Rachel Bloom - I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are

Rachel Bloom is a comedian, actress, writer, and singer based in Los Angeles. She created, co-executive produced, and starred in the TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on the CW Network and earned both a Golden Globe and Critics Choice award for her performance. She has been named a comic to watch by Cosmopolitan , Time Out LA and Backstage Magazine , and has been featured in Variety and the LA Times . Together with Adam Schlesinger, she'll be writing the music and lyrics for The Nanny on Broadway.

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are

Rachel Bloom

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Coronet

An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Handsome Iguana, Inc 2020

The right of Rachel Bloom to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover Art Sara Deck

Cover Design Phil Pascuzzo

Photograph p.v Christian Kilrain Carter Coleman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Unless I say otherwise, all names of my childhood friends, classmates, managers, and love interests have been changed, as have some identifying details.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 529 35463 8

Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 529 35464 5

eBook ISBN 978 1 529 35465 2

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

Contents

In memory of Adam Schlesinger, who never cared what normal protocol was, hence organizing his own photo shoot for a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend episode in which he posed as a fictional composer named Elliott Ellison, the photo of which would only be shown for less than five seconds.

What is normal?

Every day we hear it as something everyone should be. But should they really?

What is the so-called standard that we mold and fit ourselves through an invisible corset to be accepted in society all our life?

Is it based on looks?

Humor?

Brains?

Or is it something else, something in your heart that youre born with, and cannot gain from practice or experience? If no one is sure what it is, then why are people harshly judged by its qualifications

every single tedious day?

I rack and rack my brain to figure out what it is. Who is normal?

Your neighbors?

Your Freddie Prinze Jr. look-alike crush?

Your dog?

What appears to be normal may in fact be the opposite; a juicy ripe apple with a green worm inside.

My theory is that every apple, whether rotten or ripe on the outside, has a tiny little green worm inside thats just dying to crawl out.

And one day, it will.

Written by Myself, Age Twelve

Were you bullied in middle school? Yeah? You were?

Bullshit.

You werent bullied. I was bullied. I am the ultimate judge of bullying and I conclude that I was bullied and you were not bullied. So says me, court adjourned, gavel goes bang bang.

Most people say they were bullied in middle school. But what theyre describing isnt bullying; its just feeling out of place. And hey, thats fair; middle school is awkward, even for, per the title of this book, the normal people. For the normal people, I gather that middle school was annoying but that the personal conflict never got darker than a story in the Disneys One Saturday Morning animated series Pepper Ann . (Theres only so much darkness to be mined in the life of a protagonist described by the theme song as Much too cool for seventh grade.)

Over time, I became resentful of these normies / happies / reggies / those too cool for seventh grade who conflated run-of-the-mill middle school awkwardness with bullying. So in adulthood, I started to call them out on their shit. Oh, Im sorry, were you excluded from Sarahs birthday party that one time? Fuck you. I routinely found notes that said Ugly and Looser in my locker. And no, typos dont make the insults hurt less. I warsh they did!

By my mid-twenties, every middle school story that didnt send someone into therapy later in life became open season for my ridicule. Aw, you got your period right before you went onstage for the talent show and it was awkward? Well I was so routinely harassed at every talent show that by the time I got to seventh grade, I was grateful the only booing I got was one person shouting, Rachel sucks!

(Side note: Heres that actual diary entry from 3/26/2000):

2 days ago I was in the talent show. I got no boos, except for a barely audible Rachel sucks! I did super well.

You may have noted that, in my need to out-trauma-story people, I turned into a bully myself. To that I say: Oooooooooh look whos so smaaaaaaaart its youuuuuuu youre so smaaaaaaaart why dont you have a smaaaaaaaaart party (but please invite me because being left out of parties triggers my insecurity).

As a mature adult, Ive come to learn that trauma is real for everyone and just because someone had it worse doesnt mean you didnt have it bad. And Im the first to admit that my middle school horror stories paaaaaaale in comparison with those of many other people. I was never physically attacked, the bullying never resulted in self-harm, and it had nothing to do with my race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or socioeconomic status. I was a looser, yes, but a white, straight, upper-middle-class, cis-gendered, able-bodied one. Of course, this caveat regarding privilege applies to many other conflicts in my life so feel free to apply this footnote to any of the conflicts throughout the book as you see fit!

However, when I occasionally dip my toe back in the game of middle school trauma one-upmanship, I do have this story: When I was in seventh grade, the popular kids paid the most popular guy in school to ask me out as a prank.

Haha, trauma checkmate, motherfucker!

The story: In 1999, I was a seventh grader in Manhattan Beach, California, at the creatively named Manhattan Beach Middle School. And I went to school with some real dumbfucks. Dumbfucks with no sense of culture, introspection, or the difference between plural and possessive. I know middle school is famous for being filled with dumbfucks, but there really is a special brand of dumbfuckery unique to the Southern California beach suburbs. Were talking people named Tiffany or Gaskin. Most of their conversations involved wakeboarding and burritos. People who think melanoma means a really awesome tan, people who asked me, So did you guys write that whole thing? after the drama department put on Into the Woods . No, Gaskin. We didnt.

When I was in middle school circa 1999, a lot of movies came out that explored the popular vs. unpopular caste system: Shes All That , Never Been Kissed , et cetera. Most people walked away from these films understanding that the moral was that the bullies were bad. But my bullies were so fucking stupid they thought the heroes of those movies were the BULLIES. The second a new teen flick came out, my bullies would literally adopt the clothing and verbal styles used by the bullies in the films. I guess they loved the characters cool fashion, their awesome cars, and the biting insults said by the twenty-eight-year-old actors pretending to be sixteen.