Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(4)

    My dad used to tell me that there was always one line in every book that summed up the entire book. He also said that even if you don’t understand everything you’re reading in an article or a book, or even hearing in a conversation, try to take one piece of information away from it—that way you’ve left with something new to add to your brain. At the time, I was only eight, but I was already sick and tired of my father forcing me to read so many hard books—The Fountainhead, East of Eden, Anna Karenina—that I would always look for the first line that I thought would give him the impression that I had read the books he assigned. This was that line from Viktor Frankl. What does life expect out of me?

How lost was I if that question had never occurred to me—and it hadn’t. I had to read it to think it. What a fucking dummy I was, rewarding myself over and over again with homes and cars and vacations and gross extravagance. I justified all of it because I worked for everything I had. I came from nothing, I told myself. For years, that was my story. Work hard, fight hard, don’t give up. You can do anything. You deserve this.

The idea that I came from nothing is a joke. My parents were disappointing in many respects, but I always felt loved—by a lot of people. I never went hungry. I never struggled. I was white, pretty, and Jewish, and had a ton of misplaced self-confidence, so life got easier the more focused I became. I got to Hollywood and was rewarded for all of the above. It took a few years, but I never thought it wasn’t going to happen, and people who like me can say it’s because of talent, but talent is a nonissue. There are too many untalented people who are successful, and too many talented people who aren’t. Talent is neither here nor there. Becoming famous just seemed like the easiest way to become wealthy without going to college. That was my mindset. It was a lot of luck and a lot of privilege.

    My life was a bubble. That’s exactly what it had become. A big vapid bubble. What were my ties to being famous? To being a celebrity? Wealth and fame existed as a couple in my mind; they went together. Did that mean I could still have one without the other—and, if so, which one would I choose? Was this my whole life? No. It can’t be.

Do I get to fall in love again? With a man? No, a man can’t help me with this. You got yourself here. So, the question is: What am I going to do with myself now? What is my enough?

I’ve always been generous, but that’s always come easily to me. It’s easy to give. If anything, it feeds my ego to give to others. Real generosity is also showing up when you don’t feel like it—sacrificing your own happiness in exchange for someone else’s. Was I willing to do that? What am I willing to do that I really don’t want to do? Is that something I’m even capable of?

I never had to care about the state of the world before. The world was a vague thought and a whimsical fancy—that was for the adults. I thought that by traveling to so many different countries, I was doing my due diligence, that by edifying myself with other cultures, and sharing my experiences on camera and on my show, I was somehow making a worthy contribution to society. America wasn’t a problem. There was no problem. We had elected a black president. Racism and feminism were fights we had already won. America was being handled by people smarter and more skilled in politics, and they took care of this stuff so that people like me could live the American dream and remain blissfully ill-informed. I had spent my adulthood on a cigarette boat going a hundred miles per hour, and now I felt like I had somehow become marooned on one of those terrible all-inclusive Carnival cruise ships.



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Tanner fixed my TV and awkwardly put the iPad on my lap. I wondered if Tanner was the awkward one or maybe I was just stoned too much of the time and I was the awkward one. And if that was right, why was I stoned all the time? Then I remembered that I was coming out with my own line of weed and the reason I was stoned all the time was because I was doing research. That’s a true story. I also have the Trump family to thank for my newfound love of vaping and edibles. I had to get stoned to watch the news because alcohol and outrage don’t mix well—a hat on a hat.

Time speeds up as it goes by. Someone explained to me that there is a mathematical reason for this: as you age, each year becomes a smaller percentage of the life you have already lived. I’m forty-two as I write this. One year now represents a small percentage of my forty-two years (about 2.38 percent). But when I was eight, one year was a really long time; it was an eighth of my life. (This is why summer lasted about four years when you were a kid.) This may be why I now feel an urgency to know more, to do more, to be more.

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t believe life is too short. I believe life is too long. It’s exhausting. I don’t fear dying. I want people to know that: if I die early, it’s not some “tragedy”; I’d be relieved. My life has been an incredible adventure. I have $250,000 set aside for my funeral because I want everyone to have one big fucking party in my honor. I want to have a great funeral filled with dancing, little people, mushrooms—little people on mushrooms. I want it to be a celebration for all the people who love me and for all the people who are happy to see me go. (Note to self: You should probably put that money toward something more meaningful than a party for yourself—like maybe Syrian refugees or the NAACP. Just a thought.)

    However, in the meantime—between now and then—this is my attempt at taking stock of how I got here, where I have been, and where it is I’m going. What exactly it is that I might bring to the table to answer the question that Viktor Frankl forced me to ask myself. Do I have the conviction to examine myself unflinchingly, to reveal the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful? The answer is yes. I have a lot to be embarrassed about, and I intend to advertise it.