After the writer, actor and director Phoebe Waller-Bridge won multiple Emmys last week, a post-awards do photograph circulated online. In it, Waller-Bridge is resplendent in a Monique Lhuillier ballgown, sitting next to a table stacked with her trophies, as she drags on a cigarette and holds a filled martini glass. She looks, as well she should, triumphantly cool. As social media users fawned over this photo, it occurred to me how perfectly it captures a contemporary mode of aspirational success: a young, beautiful, cool woman, at the top of her game, surrounded by the fruits of her success, smoking a fag and drinking a cocktail just as any girl on any Saturday night anywhere in the Western world might. Because she’s one of us.
Except she isn’t one of us. Neither is Sally Rooney. Nor was Lena Dunham. These women might make women feel so seen, but their individual creative output is theirs alone. One of the things that I have learned, now that I am a novelist, is that writers who are competitive with other, often more successful writers are wasting their energy. For only that person’s singular brain could have beamed the work they have created into existence – the envious onlooker couldn’t have made it, no matter how hard they tried. So what’s the point in wasting the energy that could be used to make art preoccupied by the successes of others? The same is true of any artform. Jealous of Tracey Emin? Want her success? Then you’ll also be needing her particular collection of life experiences and her particular facility for making resonant art from those experiences. It’s a hopeless project: you can never be Tracey Emin.
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