At several points during my recent trip to New York, I was gripped with an ineffable sense of how strange it was to be there. It was my first time in the city, and there is, admittedly, something quite starry about the place. Granted, this is not a novel observation, nor one you would want to admit to New Yorkers out loud, but there are few places on Earth where even the crosswalks, fire hydrants and fire escapes seem, if not quite famous, then at least like character actors you recognise from a million things but whose name you can’t quite place.
The main reason it all felt so strange, however, was that I was there to attend a film premiere at the Tribeca Festival. The film is an animated short named Me, Myself & Mary. It’s written by me, adapting a true story from my own life – namely, the time I ended up serving drinks to then-president Mary McAleese while I was on drugs.
If you’re not aware of this story, I first told it publicly on the site formerly known as Twitter back in 2018, which amassed something close to 100 million views, led to me becoming the internet’s main character for three or four days and quadrupled my following overnight. As such, it’s probably the piece of writing I’m most associated with, but I’ve never written much about it. Now, however, fresh from standing on a red carpet at a major film festival, feels like the right time to describe just how much it has changed my life.
It’s not hyperbolic to say that if you’ve read anything I’ve written in a book, magazine or newspaper in the past eight years, it’s very likely that it was directly related to the time I went to work while coming up on cat tranquillisers. Put plainly, the response to that story was so huge that, within days, I’d landed my first weekly column with a UK broadsheet and sold a memoir.
Within three months I had quit my job and begun writing full time. This was huge for me, since it had always seemed inevitable I’d leave that job on being sacked by managers increasingly aware I was spending all my working hours posting stupid things online.
Quitting at that moment was also, it turns out, a comically premature decision, prompting an extremely lean year in which I discovered that you get more money putting numbers into spreadsheets for a recruitment company than you do writing an excellent and hilarious childhood memoir. No matter, I’ve never worked a desk job since, and walking away from the working world is the creative decision I’m most proud of.
In the midst of all this, my old pal John Michell asked if he could buy the film rights to the thread. This seemed such a delightfully odd proposition that I jumped at the chance, signed a contract and, well, promptly forgot all about it. He toiled away in the background, making an exceptionally funny animated short, starring Chris O’Dowd and Aisling Bea, without a single euro in assistance from a funding body or cultural institution (if any such body is reading this and would like to help us tour the film further, I’d be very enthusiastic to let them jump on our bandwagon).
Then, after six or seven updates in as many years, John called me two months ago to say he had not only finished the film, but that it would be leading Tribeca’s prestigious animated shorts roster. That slate is curated by Whoopi Goldberg, which is how I ended up standing beside her on a red carpet last week, taking questions on how the film, and its story, came to be. (You can even buy a photographic print of this very moment for $375 from Getty Images, should you wish).
Sitting at the screening, while Spike Lee laughed his head off at a cartoon of me tripping on drugs at work, I buffered at the bafflingly unlikely sequence of events that led me there. Had @b3ta not put out the tweet about worst work days, which prompted me to reply, I’d never have posted the story at all. Ditto if I’d actually been doing the job I was paid to do instead of mindlessly scrolling my feed at that moment.
It’s been useful, these past few years, to maintain that perspective, to know that only an insane and arbitrary sequence of events led to me getting to write about things for a living, instead of finding myself, to this day, toiling away in an office job I hate. Probably not that office job, admittedly. You see, I was on Twitter all the time, and people really were starting to notice.
