Hello! First, a little apology that I’ve been silent all summer. I’ve been busy writing for GQ and other places and also editing the very great newsletter DIRT for its Season 1. Since that’s winding down, I made a promise to myself to start focusing on The Melt. I promise that I’ll either keep doing it and get my Nanny recaps up, or I’ll just send it to wherever forgotten online projects go to die.
Writers with money
Writers love to talk about money. We love to talk about how much we make or don’t make, and we also love to talk about how much others make.
We, except for me. I’m not a fan of talking about money just because I lived feast or famine pretty much my entire life save for the last decade. A lot of the famine was out of my control (I wrote a memoir and you can read about some of that if you buy it), but it still put this weird thing in my brain that if the money is ever good that it can go away very quickly. So I just don’t talk about it. Money freaks me out. A combination of growing up around immigrants and experiencing bouts of homelessness will do that to a person.
I am, however, very open about my dueling feelings about how I think capitalism is the devil, but that I also really like nice things. Not things for the sake of having them—I don’t believe something is better because it’s just more expensive, that’s gross. I just like stuff. I also like the comfort of knowing that me and my own won’t go hungry since I’ve literally gone hungry a number of times. And if you know me, I really do not like being hungry.
I’m definitely not a rich writer. I’m also really not sure what a rich writer is besides Danielle Steel or Stephen King or people that you know sell ten billion paperbacks at airports and who have names everybody knows. The successful writers who are about a decade older than me, the Michael Chabons or Zadie Smiths, definitely do well. They’ve sold a lot of books and their stuff has been optioned and they probably get paid a lot of money to do things like speaking gigs. But they still work. They still write. I appreciate that.
I have the feeling Gary Shteyngart can count himself among the Zadies and Chabons. He seems to do well for himself. At least I gather that because his personal real estate holdings in and around New York City have been well documented over the years. His Lower East Side apartment that went on the market in 2009 was modest by NYC standards (under $500,000), but by the next year he was in a “spacious and extraordinarily sunny” two-bedroom Gramercy Park spot on East 18th. Less than a decade later, the Times was reporting on Shteyngart’s “house on the hill,” a Craftsman bungalow situated on seven acres of Dutchess County land.
I mention all of this because upstate has played a large part in Shteyngart’s Instagram for some time now. It’s basically all nice dishes he’s eating (he is partial to the Arctic char at Hotel Kinsley in Kingston), nice views, cocktails and watches. It is, overall, a nice looking way to live life.
I’m not going to act like a martyr here. I love writing. It’s a blessing I do what I’ve always wanted to do and I love talking to younger writers about how I got to where I’m at while not hinting at the fact that I have no clue where I’m going. But it’s also thankless. You work your ass off to get a single story or poem or essay published, you maybe get paid a few hundred bucks if you’re lucky, and the likelihood of that poem or story or essay breaking through and getting to people who don’t always read poems or stories or essays tends to be pretty slim. But if you’re a believer, if you really care, you brush off that fact. You don’t wallow in any of it. You get back to work and do it again and again and again and maybe sooner or later you have a book deal or a staff job or you teach and write or you do what I’ve done and you edit and write. For many of us, the endgame is to just write, but, again, that’s not everybody. Just look at the aforementioned Zadie Smith or any other bestseller that also is in academia. There’s a reason they do what they do and I might be a sucker for thinking this, but it goes beyond money. And that’s really why I love my fellow writers: It’s lonely, it’s weird, it’s frustrating and more often than not the pay is lousy if there’s even pay at all, but there is nothing else in the world I’d rather do.
It’s also, ultimately, all I’d like to do. I don’t want to be a fancy man sitting around all day writing my prose, but I’d like to be able to just live my life being creative and not worrying about money. I’m not a fan of meetings and paperwork. Being creative and getting paid is what I think we all want, really. I love George Orwell, and I appreciate that, even though he was born into a good family, he wanted to experience poverty because he believed he couldn’t be an honest person or writer if he didn’t understand how so many people live. He probably couldn’t have written his best works if he didn’t do that. It might seem like a holiday in others peoples misery to some, while others might view it as just a great artist doing what he had to do to create. In my mind, it goes like this: I love Orwell and I’ve been poor. I don’t want to be poor again. The only remedy to that — capitalism being what it is — is to keep making money.
I also do not have any idea what I’m worth. I really don’t know or give much thought to how "I could “grow my audience” or look at writing like a business. I’m not a business person. I’m a writer. There are people that can be both, but I’m for sure not one of them.
But I do often wonder to myself, if I could be what would be considered on paper a “rich writer,” what would be my personal ceiling?
Shteyngart on his Instagram has given me a road map of sorts. He is one of the few modern writers I can think of who are willing to even be like “Hey, I’ve got a little bit of disposable income and here is me documenting myself enjoying it.” And it’s not even like he’s dressing himself in all gold and prancing around like Scrooge McDuck; he’s just eating nice looking food and wearing watches, really. He’s a famous writer in his late-40s and he’s enjoying things. Nothing too wild or ostentatious, but I like that he’s more into Instagramming about cocktails and not about The Process of being a writer or anything like that. He’s not acting like he’s some hermit banging a keyboard and flogging himself if he doesn’t get the sentence perfect the first time. I feel like Gary Shteyngart does it right is what I’m trying to say.
So why do I mention any of this at all? To be honest, guilt. I feel guilty because I read this thing at Vanity Fair recently about how there’s a private plane boom over the last year, and I got to thinking about how if I were rich (whatever that means in this day and age where billionaires are riding rockets into space for shits and giggles), like if I could somehow get to a point where I’m like “15 thousand? I can spend that to get to Miami from NYC because I don’t feel like being treated like garbage by some big airline right now,” I feel like that would be it. That’s as far as I could go in terms of acting rich. I’d be willing to buy convenience if I could. I don’t want the nicest car or the biggest house and I don’t need to be in head to toe Balenciaga. I’d just want things to be a little easier every now and then.
It’s my Big Tevye Energy to think about if I were a rich man. I always tell myself I’d have no problem paying lots more in taxes, especially if it does things like raise the minimum wage and guarantee everybody could have health care. I’d buy my wife nice things, keep buying books and sneakers and go out to dinner once or twice a week and I’d probably give a lot of the money away because, really, who needs too much money? I know there are people who can honestly tell me they think you can never be too rich, but I’ve met a lot of very rich people in my life, and I can say that some of those people would definitely disagree with you.
The reason I felt bad about the private plane dream is really because I’ve always had such a loaded relationship when it comes to money and so much anxiety about not having enough, but worrying what having too much could do to me. I found myself feeling bad for wanting to buy convenience even though that’s what it’s really all about. Some people can afford that, and the rest of us have to wait on line and then get jammed like cattle into a stuffy plane.
The good news is that I’m likely never going to have to worry because I’m a writer, and a marginally successful one at that. Definitely nowhere near Shteyngart level, yet I look at his Instagram and often find myself thinking that he has hit a point of noticeable wealth that I’d personally be comfortable with. I like how he lives. The guy has good taste and writes books that I always buy. He’s a working writer who has a house in the city and another in the country. He takes himself out for a nice Martini and appreciates a good bitter Italian drink. He’s an immigrant boy made good and he’s worked for it and keeps doing that. And I think that’s great. I like seeing it. It gives me something to aim for since it’s unlikely I’ve got a Da Vinci Code up my sleeve that would enable me to get on private jets whenever I want. What I’m saying, ultimately, is that while I’ve always looked up to Shteyngart as a writer and love his work, it’s also nice to have a few writers you look at and say, “I like how they live. This looks nice. Let’s aim for that.”