I Swear This Story Is True

How do I know so much about cultural insanity? Let me tell you ...

Apparently, a huge chunk of Substack’s top earners use AI to write their newsletters.

How tragic. ChatGPT has nothing on ChatLIZ.

And while I do love when you pay me …

Writing my newsletter is not my job; it is a virus that infected my central nervous system like a bite from a rabid raccoon. So, today, in honor of this momentous occasion — Burn It All Down’s 100th send — I have a very special episode, wholly written by these typing fingers and generated by the life I live.

Thank you for all of your support, my beloved readers.

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cue the paparazzi flashes.

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Nearly ten years ago, I started working in Hollywood by fluke.

At my first job in Los Angeles, I wrote clickbait headlines for a start-up media company above a tattoo parlor on Melrose. A few months later, after the office moved down the street to a storefront by a great dive bar called “The Snake Pit,” I got an email asking if I was interested in a social media job at a new Netflix talk show. By fall, I found myself parking my little blue car on the studio lot where I worked for Chelsea Handler.

Internet Killed the Talk Show Host

My Hollywood dream was screenwriting, but in a town full of dreamers, I was a social media strategist. And my timing was accidentally perfect. Tech companies were riding into town, excited to funnel billions of dollars into disrupting the entertainment industry (it worked). I was competent in something rare that everyone needed, and it provided me a lot of opportunity to make vertical videos and explain things about phones to successful people who were threatened by my existence.

In the spring of 2019, a Facebook Watch show I produced wrapped, and out of unemployed desperation, I produced another project for that now-defunct streaming platform, a series of cross-country dairy farm shoots that ended with me negotiating the van keys back from a PA who had a mental health crisis in rural Minnesota. It was so terrifying that we called an ambulance to pick him up at the airport in Minneapolis on the day we flew back West. After that, I had a “What the fuck am I doing?” moment and decided I needed stability in my work life.

say “cheese.”

When I recovered from keeping farmer’s hours, I decided to network more brazenly, and reached out to anyone I genuinely liked and wanted to get coffee with or thought might be able to offer me a job in development. Development jobs (RIP Hollywood) were the most stable because they weren’t tied to the success of one project and often came with benefits.

I had a memorable coffee with a smart and lovely development executive at Quibi, the mobile-only streaming service that spent $2 billion and lasted six months. At the time, I couldn’t go to a party in Los Angeles without meeting at least three people who were making a short-form series for that app that made no sense, and I was curious about what was going on over there. I didn’t get intel. I’m not sure there was any. She wanted to “pick my brain” about the company’s social media approach, told me they were looking for an executive to lead those efforts, and asked if I was interested.

Certainly not.

That summer, I raised my rates and was quite content driving to the surface of the sun in Calabasas to work for Will Smith’s digital content factory. This was pre-slap, and all celebrities are awful, but Will regularly visited the office in his golf clothes and brought an uplifting vibe that included high-fiving most of us. I wrote a lot of Instagram captions, ate free lunch, and produced a back-to-school photoshoot for Jaden Smith’s brand of biodegradable bottled water. When I least expected it, because I was deep in the Valley participating in lucrative absurdity, my networking came through, and just after Labor Day, I started working for Oprah, who was about to relaunch her book club as part of a big development deal with Apple TV+.

Getting sued by Oprah (Ms. Winfrey as we called her on the inside) is not on my Best Life Vision Board®, so I was hesitant to write about any of this until now. My fear of getting sued by a billionaire is real, but my need to tell this story is realer. My time with Ms. Winfrey is a key piece in the puzzling path that led me to name the Age of Unhingement™, let alone write about it for three years. I think I’ll be OK because I’m not talking shit. I have a lot of reverence for Ms. Winfrey, who is a creative genius and a singular legend of pop culture. Yes, working for her took my last hinge, obviously, but it also changed my life and taught me invaluable lessons about media, money, and power.

My third week on the job, upstairs at the Apollo, at a cocktail reception for the book club’s relaunch, waiting for Ms. Winfrey to take the stage with Ta-Nehisi Coates, I was reprimanded by her head of PR for an email I sent that included a joke about taking down Reese Witherspoon’s book club.

“That sentence could end up in The New York Times,” she said in a tone that would give any Jew who’s just trying to lighten the mood instant diarrhea.

Six months later, Ms. Winfrey announced American Dirt as the next pick for her book club, a memorable moment in cancel culture because Twitter was still Twitter. Debates about race and cultural appropriation were ripe for the trending, and American Dirt was about Mexican cartels and undocumented immigration. Years before, the author, who was paid a multi-million dollar advance, had written a personal essay referring to herself as white and then shifted her identity, ostensibly for the book’s promotional narrative, to Puerto Rican. All of this set off a massive conversation about who gets to tell which stories and the publishing industry’s glaring lack of representation. Crazy content — like photos of a book party centerpiece featuring fake barbed wire on a border — rolled out for days as if goddess herself wanted to keep the conversation going.

You can read all about it in an article that indeed made the front page of that Sunday’s New York Times and included this snippet:

After Ms. Winfrey’s pick, the actresses Salma Hayek, Gina Rodriguez and Yalitza Aparicio posted shots of themselves holding the book, which had been sent to them by Ms. Winfrey’s producers. By Friday, Ms. Hayek and Ms. Rodriguez had deleted their posts.

Just following orders, I was one of Ms. Winfrey’s unnamed producers who put Salma Hayek in the line of fire. My cortisol levels could not have been higher. And less than two months later, when the world locked down for covid, my back was so fucked up that I was horizontal, working from my couch with my laptop on my stomach, during the last week anyone was in the office. At the time, I was in talks to produce a Quibi talk show hosted by a sexologist. A few weeks into lockdown, they emailed to see if I was still interested, but I knew I had to see my “stable” job through the pandemic.

The pandemic was a surreal experience for everyone, but during the height of quarantine, I was Zooming with Oprah from a busted IKEA table in my tiny apartment and producing Instagram lives for her book club. The authors were not who you would call digital natives, and that meant I had to rehearse with them, each of us on one of my two burner Instagram accounts, to make sure they knew how to accept her invite to join. I cherish the memories of the private Instagram lives I had with two Pulitzer Prize winners and Eckhart Tolle’s assistant.

One morning that summer, my boss asked me to pitch a podcast I was developing to Ms. Winfrey with twenty minutes notice. The vibe in LA at the time was, uh, dystopian. I had the kind of insomnia that makes one pray to be shot with an elephant-grade tranquilizer. For some reason I thought it was a good idea to read Parable of the Sower. There’d been an earthquake in the middle of the night. I was still on my first coffee when I got the Zoom invite. I left my body, but I nailed it. After I ran through my pitch deck, all the other wenches on that call had to silently watch me volley ideas around with Ms. Winfrey and get her stamp of approval.

By the time that Apple deal ended in 2022, I was burnt out to a crisp and had no concept of reality. The book club was moving to Ms. Winfrey’s website in New York, but I wasn’t getting involved with the digitized corpse of the magazine world when I needed a sanitarium. So, I lived out a dream I didn’t know I had: I quit my job and was simultaneously let go with a very generous severance package.

Much gratitude to Ms. Winfrey.

I’m only out here, living my best work life, because she gifted me the podcast brainstorm that made me fear no meeting and the seed money to lie down for six months before I started my own consulting business.

My beautiful apartment is also part of her legacy because my landlords are gay men of a certain generation. When they heard I might Zoom with Oprah in their fourplex, no other applicant stood a chance. I moved in about halfway through 2021 and put my desk in a walk-in closet, a valiant attempt to create work-life balance in my new home. Last year, I turned my office closet into my tiny yoga studio.

here I am in my former office closet. one of my brilliant colleagues, who I miss deeply, pinned my Zoom box and would send me screenshots of my facial expressions.

When I cleaned out that office closet, I found a copy of the final book I worked on during my tenure directing content development for Ms. Winfrey’s Reading Community. It was The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck, who is a social scientist and the mother supreme of … life coaches. After seeing that book again, which uses Dante’s The Divine Comedy as a framework for attaining personal integrity, I realized that Martha Beck had brainwashed me.

“She teaches us how to read the internal signals that are always leading us toward our true path and how to recognize what we actually yearn for, rather than what our culture sells us,” says the copy on the inside of The Way of Integrity book jacket. I read it for work, didn’t do any of the exercises, and never revisited it, but I am, without a doubt, on my true path yearning correctly.

I started writing again about a year after Martha Beck brainwashed me into wholeness. From the first time I hit “send,” my newsletter was a space to just be ME. I developed a writing obsession and decided to write a book proposal, which was another harrowing journey. But when I was bopping around Brooklyn in my little puffer jacket last month, taking in all the new sights and sounds so happily, it smacked me out of nowhere, like every big idea I’ve had for my book, that what I’m really writing is a memoir and I’m not done living the story.

she might brainwash you, consider yourself warned.

I’ll make better sense of this wildly transformative time in my life a few years from now, I’m sure. But one thing I already know is that I have no plans to become a miserable old bitch or a sad stagnant hoe. Life is for living and trying and trying again and letting people watch you try because why not get over yourself and put on a show?

More on that next time because this is getting long and I have a lot more to say on the topic of how healing it is to not give a fuck in this fake-ass rodeo.

100 editions of Burn It All Down, and the world is indeed burning, my friends. Don’t look at me like that; I didn’t light the match. I’m only grinning like this because I’m psyched to keep writing as it goes.

Here’s to a million more.

Less Lesson’s More Blessin’s™

Liz