Come sit with me in the empty theater

A note on ambition as the old world breaks.

Let’s sit down in the Opera House at The Kennedy Center. I’m patting the chair next to me. We need to have a serious talk about your career, and since this place is empty, I figured it would be as good a venue as any.

Before we get to business, though, perhaps we could just spend a moment looking around: up into the glittering constellation of chandeliers; around at all the pretty red velvet and brass; outward at the silent stage. What a strange and holy thing an empty theater is—particularly one like this. Where else on Earth could silence feel so full? Where else could our ghosts stand so close that we can almost feel their breath?

Fun fact: toward the end of his life, when I was eleven, my grandfather wept right here next to where I am now. A tender-hearted DC native like me—terminally tender-hearted, actually, in the cardiologic sense—he was already frail by his late sixties.

We were watching Damn Yankees. As Joe Boyd sang “Goodbye, Old Girl,” a sentimental farewell to his wife, I looked over in the dark and saw Rock’s shoulders heaving. I wouldn’t understand why for many years.

Two years after that—coincidentally, just a week or two after Rock died—I came back here to see Annie Get Your Gun. It was the big revival with Bernadette Peters and Tom Wopat, and my mom—who is, like her father, a big musical theater fan—had splurged on box seats.

We were in for a surprise: just before the lights went down, fifteen or twenty feet to our left, Bill and Hillary filed into the presidential box. This was January of 1999, mind you, at the absolute pinnacle of the Monica situation. The band played “Hail to the Chief,” and everyone in the crowd stood up and screamed: some in support, some in disgust, most in a genial and undirected frenzy. What a country!

I could tell you so many more stories like this. Age nearly 41, I’ve sat with friends and family in this theater four or five times a year just about every year since I was, oh, five? It’s one of the most familiar places in the world to me, an island of comfort in an ever-odder world.

To grow old in one’s hometown is to watch it go away. If you don’t leave it behind, it finds a way to pack up and leave you, one room at a time. This Opera House is one of the precious few remaining rooms that has stayed exactly the same since my childhood: warm, special, comforting. And now—well, goodbye, old girl. You’ve heard the news, I’m sure. It makes me heartsick.

(Oh, Rock, look: here’s the granddaughter you last saw as a child, now a middle-aged woman herself, folded back through some miracle of spacetime into the chair next to yours, weeping right beside you.)

*

I brought you to this place, friend, because I know your heart is breaking too. Even if not specifically for The Kennedy Center, I’m sure you’re grieving for something recently felled by the breathtaking incompetence of angry little men. Perhaps it’s The Washington Post, the United States Constitution, Keith Porter, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, your nervous system, your faith in institutions, or your hope for the future. Take your pick!

You feel powerless, paralyzed, stuck, unable to write, unsure of how to live and what to do. The Epstein files have reminded you how many men who lecture you with breezy confidence about the workings of the world are in fact greedy, predatory frauds. At present, these men still control most of the power and money on Earth, and they’re wrecking almost everything we love.

How do we keep going in the face of all this? How do we still dream of publishing serious work in a time when seriousness itself seems fraudulent? How do we find an audience as institutional opportunity becomes ever more scarce? How do we push through all this sorrow, rage, exhaustion, and fear?

That’s what we’re here to discuss—you know, just the normal agent-author stuff. A few light topics. No big deal.

The first thing I want to say is something I hope you already know: you’re not alone. You’re the opposite of alone. I can say that with confidence as I look at the big whiteboard in my office with all my clients’ names on it, noting where they are (and aren’t) in the idea-to-publication pipeline. I can say it with even more confidence as I look at my own to-do list. It’s a mess.

The second thing I want to tell you is that it’s time to give up. No, seriously—give up. Weep with me here in the empty theater; that’s why I brought you somewhere quiet. I brought water so you can stay hydrated. This is an awful time to be a person with a conscience. Let all the pain in, as the author Stephanie Harrison has said, and then let it change you.

*

Here’s the truth: you’re not stuck because you’ve lost your ambition; you’re stuck because the dilapidated model for ambition you’ve been working with since childhood is broken beyond repair. I’m sorry.

I’m doubly sorry because my industry, book publishing, did a lot of work to foist this shoddy model onto you in the first place. For a long time, my colleagues in nonfiction and I elevated mastery as a moral good, rewarding the people who swore they could explain the whole world in a single argument. These people promised us optimized futures full of clarity and control, and we platformed that nonsense. Many of us still do. Hell: one of Jeffrey Epstein’s primary enablers was a literary agent.

Here’s the thing about mastery: people who preach mastery are people who think they deserve to be masters. For that reason, handing them power was never a great idea. This is not an original insight; I am basically just paraphrasing Frederick Douglass here. Dozens of Black social critics have expounded on this in dozens of different ways in the generations since—a fact about which I am constantly reminded as I read A Second Sight, my client Sarah Jackson’s brilliant forthcoming book. But did the book publishing industry listen? Did we look at all those Big Idea books and the weirdo fedora men who wrote them and put two and two together? We sure didn’t. It felt benign, but it was never thus.

And now here we all are, weeping in pain beyond belief.

*

This is awful. Cry with me. Cry until the floodwaters have eroded your attachment to the old world just enough that you can begin to swim away—however long that takes.

Whenever you’re ready, swim toward a new kind of ambition: one in which you no longer seek to dominate or impress anyone at all. You were not born to be immortal or even a big deal; none of us were. Rather, we were born for each other—to find one another, play with one another, make new things together, sit here together. Love each other.

The world now calls us to practice instead of conquer and listen instead of explain. It calls us to make things that are provisional and true instead of grasping at everlasting renown. There is no hope for immortality within us, but there has always been infinite potential between us. Aim for that instead.

What I’m telling you is something similar to what Lincoln Michel said in his newsletter this week: the future is punk rock. It’s intimate, collective, networked, DIY. (Re)creating a healthy media ecosystem and sustainable jobs economy in writing and the arts will ultimately require massive amounts of antitrust legislation and wealth redistribution away from the billionaire class, but first things first: the rest of us must remember what we are here on Earth to do. We are here to be together—in community, in real life.

*

“Thanks, Anna,” I hear you saying, “but I asked you for career advice, and this is more existential. Togetherness does not a rent check pay.”

This is a fair point. My career advice for you—such as it is—is this: run toward empathy like never before and see where that gets you.

Instead of asking whether what we write is important or impressive enough to make us famous, we must ask, again and again, whether it’s honest—like, the kind of thing we would share with each other here in the seats of this empty theater versus at each other while up there on stage.

As a matter of practical, professional urgency, you and I need to read a lot more and doomscroll a lot less. How this will result in mutual profit I am not quite sure, but I know it’s going to work out better than the current panic-paralysis situation in which we both find ourselves.

For now—for today—we should focus on building durable relationships and solidarity, with readers, other writers, editors, and even competitors.

We also need to clear up some space in our heads by doing a once-over in there with the vacuum of forgiveness. Let’s stop obsessing about that one person who said that smug and perhaps supercilious thing about us on Bluesky a few months back—you know, the one who’s clearly going through her own shit—and remember who our real enemies are.

We need to do all this without knowing for sure what comes next. Doing it will at minimum clear up the mental space necessary to finish your overdue manuscript or start that book proposal. Or maybe it’ll give us the energy to figure out something all new.

*

I’ll tell you: amidst the horrors of this week, there were only two times I felt okay.

The first was during my cello lesson on Tuesday. I’ve been taking weekly lessons for just over four years. Thanks to a combination of desultory practice and zero neuroplasticity, I’ve made about as much progress as a dedicated third grader would in six months. But this means I am now—finally—able to sight-read my way with some panache through a simple folk tune like “Oh Shenandoah.”

At the end of my lesson this week, I played that song in a spontaneous duet with my teacher, a bespectacled 30-year-old woman named Emily. It was beautiful. For about forty seconds, we made something holy together. In the middle, my throat hitched, and I turned away from her, shy about how moved I was.

The second time I felt okay was at the Rally for The Washington Post on Thursday. I decided to go at the last minute after waffling about it the way one waffles about attending the funeral of a friendly acquaintance. (She meant a lot to me, but will her close friends and family think this is weird?)

Sixty minutes before the event started, getting into my car after a morning appointment, I asked my ex-Postie client Jess Goldstein if she was going. She said yes, I am working on my sign. And I thought, you know what? That sounds fun. It would be fun to make a sign. So I turned my car toward Michael’s and bought posterboard and a marker. And in the checkout line, I texted Jess again: what is a funny but true thing I can write on my sign?

And that’s how I ended up standing next to Jess at the rally minutes later, holding this sign:

My sign made sad people laugh. I saw some other clients and friends, and we all felt sad and laughed together. It was medicine. It gave me the energy to write all this down.

*

Like so many palaces that felt like they’d be bustling forever, the Opera House is empty—save for the two of us, that is, for now.

I don’t want to walk out that door, and I’m sure you don’t either. It still feels so alive in here, even now, and the world outside is so uncertain.

But you already know in your bones why the air here feels so charged. It was never the chandeliers or red velvet, beautiful as they are. It’s the decades of practice that have animated this room: the energy between people, disembodied and therefore unkillable.

It’s the current that runs between us now as we talk, arcing from my grandfather’s ghost heart into mine, then yours, then forward into our friends and the as-yet unborn.

It’s what makes me less afraid of my own mortality these days. I hope it does the same for you.

Our love will keep, old girl. We’ll carry it with us. It’s enough. It is.