Free Sad Desk Salad by Jessica Grose Page B

visit his father at the villa in Switzerland”), my mother floundered up there in the attic. She started out on a strict schedule, writing at least a thousand words a day. But as she reached the middle of her dissertation, she became completely blocked. She would sit at the typewriter for hours and for every sentence she’d write, she’d erase two more. It got so bad that she became phobic, she’s told me: She would start to shake and sweat just walking up the steps to the office she had so lovingly appointed.
    My father didn’t have much patience for my mother’s freak-out. My mom’s baseline personality is placid and bright; my dad was more of a brooder. The pattern they had set from the beginning was that my mother was the ray of sunshine that brightened up his default gloom. He couldn’t understand how his cheerful wife had become such an anxious mess—all he knew was he wanted her to get control of it. In order to yank her out of her doldrums he suggested a cross-country road trip to Berkeley the summer between his first and second years at Manning.
    As they rambled through Wisconsin in their beat-up 1969 Bug, my father gave my mother a bombshell ultimatum: Either finish your dissertation in the six months after we return from this trip or take a job I’ve secured for you in the English department at Manning. I don’t know how the conversation played out after that. My parents never went into the particulars. All I know is my mother took the job at Manning. The half-finished dissertation is in a locked file cabinet in that attic office, where my mom grades papers to this day.
    When my dad was still alive, my parents told this story so many times that the pathos got ironed out of it. They tried to make my mother’s panic seem silly, rather than harrowing, but I never really took it that way. And yet, my mom has never seemed unhappy as a teacher—she takes pride in her work and genuine succor from the connection with her young students. But there’s a palpable wistfulness about her. I suspect she always wonders what might have been if she had really pushed herself to write.
    As if living out her sublimated fantasy, I wrote for the college newspaper at Wesleyan, and I took that writing very, very seriously. I didn’t want my dad to feel like he’d wasted his money, and I wanted to be proud of the articles I e-mailed home to my mom. I wrote some culture pieces about a subset of girl bands I liked and referred to as clit rock. But I also wrote investigative features that I thought would really change the world—or at least change Connecticut.
    I was most proud of the eight-thousand-word exposé on an underfunded Bridgeport shelter for victims of domestic violence that won me the creative-nonfiction award for advocacy journalism at the end of my senior year. I was a favorite of the English department, and several of my fellow newspaper nerds complained that I wasn’t enough of an activist to deserve the award—like my piece was wasn’t worthy because I’d never chained myself to the nearest Planned Parenthood.
    That was around the time I started applying for jobs. I thought I would be a shoo-in for intern or assistant gigs at liberal bastions like American Prospect and The Nation . But I heard nary a peep from any of them—even Mother Jones wouldn’t have me. Turns out that all the other earnest college kids from Vassar and Brown had already scooped up every position possible.
    Then I tried to get a gig at every newspaper in the country, from Traverse City to Tarzana. I would have been happy to have covered the sanitation beat, writing about changes in street-sweeping for some tiny local daily in the hinterlands, but none of them would hire me, either—not even in an unpaid position.
    After that second round of rejections, I decided to try for the gig at Rev . Sure, it wouldn’t involve the hard-hitting reporting I wanted to be doing, but I was hardly in a position to be picky. I knew that the industry