My New Yorker Magazine Cartoons

Part 1

Above: the first of my cartoons published in the New Yorker magazine. (Rather than dig through old issues of the magazine, I just screenshotted it from the Cartoon Bank.)

In my early thirties I lived in Baltimore and drove a cherry red 1974 Fiat Spider, a car that was, at any stoplight, the coolest car. I would glance to my left or to my right to see what other cars were waiting for the light to turn green. A new, silver Mercedes convertible? A black Corvette? A shiny white Jeep filled with women wearing cut-off shorts? No matter. I always felt that my rumbly little Italian car with its gleaming wood dash, lollipop gear shift, and horn that sounded like a clown’s horn echoing off the cobblestones on a narrow street in Rome, was cooler.

It was with this general, light but persistent feeling of coolness that I gave 4-weeks’ notice at my perfectly fine job as a marketing director for the alumni office at Johns Hopkins to move to New York City, where my friend Eliza Griswold said I could sublet her boyfriend’s apartment while he was at Yaddo for two months.

I didn’t have any work lined up, but my dream was to land a magazine job and become a real New Yorker, the kind of person who dresses well and knows which train to take. But really, my dream was deeper than that. I wanted to become who I was born to be in the world, whoever that was. My hunch/hope was that it had something to do with what I observed and what I really thought about things. I wanted to never again work in marketing, where you apply your taste and best arguments and creativity to the questionable task of convincing people that the institution you work for is noble, special, superior, and trustworthy, when in fact every institution really just wants money money money money money money. I was tired of what felt like the sanitizing of myself in the service of a big, already rich institution.

Eliza’s boyfriend’s apartment was a small one-bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen, in a five-story building that the City of New York had purchased in the 1990’s in order to sell the units to the low-income tenants who lived in them.

I knew exactly two people in New York: Dorothy Sullenberger, a girl I went to high school with, and Eliza. Dorothy let me park my Fiat on the street outside her Williamsburg apartment in Brooklyn, and Eliza (I will never forget her kindness in this) invited me everywhere—to her Buddhist meditations in light-filled studios in Soho, to her private exercise group of 7 other writers, to Paris Review parties in George Plimpton’s apartment, to book parties at her literary agent’s apartment, and to drinks out at bars, including one time when we went to a dark, quiet bar dominated by low, black velvet sofas, and Eliza told me, “Lindsay is bringing Toni Morrison here in ten minutes.” When Lindsay and Toni Morrison arrived, I didn’t dare say much but laughed when Eliza or Lindsay asked Toni what she was working on now and she said, archly, “I thought I’d try my hand at writing a novel.”

When I wasn’t with Eliza, I was walking the streets. I’d arrived with $900 to my name, after paying the first month’s rent, and I knew I had to find a job, but you can’t spend ALL day job hunting. I walked from my apartment on 54th street all the way up to Inwood and down to the Financial District, marveling at how the neighborhoods changed gradually along the way on a continuum of cleanliness, storefront topics (from a jumble of house goods to a store carrying a total of ten cocktail dresses spaced out along a single rod), and the crowds morphing too, from elderly Hispanic women with practical metal shopping carts to laughing young gay men gleaming at cafe tables to Africans talking on the sidewalks, and then finally families of Orthodox Jews strolling at a slow pace.

The best part of New York is walking and seeing thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people in a single afternoon—what they’re wearing, what they are carrying, who they are with, and what mood they’re in.

“There’s a fact checking job open at the New Yorker,” Eliza emailed me one day. She’d gotten the tip from her friend Dana, who was an editor at the magazine.

I applied. Meanwhile, someone I’d met at a party told me about a publishing internship at Grove, where for $25 a day, I spent a few hours stuffing envelopes with books and a press release before mailing them off to book reviewers.

My husband Marshall just read all of the above and said, “Did you have any difficulties?”

I did!

To be continued…

That felt oddly familiar. Oh! I have already written a sketch of my move to NYC, in the service of offering advice to a gentle reader in a fix. (Emily Writes Back used to be an advice column, did you know?)

Stay tuned if you’d like to know more about what it’s like to be a New Yorker cartoonist…