Table Of Content

Copyright Copyright © 2013, 2018 by Kelly Williams Brown Cover design by Brigid Pearson. Cover photo by William Bragg. Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc. Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. Grand Central Life & Style Hachette Book Group 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104 grandcentrallifeandstyle.com twitter.com/grandcentralpub Originally published in hardcover and ebook by Grand Central Publishing in May 2013. First Revised Edition: March 2018 Grand Central Life & Style is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. The Grand Central Life & Style name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591. All line drawings by the author. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959713 ISBNs: 978-1-5387-2913-7 (revised trade pbk.), 978-1-4555-1689-6 (ebook) E3-20180724-JV-PC CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication A Note on the Second Edition Introduction 1. Get Your Mind Right Accepting non-Singular-Seahorse-ness, leaving behind things that are Not a Valid Long-Term Plan, and the value of Real Talk. 2. Domesticity Find an apartment, obtain cute but inexpensive furniture, clean effectively, and generally avoid living in an unlivable hellhole. 3. Cooking Ramen can only take you so far, so stock a kitchen, learn the basics, and maybe, someday, consider throwing a dinner party. 4. Fake It Till You Make It The world only sees your outermost layer (unless you tell it about your HPV, in which case it’ll know about your insides, too). Make that layer presentable. 5. Get a Job Find a job, negotiate for your salary, dress for not-sleeping-with-co- workers success, and shut down office creepers. 6. Money Live cheaply, celebrate your poverty, and strive toward the day when forty dollars doesn’t seem like too much to pay for pants. 7. Maintenance You can have nice things—if you treat them like they are, in fact, nice things. 8. Friends and Neighbors Ask people on friend-dates, deal with neighborly sex noises, and give apologies worth accepting. 9. Love Dates versus non-dates, fighting like a grown-up, and how to tolerate his or her unbearable friends. 10. Times Were Tough Cope gracefully and eventually move past emergencies large and small via the resilience of the human spirit and the power of safety pins. 11. Families These people changed your diapers, so you owe them one. Convince them your (metaphorical) diapers no longer need changing. 12. Conclusion Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Kelly Williams Brown Newsletters To Barbara, Joel, and Barbara A NOTE ON THE SECOND EDITION Dear Reader, Feel free to skip this part. Any of the book, really, but this little section especially, because it has just one concrete, useful life strategy, and here it is: Pour liquids from one container into the other over the sink; pour solids over a garbage can. Assuming the solid in question is, say, sugar and not your collection of loose sapphires, in which case, maybe just pour over a big empty bowl. So here is a story: When I was twenty-six, I was a reporter in Salem, Oregon, which is my real-life Pawnee. My beat was events and music and nightlife and any of the things human beings do, not because they have to but because they want to. I also wrote a weekly column of whatever nonsense I came up with, like crowning the cutest baby animal at the Polk County Fair, or writing a musical about the time everyone thought we were finally getting a Trader Joe’s but it was a mean trick, or spending an afternoon “solving” “mysteries.” Sample Mystery: Wait, we have an entire store dedicated to clocks? What? Findings: Yeah, we do, and it has a whole bunch of clocks. These clocks are all going their own way in terms of ticking and chiming; they were supervised by an intense owner who answered all my questions with one word, then watched me as I moved among his precious timepieces. In fact, this experience introduced more questions than answers, but they remain unanswered; I couldn’t spend more than twenty minutes there. It is alarming to step out of your Parks and Rec life and into a David Lynch movie. People—again, not just my mother!—asked me if I “was ever going to write a book,” which is sort of like asking an aspiring actor if they were “ever going to star in a movie.” Plus, I had no idea what I could possibly write a book about. I lack the focus to write the kind of dense nonfiction that takes a decade of research (A Cohort of Scoundrels, Scholars, and Princes: How Truman’s Forestry Department Changed Everything and Everyone, Forever [and What It Tells Us about Sexuality and the American Dream]. I lack the creativity to write fiction; every time I do, I end up just telling one of my own anecdotes with my name changed to Betsy. The world does not need my memoir. Plus, at the time, I did not have a computer, nor the money to buy one. Challenges! One afternoon, in an attempt to get the community to basically write my column for me, I posed a question on Facebook: What concrete, tangible skills should you have by the age of thirty? There were a lot of very thoughtful replies, though, sadly, not enough to make a column out of. Then, a little while later, a friend complimented me on giving good advice and said maybe I should write an advice book. I felt, based on the way my fridge smelled at that very moment, that I was in no place to tell anyone anything about how to live. When I was twenty-two, my friend Rachel (who, at the time, was twenty-seven and capable and wise and generous and lived in a tasteful apartment with actual furniture) gave me a wonderful gift. We were driving back to the newsroom of the small Mississippi town where we were both reporters, and… well, now, I can’t remember what problem I was crying about. There were a lot of possibilities. Maybe I was lamenting that I had no real furniture, as mine was made of particleboard and had literally dissolved when I moved during a rainstorm. Maybe I was sobbing because I was only a few months into my first grown- up job and, while I was doing what I had always dreamed of doing, I was also consistently screwing every single last thing up, and felt like I had tricked my editor into hiring me, and any moment I would be caught and exposed for the fraud I was. Maybe I was agonizing over my long-term relationship with a truly wonderful guy who, I knew, was not right for me and vice versa. Maybe she had just treated me to a Sonic Cherry Limeade because my take-home pay was $610 every two weeks and I had student loans and my post–Hurricane Katrina rent was a bargain at $450, which meant I was always overdrawing my bank account and relied on what I called the Walmart Check-Bouncin’ Grift. In short, I was twenty-two and my life was nothing but chaos and shambles, and it showed no signs of ever being otherwise.