It hurt to remember Susan, the recruiter from the small publishing company I’d been dealing with through weeks of calls, interviews, and writing tests. Forget any relative living or dead, ex-lover, or guy that ghosted me, lately my thoughts had revolved around one person and one person only: Susan. It was Susan I longed to hear from, Susan to whom I sent messages both electronic and telepathic at all hours of the day and night. I felt sick as I told Audrey about Susan’s email. It had started off well, thanking me for my “patience and enthusiasm”— the praise, from Susan of all people, had made me beam— but that was the end of the good cheer. Susan regretted to inform me, but informed me nonetheless, that they had gone with another candidate, “someone with more boating-industry experience.”

She had signed off by wishing me luck in my future endeavours.

Insultingly generic, I thought, given all we had been through.

“More boating-industry experience?” Audrey repeated, almost off ended, as if Susan had talked shit about her mother. “Please, any chump can learn about boats. Starboard, port, nautical— ” 

“I think there’s more to it than wearing striped T-shirts,” I said.

“I hope the next time Susan goes boating someone pushes her overboard.”

“Audrey,” I scolded, though after the way she had betrayed me, it was hard not to take pleasure in the image of Susan flailing about helpless in the open seas.

“You’re too good for them anyway. Moving on. What other jobs have you applied for?”

I led Audrey through the haunted house that was trying to get a job as a journalist in the summer of 2014 when you hadn’t been born into media royalty. Aside from the one editing a magazine about superyachts, there was a gig at a weird lifestyle website writing oddly specific lists: 47 cheese puns for Instagram captions or 72 sweet things to text her in the morning. Cheat codes, I assumed, for people who outsourced their personality along with their laundry.

Then there was the writer role at Surviving Cancer, a small medical magazine.

“We need someone to write the short, snappy articles that keep things light in between the features about chemo,” the editor had explained on the phone, weariness in his voice.

“Celebrities with cancer, bizarre misdiagnoses, that kind of thing. The editor in chief is a difficult man, so you do need a thick skin. But you’d have job stability. More than five thousand hospitals subscribe, and chemotherapy is a long, boring process, so we have a captive audience.”

“Unless they find a cure for cancer,” I’d said, my attempt at a joke.

He didn’t laugh.

“Grim,” Audrey said when I was finished.

“Or is it hopeful?” I considered. “The magazine is about surviving cancer.”

“It’s still a magazine about cancer.”

“True.”

“What about BuzzFeed?” Audrey asked.

“Hiring freeze.”

“Huff Post?”

“They just made a bunch of hires.”

“Have you talked to Abigail at New York Magazine? She’s great. Maybe she can help.”

“I got her out-of-office reply. She’s on some long summer sojourn. Does she think she’s French?”

“Summer is the worst time to look for a job. Everyone is at the beach.”

“I wish they would wash the sand out of their cracks and come back already.”

I didn’t want to admit it, but I was losing hope. I was coming to the realisation I was part of a micro- generation in the media, those of us who graduated around 2008. We were too young to have a steady enough foothold to ride out an era of such tumultuous change, but also too moulded in the old ways (and too expensive) for entry-level digital roles, the only kind opening up with any regularity. My magazine editor pedigree increasingly meant little in a digital world.

Because she was a good friend, Audrey pivoted the conversation to one of the few things that could cheer me up: people who were doing worse than I was. We spoke like octogenarians at a wake, sombrely trading names of recently deceased acquaintances. Alex from GQ is writing SEO content from his parents’ basement in rural Ohio. Such a loss. Jenna from Elle is telling everyone she’s “freelancing,” but everyone knows that’s just something journalists say when they’re out of work. Tragic. Celeste from Harper’s Bazaar is illegally selling all the samples and gifts she’s been sent from brands, spread out on a rug at McCarren Park on weekends. Just awful.

Audrey also regaled me with a story about a recent encounter with the well-known Vogue and Atlantic writer Elizabeth Waites. As the daughter of media royalty, Audrey often had juicy anecdotes from her rarefied plane of media existence, which I always lapped up greedily.

“She’s involved in this thing, like Avon but more pyramid scheme-y,” she said. “She’s trying to rope half the Upper East Side into a multilevel-marketing network. Can you believe it? Elizabeth Waites tried to sell me an electric foot massager. The woman won a Pulitzer!”