Hi all,

GUEST EDITOR NEWS! I'm delighted to announce that Fem Friday next week will be edited by Jenny Teasdale. Jenny is a dear friend and soon to be former colleague, and I'm really stoked for the sensibility she will bring to Fem Friday; get excited for community engagement, travel, gardening and 🐝s. There has never been a better time to be a subscriber.

In the meantime, enjoy these two articles about women who were hothoused to be funny by their family, in better and worse ways.

First, a long article on The Toast Dot Net and its co-founder, Mallory Ortberg. Her father set up an incentive structure to make sure the children were being funny at dinner, and it obviously works, but when I imagine it there must have been a lot of yelling bon mots increasingly loudly and clearly to be sure that everyone heard and that you were in with the chance of a reward:

But some of The Toast's, and Ortberg's, most salient characteristics came from her parents. "Irreverence was inculcated in our family," says Turner, her sister. At dinner, John paid his kids a dollar for every good joke, and they wandered through riffing narratives together. "They were trying to make that a safe space to say what you're thinking," says Turner.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mallory-ortbergs-internet

The Nora Ephron story is quite famous, but to my chagrin I can’t find the article where Nora describes coming home from school with some sort of problem and her mum refuses to listen to her until she (Nora) imposes an interesting narrative structure on said problem. Maybe that didn’t happen, it doesn’t sound like a very nice thing. Perhaps a kinder approach would be to say, you can have my sympathy plus a dollar if you get some narrative technique around this!

Phoebe gave her eldest daughter the now iconic advice, “You’re a reporter, Nora. Take notes.” […] Nora took her advice. “My mother taught me many things when I was growing up, but the main thing I learned from her is that everything is copy … As a result, I knew the moment my marriage ended that someday it might make a book—if I could just stop crying.”

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/18/the_troubled_marriage_that_inspired_nora_ephron/

Happy Friday,

Alex.