I Like You Just the Way I Am
Read I Like You Just the Way I Am Online
Authors: Jenny Mollen
Tags: #Actress, #Biography & Autobiography, #Essays, #Humor, #Nonfiction, #Retail
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.
“I’m just looking for a girl who isn’t drama.”
—MY HUSBAND, THE FIRST NIGHT WE MET.
(I love you)
Contents
1.
Behind Every Crazy Woman, There’s an Even More Batshit Mother
3.
All the Best Men Are Either Gay, Married, or Your Therapist
7.
Hand Jobs: The Fine Art of Getting a Mani-Pedi Next to Your Husband’s Ex (Who Hates You)
11.
Nobody Wants to Be Your Fucking Bridesmaid
15.
The Bloody Truth About Hollywood
Author’s Note
The stories you are
about to read are basically true. Though I tried to do my best in depicting the events as I remembered them, there are exaggerations, some characters are composites, and some time periods are condensed. The only thing I’m sure of with complete certainty is that I was really thin and cute the whole time I was writing this.
Introduction
Hi, I’m Jenny Mollen,
an actress and writer living in Los Angeles. I’m also a wife, married to a famous guy, which is infinitely annoying, because all the free stuff he gets never comes in my size. Sometimes I wish I’d married Ellen.
Now, I’m self aware enough to know that underneath my charming exterior, I’m an insecure mess of a person who hates herself. But despite all that, it’s still pretty great being me. Why? Because I don’t pretend I’m
not
crazy. You guys, I am! But so are you! “Crazy” is just a word boring people use to describe fun people. And I am really, really fun!
What you’re about to read is a collection of stories about my life. It’s a book about not doing the right thing. Yes, it’s about me (not doing the right thing), but it is also a book about women, all of whom come in two types: those who are totally batshit crazy, and those who are liars. It’s a book about acting on impulses, plotting elaborate hoaxes, and refusing to acknowledge boundaries in any form. Because why not? You’re already doing it secretly anyway. And reading your ex’s horoscope every week isn’t going to help you control his life. No, you need to hide in his bushes, break into his e-mail, or kidnap his dog if you want to effect any real change.
We are a generation of females that never had to burn our bras, get a back-alley Mexican boob job, or bleed into a makeshift cloth diaper because tampons weren’t invented. Our generation is fighting for something different: honesty. Decorum went out the window when Madonna made the movie
Truth or Dare,
ladies. We don’t need to be perfect. We need to be real.
This is my mission statement, my manifesto, and my plea to women everywhere: Indulge your inner sociopath. People are judging you anyway. That’s what people do. I’m judging you right now for reading this book. There is zero reason to be ashamed of announcing and acting upon your real feelings.
Life is too short for bullshit. I’m thirty-three, and my tits drop about half an inch a year. In other words, it’s all downhill from here. Someday very soon, ladies, we are going to be whatever fetish comes after “cougar,” unable to wear shirts without sleeves, and full of cell phone cancer. It is our obligation to live lives that convince our children not to ship us off to retirement homes because we are still kind of entertaining to have at parties. This book is utterly who I am when I am not trying to impress or protect someone’s feelings. It is my hope that you read it and become better acquainted with who you really are and what you really want. Which, let’s be honest, is most likely someone else’s e-mail password.
1.
Behind Every Crazy Woman, There’s an Even More Batshit Mother
My mom was always
more of a friend than an authority figure. But not like a laid-back friend who comes over to watch
Homeland
—more like an annoying friend who comes over with two dudes you don’t know and starts doing body shots off your sleeping roommate at 3
A.M.
on a Wednesday.
Everyone’s mom is fucking crazy to some degree, and my mom is no different. Except that she’s
completely
different because she is infinitely crazier than your mom. She is a product of Ashland, Oregon, in the 1960s, a reaction to a generation of Betty Homemakers and Goody Two-Shoes, and a man-eater with a serious penchant for partying. In her youth, my mom looked like a real-life Barbie. She has blond hair, one green eye and one blue eye, and tits that I inherited only after surgery. Though she always emphasized brains over beauty—by talking shit about any woman who didn’t make her own money and own at least one copy of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
—my mom’s identity was heavily wrapped up in her physical appearance, and attention from the opposite sex was a prize I could never compete with. After dissecting her psychologically over the years, I feel I understand why she never stayed in one place for more than a year, why she’s been married to every name in Paul Simon’s song “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and why after a summer at sleepaway camp, she sat my sister and me down to tell us we needed to go live with our father because she didn’t “know how to be a mom anymore.” (All of this was a step up from
her
mom, a lady who allowed my sister and me to sleep in cribs when we visited up until age nine.)
At times she felt like my child, especially when she would remind me that in another lifetime, I was the parent and she was the daughter. But mostly she felt like an older sister I was always trying to keep up with.
And according to everyone around me, I had it great! My mom was the “fun mom.” She was the woman who had her nipple pierced in front of my eighth-grade boyfriend. The woman who one time disclosed to a table full of dinner guests that I had recently taken a Bic razor and accidentally given my pussy a mohawk. And the woman who, when I was fifteen, told me I needed to get a fake ID if I wanted to keep hanging out with her.
* * *
“It’s just the way
it is. You have one week to figure it out before your spring break,” Mom threatened through the phone. At this point, I was living with my dad in Arizona, but every March I went out to visit my mom in San Diego for a week of mother/daughter debauchery.
“I’m serious, Jen. I had like three IDs when I was your age. Maybe four.”
“You were dating a drug dealer! I live in Scottsdale.” I tried to contain my barking so as not to let my father hear our discussion.
“Just figure it out. Okay?” I heard the click of her thirty-pound cell phone hanging up.
There was no way I was going to figure it out. I was a sophomore in high school in one of the most conservative states in the country. I was a prep who wore business suits to school and carried a briefcase. I took myself incredibly serious and always threw big words around to let my peers know I was destined for a better life than them. The downside of elitism in high school is not having access to any illegal shit. I was on student government and the president of FACS (Fine Arts Community Service, a fake club I made up strictly for college applications). I had a gay boyfriend who claimed to be straight but was still on the tumbling team, and the two of us spent our wildest nights dancing around my bedroom acting out the
Aladdin
soundtrack. I would never even have seen marijuana if it weren’t for my mom having gotten me stoned the summer before eighth grade because she felt it might prevent me from smoking cigarettes.
I decided the easiest route would be to look for an older person I resembled, then ask them if they had a spare credit card, license, or gym membership with their birthday on it that I could possibly borrow. Unfortunately, everyone I approached seemed uneager to help.
So I arrived in San Diego the following week empty-handed.
“Unbelievable,” my mom moaned as she handed me her coffee mug filled with Coors Light and flipped a U-turn out of the airport.
For the first two days, we lay low. We saw a few movies, tried to talk about periods, and even played a couple rounds of “Which of your husbands had the most money?” But by the end of the week, my mom was restless and in need of a bronski. She decided our only option was to cross the border into Mexico.
“Nobody cards in Mexico!” she said, slipping into a bikini.
“I still think you have to be eighteen.”
“You’re basically eighteen. Want a thong or a full bottom?” she asked, holding up two equally slutty bikinis, the kind I imagine she got for free with her last six-pack of beer.
Within the hour, we were headed south. We stopped to pick up Mandy, my mom’s manicurist, and Mandy’s cokehead sister, Cody. Mandy was petite, redheaded, and surprisingly not Asian. She met my mom at a Shirley MacLaine “past lives” seminar in La Jolla several years prior and had been doing her acrylic French manicures ever since. She had a boyfriend I still don’t believe existed and a secret tattoo of flames just above her vagina, which she constantly flashed to strangers as if it were the most hilarious thing ever. Mandy was one of those seemingly innocent, shy girls from a wealthy family who mysteriously ends up stripping in college and having eight abortions and an annulled marriage to a guy named Feather.
Her little sister was a different story. Cody looked like she’d been hanging on to the back of a motorcycle since the late ’80s. She was at least six feet tall with teal hair and a bald spot near her bangs, which she used to pick and eat. She was thirty, which to me at fifteen meant her life was pretty much over. Cody was a bad drunk before she started drinking. She was brash and sloppy and always had one nipple peeking out of her lace halter top. It was hard to believe she and Mandy knew each other, let alone shared the same parents. My mom, Mandy, and Cody all had college degrees, financial stability, and the right to vote. But looking around the car, it was obvious that, even without a license, I’d be the driver getting us home.
* * *
After a thirty-five-minute ride
past the border, we were in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. Rosarito is a coastal town on the Baja Peninsula notorious for fun, sun, and underage drinking. Tourism dominated the Anglo-friendly economy. You couldn’t walk ten feet without accidentally getting your hair braided or having someone write your name on a grain of rice. The lobster tacos and ocean views were without comparison, but the real reason everyone congregated there was to drink their body weight in cervezas.
The girls and I pulled into Papas and Beer around twelve noon. By twelve fifteen, I was being turned away for being underage.
“But she forgot her ID in the car,” my mom insisted to the bouncer.
“Then go back to your car. Isn’t that it right there?” He pointed to the convertible we’d just hopped out of, no more than twenty feet from where we were currently standing.
Busted. She took a different approach.
“Fine, we’ll go in. Jen, wait in the car.” When the bouncer wasn’t looking, she whispered in my ear for me to meet her behind the club. “I guess she’s just gonna wait in the car,” Mom announced, as if the thought of me not having fun was somehow going to guilt the bouncer into breaking the law.
I wandered around back and saw a large fence covered in black tarp separating the club from the rest of the beach. I tried to look in but saw nothing. Exhausted, I bought a mango on a stick, sat down by the fence, and considered getting a caricature of my head riding a whale while I waited for my mom’s plan B to go into effect. I fantasized about ditching my mom and her posse and disappearing into the streets of Rosarito. Maybe my mom would think I’d been kidnapped and frantically search for me. Maybe I’d meet a new Mexican mom who made tortillas from scratch and loved doing my laundry.
