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Episode XXX: "I wouldn't want to reassure my past self. 'Keep panicking'."

Published 9/29/15
In this installment, I speak with Mallory Ortberg of The Toast. Topics include finding motivation, the Google doc that houses her ideas, George McClellan, healthy partnerships, reading comments, life lessons & more.

I’m here with Mallory Ortberg. Mallory’s a writer and an editor and the co-founder of The Toast and if you’re under thirty-five and haven’t read something she’s written I want to interview you next to find out how you function and your general world view. She’s also been featured in the Forbes “30 Under 30” list for “Media” and, just to make to her parents proud, found herself on the New York Times bestseller list for Texts from Jane Eyre. What sort of breakfast fuels someone prone to this much success?

Today I had oatmeal. Yesterday I made an egg and cheese sandwich. Those are my two favorite breakfasts, probably. Also several cups of tea, milk in. I can't enjoy my day if breakfast doesn't last at least an hour.

Milk in, my British grandmother does that. Are you British, or of the persuasion?

I've BEEN to England if that counts. Tea is good both with and without milk. Never sugar.

It doesn't count. Moving on. If my mom asks me what The Toast is, what should I tell her, verbatim?

Website! Nominally for women, nominally made of comedy, but also about everything. I never was very good at the elevator pitch.

What's the very truncated origin story?

Nicole Cliffe and I fell very much in love and decided we had to start a business in order to bind our lives together.

How'd you meet?

She was writing for the Hairpin and I was commenting on the Hairpin every day at work and we were very taken with one another's dumb jokes. So we started emailing and a few months later she bought me a ticket to Salt Lake City and we ran into one another's arms at the airport.

This movie sounds ripe for Ryan Reynolds. Why is The Toast so successful?

We found an audience that really loves us and we really love them, I think. We're not enormous, by any stretch of the imagination, but we found a niche that works for us. There are a lot of intellectually lazy people out there who vaguely remember reading Beowulf and just want to make jokes about old English rather than talk about the state of art or poetry or publishing (probably).

Is actively seeking a wider audience something that's on your agenda? Do you and Nicole run the business side of the operation yourselves?

We have a publisher that we work with that handles ad revenue. We're aware of it but don't have to run it ourselves, which is great. I think we're more interested in slow and sustainable growth than in becoming really big. I'd love to be able to hire like, 2-3 people in the next year or two and get a health insurance plan rather than try to get 30 million pageviews a month or something.

How do you define sustainable—or rather, what would being unsustainable mean to you?

Unsustainable would mean losing money and/or not being able to pay writers and ourselves.

It would appear to most people in your micro-demographic that you have "the dream job". Put them at ease: what about your day do you dislike?

MICRODEMOGRAPHIC. I like that.

Feel free to use it.

It's a lot of work. I generally write anywhere from 2-4 posts a day, and they're very rarely blog posts, it's almost all original fiction or humor or essays and a lot of our site's traffic is dependent on that. Luckily, I enjoy it, but it can also be creatively demanding, and if we have a slow day, it's kind of my fault and if I half-ass it, we look stupid and boring. Also I don't have health insurance. I'd say that's my least favorite part.

Are you on Obamacare?

I was for like two months but it was super expensive.

It's the worst.

So I dropped it.

Where do you find motivation and inspiration?

I have a Google doc where I drop all my stupid ideas as they enter my brain and I'll end up actually using maybe half of them.

That's a pretty high percentage.

Right now it's just: George McClellan/Gore Vidal & WFB/Dirtbag WJB/Questions To Ask In A Job Interview/Guy Used To Crossing Boundaries At Work/Science Says Not To Worry About The Blue Light/Celebrities Who Have Never Murdered Anyone/The Worst Birds/MRA Charlie Brown/Dirtbag Robert Frost/Dante/Another Day In The Life Of Doing What A Man’s Gotta Do/How To Tell If You Are In A Transcendentalist Novel/Amelia Bedelia/Knott’s Berry Farm Biscuits/You Know, I Actually Happen To Be Quite Wealthy/Cool For The Summer Is Over/Teens Argue About Who Sets Up Weed/Are You My Mother?/The Writer Goes Outside/How To Tell If You Are In A Modernist Poem/Calvin Reviews Children’s Books/Ayn Rand’s Xena The Warrior Princess.

I've been wanting to write something angry about George McClellan for half a year now but I don't know if I'm ever going to do it.

Why not?

I never get much past "I HATE HIM". I once listened to "Team of Rivals" in my car and I had to pull over because I was yelling at him so much. He was such a sack of garbage!! Always writing home to his wife like "Dear Mary, Today the boys asked me to run for President again. Told them I couldn't dream of it. Single handedly fought Jefferson Davis on the Potomac, but no one saw me do it. Love, George." He just LIED ALL THE TIME and WOULD NEVER ATTACK.

You wrote about him in 2014: http://the-toast.net/2014/03/24/i-hate-george-mcclellan

Oh shit, so I did! I should take him off the list, then. This is the other problem. I will every now and again start writing something only to realize I wrote about it a year or two ago

oh, good for me, I'm glad I wrote this.

Happy to help. I can't imagine you're a hateful person. Am I wrong?

I don't hate anyone but George McClellan! I mean, oh man, like everyone I struggle with enormous reserves of insecurity and envy which curdles into an inability to feel joy on anyone else's behalf if left unchecked but I try very much to check it.

I imagine starting a company with someone you like as a person can be difficult and yet ultimately incredibly rewarding. How has your relationship with Nicole morphed through the process?

She has been an absolute angel because yes, as you have so astutely guessed, I sometimes forget things like "meetings I have agreed to attend".

So she's more organized.

Yes. Things have certainly gotten easier since we hired Nikki Chung, our managing editor. So fewer of those responsibilities have depended on me but Nicole and I agreed when we started the company that whatever else, we were only allowed to complain about each other to each other, and that's a promise I've actually been able to keep. So we never let anything fester or grumble about the other to someone else, building up our own sense of frustration without giving the other person the opportunity to improve.

That's an excellent idea, about only complaining to the other. Do you often complain to each other about each other?

I wouldn't say often but when it comes up, we talk to each other first. I've had a couple of times when Nicole has emailed or called to tell me that I've done something that's selfish or thoughtless that unloads a lot of extra work on her and she always says it in such a way that it makes it really clear and obvious what I need to do. So she's kind but also doesn't let me get away with things and I’ve done it less often with her, but if she does something that bothers her, I have to call her and tell her myself.

If The Toast never happened, what would you being doing now?

Well, I suppose I'd either be freelancing or if that weren't financially doable, I'd still be working in publishing or as a copyeditor and writing on the side.

What's Mallory Ortberg doing in 10 years?

I would love at that point to be the silent and supremely wealthy power behind The Toast just collecting checks and maybe writing a post every month while some brilliant wunderkind does all the work. And I would like to have written by then...let us say three to five more books.

On?

Horror, some more jokes, and TBD.

Have you written horror before? Are you being ironic?

I have, sort of. I do a series on the Toast called children's stories made horrific. Like thus:

http://the-toast.net/2015/07/14/childrens-stories-made-horrific-the-house-at-pooh-corner

OK this is good. How often do you read the comments?

Every day.

And how has that affected the way you write?

I don't know! I mean, I think the commenting at the old Hairpin definitely influenced my style. Our commenters are generally very thoughtful, polite folks so disagreement or pushback isn't common, which means that when I see it I take it pretty seriously.

How often do people try to engage you IRL after finding out who you are?

Do you mean, like people I meet throughout the course of a day? Finding out my job?

Yes.

It doesn't happen very often. Maybe if I'm at a conference or an event related to writing/the internet. Generally if I meet someone IRL and I say I run a website, they're just sort of "oh, cool, the internet's a big place and i don't know that particular corner of it".

Are you ever conflicted in contemplating the space between how you define yourself through your writing and how you define yourself personally and individually?

Nope! Sorry that's not much of an answer haha. But no.

Okay—I'll take it, but: Do you think you're funnier in person or in writing?

Oh, in writing. I'm generally pleasant and fun to be around with friends, but I'm not, you know, a laff riot.

"Generally pleasant and fun to be around" is such a way to describe someone not present.

Hah. "I can't think of a reason to object to them, so..." I mean, most of the time, in a social situation, people don't want to be entertained. They want to have an actual conversation. Even if it's a funny conversation, no one wants to be friends with someone who is performing for them.

That should be on every birthday card for 24 year olds. Maybe 23.

Oh it is definitely a lesson I have learned. My family rolls their eyes whenever I go into one of what they call "my bits". Comedy is a job, not a way to get people to love you in your daily life.

What other life lessons could you have told yourself ten years ago?

Oh gosh. Ten years ago, I'd be eighteen. I don't know that I’d have listened to a whole lot. Probably "don't go to that college". Yeah, I’d have told myself to go to a different college.

Where did you go to college?

Azusa Pacific University. It's a small Christian college in suburban Southern California. It was not a good fit for me. It's not a bad school, but I shouldn't have gone there.

Are you not Jewish?

I am not even the slightest bit Jewish. I am Presbyterian. From a long line of pastors.

Are you sure?

I didn't even know what lox was until last week.

This is mildly upsetting.

https://twitter.com/mallelis/status/643933302206808064

It's true!

Okay, what would you have told yourself five years ago?

Gosh, five years ago, uhhh. I think five years ago I was at a job I really didn't like and trying to cobble together some kind of a life and the desperation and panic I felt fueled a lot of my writing and trying to get writing jobs. So I wouldn't want to reassure my past self. "Keep panicking". “If you don't do a lot of work right now you will never get the job you want".

How do you fight complacency now that you have the job you want?

Well, having daily deadlines helps and there is SO MUCH great writing out there that I see because of the internet I would not have seen say, ten or fifteen years ago. I'm often inspired by other people's great work.

Who are your favorites?

Oh man. I think Vanessa Willoughby writes some really wonderful fiction. Carmen Maria Machado wrote this weird, crazy, bizarre piece of fiction about Law & Order: SVU last year that just bowled me over. It's not a piece, exactly, but the twitter account Evghenia is on Mars is really wonderful. And Caille Millner!

Is it by happenstance that these are four women?

Sure! I'm sure there are good boy writers too. Shrill, obviously. He's terrific.

What percent of The Toast readers do you guess are male?

Oh, I actually know this one! Between 30 and 35 percent.

Is that where you want it to be?

I don't have any strong feelings about how many men read the site as long as they behave themselves. I do not object to their becoming fans of mine.

When you're writing, do you have a certain demographic in mind, or a certain commenter, or...?

Not especially, I don't think. I will sometimes think, if I am writing on a certain topic, like "Oh I have a strong feeling some medievalists will like this, or such and such a person will want to get in a fun argument about this". And sometimes people will ask if I'll cover a certain topic and I occasionally do.

We're nearly out of time, so I'll ask one last one. What do you want someone to know about either Mallory Ortberg or The Toast that they wouldn't have any way of knowing otherwise?

Oh gosh that's difficult because mostly everything I don't mind people knowing, I yell about online at some point. So you probably already know I owned every Star Wars Expanded Universe novel published up to and including the year 1998. Other stuff, if people don't know, it's because I prefer to keep it private.

I'll take it. Thanks for your time, and your words, Mallory.

Anytime! These were good questions. You're an ace interviewer. *chucks you condescendingly on chin* For a boy.