What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding
Read What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Online
Authors: Kristin Newman
WHAT I WAS DOING WHILE YOU WERE BREEDING
“If Mark Twain was a woman and he had actually done things in the countries he traveled to, he would have been a lot more pleasant. He also would have written this book instead of
The Innocents Abroad.
This book is so good that, of the many I have blurbed, this is the only one I read.”
—Joel Stein, columnist for
Time
, author of
Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity
“I have had the pleasure of joining Kristin on some amazing adventures and can say without question that she is as good a writer as she is a traveler. Which is to say, slightly better when she’s had a few glasses of wine.”
—Nick Kroll
“I love my husband and kids, truly I do—but reading
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding
makes me want to buy a one-way ticket around the world, or rather two tickets—one for me and one for her—so we could party till dawn, flirt with hairy European men, and break several international laws. Kristin puts the ‘lust’ in wanderlust and makes adventuring and even mis-adventuring sexy, fun, and, at times, even inspirational.”
—Jill Soloway, writer/director
“Since we can’t all sit next to Kristin Newman at a dinner party, it’s a good thing she wrote
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding
so we can all enjoy her funny and unexpected tales. Unlike the rest of us, Kristin took the road less traveled and that has made all the difference. Her sparkling wit and adventurous spirit will seduce you just as it did that guy in Argentina … and in Russia … and in Jordan … and so on.”
—Nell Scovell, coauthor of
Lean In
“
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding
is sly disguised as sexy. It reminded me of George Eliot mixed with a woodshop-safety film.… A complete delight.”
—Stephen Tobolowsky, actor, author of
The Dangerous Animals Club
“I wanted to read this book but my wife stole it off my night-stand, laughed at it for three nights straight, and lent it to her friends.”
—Rodney Rothman, author of
Early Bird:
A Memoir of Premature Retirement
“Kristin’s book is such an uproarious, sidesplitting, jaw-dropping-while-miraculously-somehow-also-self-reflecting page-turner, it makes me feel like I traded in my own wife and children for a time machine and a spot in her globe-trotting duffel bag.”
—Rob Kutner, writer for
Conan
, author of
Apocalypse How
and
The Future According to Me
“Riotously funny, brutally honest, and hopelessly romantic … Newman’s global romps and brave takedown of the dated, divisive dichotomy between happy breeders and desperate singles is one of the most refreshing things I’ve read in a long time and proof that everyone has her own path to happily ever after.”
—Attica Locke, nationally bestselling author of
The Cutting Season
Copyright © 2014 by Kristin Newman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-804-13760-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3761-4
Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright
Cover photography by Martin Westlake/Galley Stock
v3.1
To my mom,
who taught me how to get around an airport,
and throw a great party,
and that “Grown-ups don’t just hold hands.”
To my dad,
who taught me about balance, in all things,
but especially when hopping across river rocks,
and who says living my life would give him diarrhea.
To my girls,
who let me write about some of their adventures,
and who have been my de facto spouses on mine,
even when they were cheering me on from home.
And to one more person,
but that dedication has to come at the end,
or it’ll spoil the whole story …
All things in moderation,
including moderation.
—O
SCAR
W
ILDE
“I’ll Have the House Special”
I am not a slut in the United States of America. I have rarely had a fewer-than-four-night stand in the Land of the Free. I don’t kiss married men or guys I work with, I don’t text people pictures of my genitalia, I don’t go home with boys I meet in bars before they have at least purchased me a couple of meals, I’ve never shown my boobs for beads. I do not sleep with more than one person at a time, and, sometimes, no more than one per year. In America.
But I really love to travel.
Now, having sex with foreigners is not the only whorish thing I do: I also write sitcoms. For the last fourteen years I’ve written for shows like
That ’70s Show
,
How I Met Your Mother
,
Chuck
,
The Neighbors
, and shows you’ve never heard of that nonetheless afford me two over-the-top lucky things: the money to buy plane tickets and the time off to travel. What this means about my life is that I spend about nine months a year in a room full of, mostly,
poorly dressed men, telling dick jokes and overeating and, sometimes, sitting on the floor with Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, and a chimpanzee (before all three found the age difference insurmountable). In the writers’ room, we talk a million miles a minute, tearing each other apart for sport and, often, out of love. Sometimes someone makes me cry, and I pretend I’m doing a “bit” where I “run out of the room to cry” even though what I’m really doing is running out of the room to cry. If I’m lucky enough to be fully employed, I get about nine months of this and then a three-month hiatus—unpaid time off from this weird non-corporate grind.
Most days, the writers’ room feels like I’m at the most entertaining dinner party in the world. Other times, it feels like I’m at the meanest, longest one. I keep both versions in perspective with my real life’s work—running away from home to someplace wonderful. And then, sometimes, having sex there.
Throughout most of my twenties and thirties, in the hiatus months (or years) between shows, I spent between a few weeks and a few months a year traveling. When money was tight, I took road trips with a tent, and when it wasn’t, I got on a plane and went as far as I could, to places like China and New Zealand, Jordan and Brazil. To Tibet and Argentina and Australia and most of Europe. To Israel and Colombia and Russia and Iceland. In the beginning, I took these trips with girlfriends, but soon my girls started marrying boys, and then they started making new little girls and boys, and so then I started taking the trips alone. Some of these girls would eventually come back around
after a divorce for a trip or two, but then leave me again when they got married for the second time before I’d managed to do it for the first. (When I complained to my friend Hope that she had lapped me in the marriage department, she replied, “I’m not sure the goal is to do it as often as possible.” I love her.)
Anyway, everyone around me was engaged in a lot of engaging, marrying, and breeding while I remained resolutely terrified of doing any of it. I did want to have a family
someday
… it was just that “someday” never seemed to feel like “today.” I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul. That wrestling match threatened to body-slam me into a veritable Bridget-Jonesian-sad-girl singlehood, which I was resolutely against, both personally and as an archetype. And so to ward that off, I kept moving.
Pretty early on in my travel career I discovered two vital things. First, that I’m someone a little different on the road, and that vacation from being my home self feels like a great sleep after a long day. Second, that you can have both love
and
freedom when you fall in love with an exotic local in an exotic locale, since there is a return ticket next to the bed that you by law will eventually have to use. These sweet, sexy, epic little vacationships became part of my identity—I was The Girl with the Great International Romance Stories at dinner parties, and around the writers’ room table. And I began to need my trips like other people need religion.