Unwifeable by Mandy Stadtmiller
PRAISE FOR
* * *
Unwifeable
“Genius.”
—Artie Lange, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Too Fat to Fish
“I loved reading Unwifeable. A fascinating kind of chaos with the realization of addiction, and then recovery. What stood out to me most was Mandy Stadtmiller’s optimism all the way through.”
—Fred Armisen, creator and star of Portlandia
“Brilliant.”
—Jon Ronson, New York Times bestselling author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
“So rewarding.”
—Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse series
“There’s honest, and then there’s honest. This book is so honest it will blow you away. With Unwifeable, Stadtmiller establishes herself as the Erica Jong of her generation—with storytelling as addictive as Jay McInerney.”
—Colin Quinn, comedian and creator/star of The New York Story
“Not since Confessions of a Video Vixen has a memoir been so fraught with insecurities and insurgence, humility and humor, degradation and, ultimately, deliverance.
—Karrine Steffans, New York Times betselling author of Vindicated
“Spectacular.”
—Anna David, New York Times bestselling author of True Tales of Lust and Love
“Unwifeable is a hilarious, unfiltered plunge; its laugh-out-loud candor will have you rolling on the floor, then getting up and cheering for Mandy every step of the way.”
—Jill Kargman, creator and star of Odd Mom Out
“I tip my hat to this absolute icon and queen of the night. Text Mandy for a good time.”
—Babe Walker, New York Times bestselling author of Psychos: A White Girl Problems Book
“Mandy Stadtmiller made me laugh hysterically, weep in recognition, and feel like I did New York all wrong. A behind-the-veil look at what it’s really like to be one of those girls-about-town that everybody is jealous of, Unwifeable is a compulsively readable work of radical honesty and tremendous heart.”
—Rachel Shukert, writer for GLOW and author of Everything is Going to Be Great
“Mandy Stadtmiller speaks the unspeakable in Unwifeable: All those things you think, but never tell anyone. And all those things you do, and hope no one finds out. Mandy lays it all out, and in the process, gets to the real issues of healing and self-discovery.”
—Neil Strauss, nine-time New York Times bestselling author
“This book is exactly what I’d expect from Mandy—introspective, funny, and excruciatingly honest. It feels like she wrote an unauthorized biography about herself.”
—Jim Norton, New York Times bestselling author of I Hate Your Guts
“Mandy Stadtmiller has written a rollicking and wildly honest tale that includes lots of sex, vodka, Andy Dick, comedy, and self-doubt. The big disappointment was that it ended and I had to go back to my life, which is a lot less interesting than Mandy’s.”
—A. J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically
“A comic tour de force.”
—Molly Jong-Fast, author of The Social Climber’s Handbook
“Unwifeable is unflinching, unforgettable, and unputdownable. Also sexy, searingly honest, and hilarious. I loved it.”
—Pamela Redmond Satran, author of Younger
“Unwifeable is fast-paced, by turns bubbly and light and wrenchingly sad. It is an unusually honest and forthright catalogue of a life that has never been ordinary. A story of painful choices, of the saving power of humor, and of real love.”
—Sara Benincasa, author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs
“Wonderful, funny, heartbreaking, and redemptive.”
—Kimberly Rae Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Coming Clean
“Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking. It’s one of those books that you read when you just want to feel like someone else GETS IT.”
—Abigail Breslin, Academy Award–nominated actress
“She’s brash, she’s sexy, and she’s scary real. Mandy’s optimism throughout her gritty growth is insightful and enlightening. She makes you feel alive.”
—Sonja Morgan, entrepreneur and star of Real Housewives of New York City
“Mandy Stadtmiller has managed to craft the rare combination of brutally raw and honest with hilarious and relatable. The perfect book for all of us imperfect women trying to figure out how the hell to make it.”
—Jo Piazza, bestselling author of The Knockoff
“Mandy Stadtmiller is so smart, insightful, and funny. Unwifeable will make you want to become her best friend.”
—Megan Amram, author of Science . . . For Her!
“A sex-soaked, bare-knuckled, razor-blade-in-the-Big-Apple cri de coeur.”
—Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
“In Unwifeable, sister-in-ink Mandy Stadtmiller lands her biggest scoop yet: the hilarious yet deeply moving story of her life.”
—Mark Ebner, New York Times bestselling author of Hollywood, Interrupted
“A book not afraid to name names and reveal all, with the author leading the charge. A must for anyone brave enough to attempt a creative career in the big city—or any city.”
—Mike Sacks, New York Times bestselling author of Poking a Dead Frog
“Shot through with real pain and wisdom, Mandy Stadtmiller’s soul-baring story of self-destruction and self-discovery is laugh-out-loud funny, brutally honest, and utterly fearless—just like her.”
—Sam Lansky, author of The Gilded Razor
“Unflinchingly honest, raw, and relatable. You’re rooting for her the whole way.”
—Lane Moore, author of How to be Alone
“A raw, harrowing, piercingly funny, binge-filled account of self-destruction and self-discovery.”
—Warren Leight, Tony Award–winning playwright and former showrunner for Law & Order: SVU
“A savagely personal memoir that pulls no punches when it comes to exposing its author’s humanity. It’s as deeply intimate as it is extremely relatable. Mandy Stadtmiller is a stunning writer, equally comedic and sobering.”
—Ira Madison III, columnist for The Daily Beast
“Mandy Stadtmiller details all that she has endured and then has the grace to laugh it all off. It’s painfully hilarious.”
—Joi-Marie McKenzie, author of The Engagement Game
“Unflinching intelligence, lacerating wit, and an unexpectedly moving love story.”
—John Fugelsang, host of Page Six TV
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For every person who was told they couldn’t
If you cannot—in the long run—tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless.
—Erwin Schrödinger
chapter one
* * *
The Black Box
If you look deep inside every woman, you will find a black box that records the wreckage of her past relationships. Internal recordings that can withstand the g-force impact of total obliteration that comes with a coupling’s end. “We’ve got bonding failure. Tell the world I’m sorry. We’re going down.”
It starts when we are babies.
Our black box records the looped attachment issues that play i
My black box is horrific—even by black-box standards.
I’ve behaved terribly, predictably, and embarrassingly—and most shameless of all, I wrote about the journey in the New York Post and on xoJane with such an excruciating lack of self-awareness I finally had to reconcile the fact that there might be no one out there left for me at all.
I considered myself unwifeable. And I liked it.
Well, the vague empowerment narrative of it, anyway.
I wasn’t just a self-destructive exhibitionist whose crippling neuroses manifested in navel-gazing narcissism and random acts of implosion. Instead, I told myself I was a feminist. My warp-speed career in personal memoir I claimed to be the ultimate act: making myself as terrifying to men as possible.
I was a living don’t, and I was okay with that.
Instigating sexual chaos provided me with the perfect excuse for my inability to save myself or learn from past mistakes. I had plausible deniability that way. Massive backlog. An unrelenting influx of more pressing cases. All to avoid confronting the most devastating moments of original impact or having to assume personal responsibility for my failures along the way to correct course.
That’s the problem with any emotional investigation: You need an unwavering focus in the face of overwhelming shame and regret and distraction. No matter what unsettling evidence emerges as all the ugly secrets start inevitably spilling out, you must resolve to never give up.
It’s a tricky endeavor—even for the bravest among us.
Because do you know what humans will do to avoid the pain of personal discovery? Nearly any-fucking-thing.
* * *
IT IS EARLY 2015, and my favorite escape-the-moment drug of choice is sex.
I am lying perfectly still on a hand-me-down bed in Manhattan, desiring nothing more than to please a mysterious forty-five-year-old man I barely know. He’s tall, dark-humored, and handsome, and I first begin seeing him after receiving $20,000 from an online dating site to meet as many men as possible—all while driving up website traffic.
Summoning my favorite seduction trick from my well-worn repertoire, I make my voice as breathy and helpless as possible, asking, “Do you want me to touch myself?”
We have been on a few dates before, but I can tell already, he isn’t like all the others. This guy stares daggers through my bullshit.
“I want you to cut it out,” he says. “What’s this thing you do, where it’s like you’re doing a show?”
“It’s just easier,” I say in my actual voice, not having intended to open up until I realize I am doing so. “Sometimes just pretending to be someone else feels safer.”
“The only thing that turns me on is seeing who you actually are,” the man says, moving his hand up my body.
“Tell me,” he asks. “Do you need me?”
“Yes,” I say, answering what I know to be true. “I do.”
“Why, baby?”
“Because I love you,” I say without thinking, then quickly try to reel it back in. “I didn’t mean it like, you know . . . It was just . . .”
“It’s okay,” he stops me. “I love you, too.”
Panic creeps in goose-bump inches up my body. This guy is different. I don’t know how yet, but he is very, very different.
“See how easy it is,” he says, “to just tell me what you’re thinking?”
Effortlessly, this man is breaking everything down to its most elemental form. Somehow, I have just let slip something I swore never to say to a man in the heat of the moment—especially without running it past an emergency preliminary hearing before a hand-picked Council of My Girlfriends and Peers.
I am terrified. My throat feels dry and the sheets beneath me are drenched in sweat and excitement. Against all logic and precaution, I feel like I can tell this man exactly where I’ve been in my past and how far down my sex and lies have taken me. I feel freedom from the cover-up, release from the conspiracy.
“I know you, Mandy,” he says. “You were bad, weren’t you?”
I nod, eyes squeezed shut tight.
“Nothing is wrong,” he says, “unless it’s untrue.”
My God, how I ache to open that little black box inside of me.
“Did you fuck a lot of guys?” the man asks. “You love sex, don’t you?”
“I have,” I say. “I do,” I say.
I can feel it now. Something changing inside me. And I make a promise to myself. I refuse to give up—until I can uncover the cause of the crash.
“Tell me everything,” the man whispers to me.
My eyes flutter open.
“Okay.”
chapter two
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The Big Break
2005
I’m standing outside the giant News Corp structure at 9:45 a.m., afraid the sky-high behemoth of an architectural phallus at 1211 Avenue of the Americas might just disappear. It is December 12, my first day as a general assignment reporter for the New York Post. My size 4 dark-blue fur-lined Balenciaga coat fits like a glove on my 143-pound six-foot-two body (all thanks to the magic of the Divorce Diet), my hair is dyed bimbo-with-a-heart-of-gold blond, and my carefully applied makeup is done to appear as if I’m not wearing any. But even with my best fashion armor on, trying to summon something like confidence, I’m having trouble mustering the courage to go inside.
The whirlwind of changes in my life, the singularly reliable constancy of chaos, is the only certainty that I can count on at the moment.
All in the last few months:
• I quit my safe job in public relations.
• I turned thirty.
• I got divorced after five years married to my college sweetheart.
• I watched my parents remarry one another (with their divorce lasting the same length of time as my doomed marriage).
• And only a few days ago, I picked up an entire lifetime of belongings, stuffed them into the trunk of a beaten-down sedan, and moved in the dead of night from Chicago to New York to return to the newspaper industry for the first time in half a decade.
It was like I had won the Most Stressful Life Events All at Once lottery. But after ten years with my college sweetheart James, I couldn’t take it any longer. I left him one day after yet another of his indiscretions was revealed. It was somewhere before the bombshell about the group bukkake he partook in with some chick off Craigslist but sometime after his confession about soliciting sexual favors from prostitutes. Somewhere before I woke up to James coming downstairs after getting oral sex from a “girlfriend” whom I’d recommended for a job and sometime after I found out he was fucking a married coworker while we were in marriage counseling.
On the bright side, I stumbled onto this great new diet.
The Divorce Diet is easy, really. You cry. You complain. And you just don’t eat.
I drink in everything around me now, trying to ignore the demons of a raging impostor complex lodged deep in my gut telling me that I don’t belong here. That I will fail. That I can’t do this.
Standing next to the giant snow-covered potted plants strategically placed in between the sidewalk and the entrance after 9/11, my eyes drift heavenward toward the enormous slab of concrete and steel towering above, which is home to not just the Post but also Rupert Murdoch’s expansive Fox News empire. Bringing my gaze back down to the ground again, I catch the shadow of Fox TV host Shepard Smith smoking a cigarette, glued to his BlackBerry while pacing furiously in front of a giant sign that says, WE REPORT. YOU DECIDE.
There is no getting around it. This is really happening.
I force my legs to move, one after the other. Through the revolving doors I go, clutching my knockoff Gucci bag, which I make a mental note to replace ASAP. I check in at the front desk.
I wait and fidget with my conspicuously naked left ring finger. That’s another thing. I need to get new rings. It feels too weird not having the gold band there, and I don’t want people to think I am weird, always fidgeting and uneasy.
As if it’s part of a pregame Welcome to News Corp show, I watch a nearly nonstop pageant of bleach and hairspray and red stilettos parading in and out of the lobby past the giant abstract mural at the front desk. I pull out my flip phone and try to look busy as I stare at the 773 number.
Yeah, this area code needs to go, too.
Steve walks down to greet me—looking only slightly older than he had when he was my editor years ago at the Daily Northwestern in the mid-’90s. Short reddish-brown hair, an intelligent smile, and the slightly worn-down look that comes from having a love for all things newspaper.
* * *
STEVE HAD FIRST reached out to me nine months ago when our journalism school email-alumni group put our names directly in each other’s in-boxes. I would occasionally sound out idiotic updates about, I don’t know, Big Ten awareness or something while I was working my very safe nine-to-five writing job for Northwestern University Medical School’s alumni magazine. The press release-y environment was a far cry from what Steve might’ve expected from the college student who’d graduated years earlier with a plum internship in the style section of the Washington Post and whom he’d championed for entertainment editor at our college daily.
“Hi, Mandy,” Steve’s email began to me back in March. “I’m on the alums list and got your recent missive, and just wanted to say hello. Also, don’t know if you still write features, but I edit the Sunday features section of the New York Post. So if you’re looking for freelance outlets, would love to hear from you.”
As I read over his message in my tiny windowless cubicle in Chicago, I let out a little yelp of excitement. Every letter in his email seemed to vibrate off the computer like a living thing—overpowering the sad little tropical desert island screen saver that formed the background on my ancient monitor.