by
Shonda Rhimes
I started watching Grey’s Anatomy, created by Shonda
Rhimes, back when it first went on the air and was immediately in love with the
writing. I adored the characters of Meredith Grey and Christina Yang. I loved
George. I watched it every Thursday for years, until life intervened. Six
months ago, I started going back and watching it from the beginning, as time
permits. (Which means I’m only through episode five or so.) But the writing
still inspires me.
A friend recommended
this book to me a year or more ago but it took me this long to pick it up; I'm
sorry I waited. It was wonderful! As a woman, writer, and mother, there was so
much that resonated for me. I found it truly inspirational and just plain fun.
Now, Rhimes starts out
by saying that she loves to lie, but I find more truth in her fiction than a
lot of other places in life.
Her tone is completely conversational,
as if you were right there with her. About having to choose between toilet
paper and red wine and the toilet paper not always winning, she says, “Did I just see you give me a look? Was that .
. . did you just judge me? No, you
are not about to come up into this
book and judge me. That is not how we
are going to start off this journey.”
Gotta love it. I’m not
sure I know how to write a review of this book that could possibly be better
than the woman’s own words, so forgive me if this is mostly quotes. I’ll
editorialize where I can.
“There’s a hum that
happens inside my head when I hit a certain writing rhythm, a certain speed.
When laying track goes from feeling like climbing a mountain on my hands and
knees to feeling like flying effortlessly through the air. Like breaking the
sound barrier. Everything inside me just shifts. I break the writing barrier.
And the feeling of laying track changes, transforms, shifts from exertion into
exultation.”
I call it the writer’s
high. It’s incredible and I totally agree.
The book, the year,
started with her sister telling her, “You never say yes to anything.”
Shonda is an introvert,
an extreme introvert, highly gifted
with words and, it seems to me, highly intelligent. Saying yes to things is
terrifying, but she begins doing it anyway, even if it finds her “licking the
dust at the bottom of the Xanax bottle because oh yeah, I don’t take Xanax anymore, it’s been twelve
years since Xanax was my friend.”
She says yes to giving
the commencement speech at Dartmouth, hyperventilates and forgets about it for
five and a half months, leaving her two weeks to write the speech.
“When I first got a
publicist, I told him and his team that my main reason for having a publicist
was so that I never ever had to do any publicity. Everyone thought this was a
joke. I was not joking.”
“It’s one thing for
people to know you are nervous and have stage fright. They are sympathetic to
that. But how do you admit to people that you don’t remember the biggest
interview of your career? That is weird.”
But this is who she is.
Nature or nurture? I think largely nature and her parents let her be her own
person.
“I was just an unusual
kid. Lucky for me, my parents held unusual in high regard. And so when I wanted
to play with the cans in the pantry for hours on end, my mother didn’t tell me
to stop messing around with the food and go somewhere else to play. Instead,
she declared it a sign of creativity, closed the pantry door and let me be.”
Lucky for all of us.
“As Watergate played
out on the tiny black and white set my mother had dragged into the kitchen and
balanced on a chair just outside the pantry doors, my three-year-old
imagination made a world of its own. The big cans of yams ruled over the peas
and green beans while the tiny citizens of Tomato Paste Land planned a
revolution designed to overthrow the government. There were hearings and failed
assassination attempts and resignations . . . Man, that pantry was fun.”
Being asked to be on
Jimmy Kimmel? Not so much.
“My left eye starts to
twitch. I tell myself that it’s okay, because it is twitching only in what I am
sure is the tiniest, most unnoticeable way. Nobody can tell it is twitching but
me.
‘Wow, your eye is
really twitching,’ Joan Rater, head writer at Grey’s anatomy, informs me with
great authority. The whole writing staff crows around to peer at my eyeball
jumping around in my head.
‘Honey,’ my toddler,
Emerson, takes my face in her hands and gravely informs me, ‘your eye is
broken. It’s busted, honey.’”
The Mommy Scorecard,
kids, dreams and doing. This book is a memoir based around the idea of saying
yes, so it’s a series of vignettes that are interrelated but not necessarily
following one right into another. It’s a window on her world - vivid, honest, engaging, funny and wonderful.
I’m so glad she decided to share it. Take advantage of that.
