I got an email from UberConference, a start-up here in San Francisco, saying they liked my work and wanted to collaborate in some way. I went into their office and connected with this guy, David. I was trying to get a feel for everything so I asked David, “What’s your story? How’d you end up here?”
“Well…I was a TV writer from 1990-2002. I wrote on Roseanne. I had the classic TV writer career. I was on a huge show, one of the great shows of all time. I had development deals, I wrote pilots. Around 2002, while I was married with 8 kids, 6 girls and 2 boys, my ex-wife, Marina, started struggling with depression. Not just post-partum, but real life struggles depression. She had battled with it for much of her adult life. In fact, I just found out that she had attempted suicide 2 years before we met. So anyways, she was basically incapacitated. She could barely get out of bed, she was 5’6” and she was down to 95 lbs. When I would go in the shower I would find clumps of her hair that had fallen out. I tried to get her to go to therapy for our kid’s sake but she refused, so I stopped working to try and manage our house. I had made a lot of money, I had a lot of savings, so I took a couple years off.
At the end of the two years she seemed good, I mean, she was never going to be little miss sunshine, but she could make it through the day and be a mother, in her own way. So I decided to go back to work. But, in the time I was gone, reality TV was born and the sitcom had died and I couldn’t find work. At this point I was late 40’s, and they don’t like to hire writers that age because once you cross 45 you’re no longer funny. So we entered into this long downward spiral as a family financially. I couldn’t find other types of work because I didn’t have any recent experience doing anything else.
In 2006 we lost our home to foreclosure. In 2008, 4 kids were still at home, things were so bad Marina and I agreed to split up. She went back to Germany, she’s a German citizen, with two of the kids because Germany has an incredible social welfare net. It’s amazing, they don’t have abject poverty. So she moved over there. The two kids that were still in Southern California moved in with friends and I became homeless.
I was homeless off and on for about 18 months. And when I say homeless I mean sleeping in a stairwell of a parking garage. Having nothing. I used to have a 4,000 square foot house with 3 cars and this wallet is all I have left. This is the only thing that survived from my life in 2002. My daughter made it for me. That’s why I never get rid of it.
So anyways, I’m fucked. But this is the way life is, and you’ve gotta make your way back. So I start trying to rebuild my life. It’s funny, I was talking to my 4th daughter about that time and I realized I lost everything except the love of my children, which turns out was the only thing worth keeping. That and my wallet.
So I got through it, and I start coming to visit my daughters that lived in the bay area. I also started seeing a woman in Berkeley. She was a real smarty pants, she had a PHD, she was an actual author. Not like me, this guys who writes jokes and shit like that. She was an actual highly educated person. So we started seeing each other and I’d come up from LA on rideshare and I’d tell her the stories from my trips and she found them very amusing. She told me I should write all the experiences down and put them in a book. So I started writing the stories, but then I thought ‘If I’m going to write these stories, I should probably explain why a man in his 50’s is using rideshare.’ That’s a more complicated story. I was a little worried because I didn’t want to embarrass my kids. When I’d go to their events I’d wear dress slacks and a dress shirt and have a briefcase and pretend I wasn’t homeless. Once they graduated and went off to college I thought it was okay to write about everything then. So I started this blog called ‘Tell Me Something She Said.’ It was because at the end of the day the woman I was seeing would say ‘Tell Me Something.’ So I really set out to write honestly about what had happened to me. I was blogging and posting links to it on my facebook and stuff, and I got all these friends who were so shocked that I had gone through this because they didn’t know. Then they started sharing this with other people and I got a really good response. So I closed the blog down and decided to turn it into a book. Once I finished the book I tried to get it published and there was a resounding thud. No one would touch it.
So I had to let it go. I decided to move to the Bay Area and I started applying for jobs and they asked for writing samples. On one of the applications I decided to send them my book, it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, so why not? A guy called me in and said he wasn’t going to hire me, but he loved my book and where could he buy it? I told him it was unpublished and he gave me $1,000 to use Create Space on Amazon and publish it myself. So we do that and then the company publishes an excerpt on their website, it gets picked up by long forms, and in a week 100,000 people had read it. It’s crazy. People all over the world were emailing me. I was featured in a Dutch newspaper. It was so overwhelming. Sometimes I would just be sitting around and I’d burst into tears.
Finally one day, I got an email from UberConference saying their CEO loved what I had written and would I mind coming in for a meeting. I came in and they hired me. And here I am.”