:

“Sorry, but we’re not taking list humor right now.”

Laura was deeply annoyed by that phrase since she had no idea what it meant. I mean, obviously she knew that her piece contained a list and was humorous. But she certainly wasn’t aware of any Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory of List Humorists creating massive amounts of derivatively unpublishable list-humor pieces.

Laura can’t help but wonder if you, the reader, is wondering who she is and why she’s writing about Failure. She wonders if you might even be wondering what makes Laura think she’s such an expert on Failure, enough to be writing about it here, and hopefully in a new book, especially in such glowingly loving terms. Laura wants you to know that she has been asking herself these very same questions and has had many brutally frank face-to-face conversations with herself in order to feel worth of the complex and controversial topic she has chosen to write about.

Or, that has chosen her.

Such is the nature of Laura and Failure’s mutual attraction.

First, as most readers know, Laura started off as a novelist. (OK. That’s not entirely true. Laura started off as a publicist. And before that, a waitress at IHOP. And before that — well, Laura is going to save this “Resume of Failure” for later so please be patient.) As a novelist, Laura often “fictionalized” events in her life that led her to call her particular kind of fiction writing “faction” – fiction based on fact. Failure: A Love Story, then, will be Laura’s first work of “non-faction” – non-fiction based on fact.

Whatever you or Laura want to call it — Fiction – Faction – Non-Fiction – Non-Faction — Laura loved writing novels. (What’s not to love? Sitting around all day in pajamas writing about people you have known and things that have happened to you and then quickly changing a bunch of details before anyone has a chance to sue you.) But after publishing four “factional” novels something unexpected happened:

She got tired of beating around the bush.

She got tired of writing about failure without actually mentioning it.

She got tired of hiding some of her most spectacularly brilliant failures behind “made-up” characters (who where never entirely made up), when all she really wanted to do was be straightforward and honest and come clean.

And most of all, she wanted credit for her failures. Instead of giving them away for free, Laura wanted, in the language of daytime television and some California therapists, to “own” her failures.

And there were certainly plenty of failures for Laura to own!

Obviously there were the epic jumbo-sized failures that inspired each of Laura’s four novels: Animal Husbandry (getting dumped); Dating Big Bird (being romantically-and-reproductively-challenged well into her 30s); Her (being insecure about her spouse’s ex); and Piece of Work (feeling like a hasbeen and a failure) — not to mention her unpublished fifth novel, which was both inspired by a failure and also itself became a failure because no publisher wanted to publish it). But then she realized that there were tens – if not hundreds – of failures in her past – a world wide web of small and medium-sized everyday personal failures — roads taken that never should have been taken — that she could trace like a network of teeny tiny interconnected veins in order to understand the big picture of her life and the most important relationship in it: her life-long journey through life with Failure. Despite the fact that they often went their separate ways and while Laura sometimes lost sight of Failure in the bright lights of occasional success, she always knew that she and Failure were meant to be, and that Failure would be waiting for her whenever she came back.

And Laura always came back.

But why?

Was she a glutton for punishment?

A self-sabatager?

A catastrophizer?

Simply unlucky?

Or did she just happen to be naturally bad at a lot of stuff?

And how, despite all odds and after such long stretches of time together that Laura thought they would never ever part again, Failure has so often led her to the unlikeliest of places and into the arms of a most unlikely suitor:

Success.

[to be continued…]