- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
The Fall
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after
– T. S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"
1. Saturday
For nearly thirteen years, I had a job as the editor of House & Garden, a magazine that celebrated the good life. It would be an understatement to describe this enterprise as part of a company that was decidedly not in the business of philosophical, spiritual, or moral soul-searching. Condé Nast's roots and branches are in the material world. So, though we maintained high standards in writing and photography, and included stories in the magazine about spirituality, sustainability, and social responsibility wherever we could (and worried about offending gas-guzzling car advertisers), the good life in House & Garden generally meant cultivating your own backyard rather than being involved in the body politic. As much as we pushed against the limits of making a so-called shelter magazine, I always felt clear-eyed about how things stood. To give you a glimpse of the sorts of things designers put up with: Its perfect madness came home to me on September 12, 2001, when a decorator called me in tears because one of his clients on Manhattan's Upper East Side had berated him for an hour as he tried to explain why her new sofa cushions could not be delivered that day. I spent more than a decade in the belly of the beast of muchness and more.
The folding of the magazine was ruthless. Without warning, our world collapsed. No one was expecting it. I came to work on Monday, went to the corporate offices for a meeting, got the news, and was told to have everything packed up by Friday. Within five minutes I was getting phone calls from media writers outside the company; they heard the news before I could get back to my office to tell my colleagues. Security guards were posted; I wondered if there was management concern about the fate of all those wildly expensive bolts of fabric in our prop closet.
"Fabric? Who cares about fabric?" said one guard in response to my question. "We don't want anyone kicking in the walls. Or taking computers."
I had to laugh.
In the four days we were given to pack up our belongings, I was overwhelmed with an urge to hoard, and began stuffing every House & Garden paper bag, pencil, and notepad I could get my hands on into a box, so that I would never run out of office supplies. I salvaged enough to run a small corporation from my kitchen. I didn't think of this as stealing. I thought of it as a twisted sort of recycling, for me, and for the stuff -— part of the strange new economy of severance into which I had been thrown. Everything with our logo on it was destined for the shredder anyway.
Even so, a few weeks later I realized I had some gaping holes in my inventory: I had no ink for my printer. The pages of my résumé looked faded, ghostly. You would have thought I was fading too, but I wasn't. I was getting plump. All I could think about was food. This was the beginning of being hungry all the time. My addled brain was interpreting the white noise of unemployment to mean that I was going into hibernation, so I had to fatten up to get through the long winter ahead. After the closing of the magazine was announced, my public line was: "I had a great run; I took a magazine from zero to 950,000 readers in ten years, won awards, published four books ... " I was a zombie. "Great run ... 950,000 readers ... four books ..."
But privately, I was in a whiplashing tailspin. My nightmare had finally come true. For years, I had had a profound dread of unemployment that went way beyond worrying about how to pay the bills. I would like to say that this was because of the insecure nature of magazine publishing in general, and life at Condé Nast specifically, where the backstabbing at the highest levels of management was elevated to an art form, an elaborate corporate kabuki. But actually my anxiety had more to do with my own neuroses. Work had become the scaffolding of my life. It was what I counted on. It supported the structure. Work held up the floor of my moods, kept the façade intact. I always worried that if I
