My Greatest Hits
How Nick Hornby's novel Juliet, Naked taught me to celebrate my wins instead of bemoaning my losses.
We’ve all seen High Fidelity, the film starring John Cusack as Rob Gordon, a self-absorbed asshole, terrible boyfriend, and record store owner who goes on a journey of self-discovery, turns into a pretty decent guy, and gets the girl.
During his transformation journey, Rob comes face-to-face with the mistakes of his past and makes a lot of mixtapes. But he makes lists, too. Lots of lists. Lists of things like his top 5 most memorable breakups, his top 5 dream jobs, and the top 5 things he misses about Laura—the girlfriend who dumped him and broke his heart.
So, when I sat down to write this post, I remembered reading about a list Rob makes in the novel High Fidelity (Nick Hornby’s first) that didn’t make it into the movie. I went looking for that list in preparation for writing this post. But I was wrong.
I read Nick Hornby’s first novel, High Fidelity, in preparation for my graduate lecture on music in literature. I read a lot of short stories and novels for my graduate lecture. I’ll list them for you someday, because it’s a great list. But when I pulled my paperback copy of High Fidelity off my bookshelf and dug my old reading journals out of the closet, I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Because the list I was thinking of wasn’t in High Fidelity. And it wasn’t a list—it was a passage from a different Hornby novel that inspired a list.
High Fidelity didn’t make the cut for my graduate lecture—the first draft of my lecture was way too Hornby-heavy, and I preferred Hornby’s Juliet, Naked. That novel not only made it into my graduate lecture, I discovered as I wrote this post that it’s where I found the inspiration for a list I made—a list that changed my life. Or at least, my perspective on my life.
At the beginning of Chapter 10, the protagonist, Annie, emails her new pen pal, Tucker, this question:
“What do you do if you think you’ve wasted fifteen years of your life?”
I was intrigued—yes, what do you do when you’ve wasted years of your life? I wanted to know, because I’d been there.
When I read Juliet, Naked, I’d recently gone through a bad breakup, I’d finally ditched an on-again/off-again relationship that had spanned twenty years of my life. I was no longer heartbroken, I wasn’t missing my ex. I didn’t love him anymore. But I was grieving the loss of twenty years of my life. In fact, he was the last in a series of bad decisions, and I felt like I’d actually wasted about thirty-five years of my life, from about 1987 onward. That’s a hard pill to swallow. I really felt Annie’s angst and her longing.
In the novel, Annie goes through a series of complex equations, trying to figure out how much time she’d wasted in a bad relationship with her boyfriend Duncan and trying to figure out how she was either going to get that time back or make peace with writing it off. She thinks about all the things she missed out on by being with Duncan. But one passage from the book got me thinking differently about all of that in terms of my own life:
“If she hadn’t wasted so much time with Duncan, she might be better equipped to work out where it had gone …. One of the traps she kept falling into—and she couldn’t help it, even though she was aware of it—was to equate time with Duncan as time generally. T = D, when of course T really equaled D + W + S + F&F +C, where W is work, S is sleep, F&F is family and friends, C is culture and so on. In other words, she’d wasted only her romantic time on Duncan, whereas life consisted of more than that.”
This put a different spin on things. I hadn’t wasted 35 or even 20 years of my life. I’d wasted many years of my romantic life, yes, but not of my life in general.
So what did I do with this information? I began compiling a less-Annie-like and more Rob-Gordon-like list of my Greatest Hits—all the things I’d accomplished in all those “wasted” years. I came up with way more than 5 things—try nearly 100!
Why am I sharing this with you? What does it have to do with writing? Well, if you’re anything like me, it often feels as if you’re putting in a lot of effort and not getting anywhere. Or not putting in enough effort and, not surprisingly, getting nowhere. But when I made my list, I realized I’d accomplished a lot more than I’d imagined. I’d been focusing on the things I hadn’t accomplished rather than the things I have.
A lot of the things on my list had to do with my accomplishments as a human being—I’ve grown a lot as a person during those years. I’ve worked hard to be a better mother, a good mother-in-law, a good grandmother, a good sister, a good friend, and a good citizen. I’ve volunteered a lot. I’ve mentored a lot. I’ve worked hard. I’ve owned my own businesses. I’ve traveled. I went kayaking and ran a 5K, both things I was terrified to do.
But a lot of things on my list had to do with my accomplishments as a writer, too. I thought about all the great books, short stories, and essays I’d read and the books, short stories, and essays I’ve written. I thought about my 7 years volunteering for literary journals and how much I’d learned by doing that. I thought about earning a BA in English with a creative writing emphasis and a minor in history, an MFA in creative writing, a copyediting certificate from UC San Diego, and book coaching certification in fiction and in memoir, all while working full-time. I won a couple of writing competitions. I published a lot of my work and had meetings with film and television producers to talk about my work. And my journey, friends, only really got underway 8 years ago, when I went back to school full-time in 2016.
Making this list did two things for me—first, it allowed me to see how far I’ve come as a writer, when it often feels like I’m not making any progress, but more importantly, it made me proud of myself. Even during some pretty miserable romantic relationships, I’ve kept moving forward in other areas of my life. I’ve never given up on myself or my dreams.
I encourage you to make your own Greatest Hits list about your journey from not being a writer to being a writer. When you see it on paper, I think you’re going to be pretty impressed with yourself.