Interview Ayun Halliday writes about her string of bizarre day jobs

Ayun Halliday is best known for her quarterly ’zine The East Village Inky, which chronicles “the Hoosier-born mother of a three-thumbed 7-year-old and a beguiling 4-year-old” who lives with her husband in Brooklyn. Halliday, a Northwestern graduate and former performer with the Chicago theater ensemble Neo-Futurists—known for its weekly short-piece anthology Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind—started the ’zine as a creative outlet after the birth of her daughter India (a.k.a. Inky).

She’s also written three books. The newest, Job Hopper: The Checkered Career Of A Down-Market Dilettante, is an entertaining look at the struggles of a twentysomething actor working crappy, short-lived day jobs—14 altogether—including waitress, artists’ model, receptionist, substitute teacher, hippie-store clerk, and more. Most of this work took place in Chicago, where she lived from 1983 to 1995, when she moved to New York with her husband Greg Kotis (who co-wrote the Tony-Award-winning Urinetown: The Musical). Halliday recently spoke with The A.V. Club about hurting people’s feelings, the Neo-Futurists, and being a mime.

The A.V. Club: In interviews, you often mention working with the Neo-Futurists. How does the experience continue to resonate with you?

Ayun Halliday: I owe them a lot of credit for giving me a forum in which to develop the voice that I write in when I write in the first person. We always played ourselves. A lot of the time, when Too Much Light demanded a lot of material in a given week, sometimes you would just be scraping the bottom of the garbage bin and throwing up whatever you happened to find there—and it didn’t always translate into something wonderful. As a writer, it trained me not to be a perfectionist. [Laughs.] I’m not sure I have too much perfection in me, and that’s nicely dovetailed with being a mother of small children—or a writer. Two drafts, I’m ready to sit and have a beer as the children tear the apartment apart.

AVC: You’ve mentioned that it pains you to think your writing could hurt anyone’s feelings, but more than a few people get scorned in Job Hopper.

AH: [Laughs.] They’re going to be running a smear campaign with customer reviews!

AVC: How have you come to terms with that—that sometimes that’s just the way it is?

AH: I think if you’re going to say something nasty to someone, you’d better be prepared to say it to their face. But when you’re living in a different city, and you’re writing to people who have come to admire your work after you left the situation you’re describing… Most of the people who read my books didn’t start hearing from me until after my life had changed radically, and I was 10 years older and had little kids. That’s the context in which they came to me, so I don’t know that I’m entirely at peace with it. [Laughs.] Some nights, I wake up in a cold sweat. The proof of how at peace with it I am is going to be in how I react when some of these people present themselves to me and say, “I hate you! I hate your ass face!”

AVC: Of all the jobs you discuss, was any one in particular much worse than the others?

AH: Working at Clubland was a real low point. It was participating in a culture that I find so odious and would never have sought out as a participant. I was a fish out of water there, so it made me feel like I was the least sexy one, and the youngest one in a non-good way. Now it sort of baffles me: For the low amount of money I was making, why didn’t I just go work in a bar that I would have enjoyed? I have a masochistic element in the jobs that I chose.

AVC: Are there any that you had initially planned to include that didn’t make it?

AH: I was a mime at a glassware convention for one day. [Laughs.] It was on a Sunday morning, and this would have been like in the late ’80s, so presumably these glassware sales reps had spent all weekend catting around and drinking too much and hiring hookers. And they have this farewell brunch in which they’re just going to get a little more glassware presented to them, and also be entertained by two mimes from Northwestern University—and I’m not a mime, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. It was just an opportunity and a hundred bucks. It was so humiliating, and I’ll just never forget going into the Hilton or the Hyatt or whatever it was, and coming out in my little beret and my striped overalls in my whiteface, and seeing these bleary-eyed, polyester-suited, entirely unenthusiastic men staring at me with this incredible hatred. I was making their hangovers worse.

AVC: A lot of the stuff in this book is more than a decade old. It seems like your memory of things would be a little foggy.

AH: You start writing about them, and there’s a key. With Clubland, for instance, the thing that I remembered was the Shot Girl and the crappy paper-maché animal-head trophies that were supposed be kind of “wacky” mounted on the wall. It had just been completely botched, and it was so contrary to my taste, and that was the portal to remembering what it smelled like. With some of these jobs, it’s so tedious, and you’re not allowed to sit down and read. There was nothing to occupy my mind except gaping at people in awful atmospheres.