What I

Was Doing
While
You Were
Breeding

A Memoir

Kristin Newman

Three Rivers Press

New York

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 Copyright © 2014 by Kristin Newman

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press,

an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division
of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House
Company, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are

registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is

available upon request.

ISBN 978‑0‑804‑13760‑7
eBook ISBN 978‑0‑8041‑3761‑4

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Donna Sinisgalli

Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright
Cover photography by Martin Westlake/Galley Stock

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

First Edition

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 Prolog ue

“I’ll Have
the House
Special”

I am not a slut in the United States of America. I have

rarely had a fewer-­than-­four-­night stand in the Land of the
Free. I don’t kiss married men or guys I work with, I don’t
text people pictures of my genitalia, I don’t go home with
boys I meet in bars before they have at least purchased me
a couple of meals, I’ve never shown my boobs for beads.
I do not sleep with more than one person at a time, and,
sometimes, no more than one per year. In America.
But I really love to travel.
Now, having sex with foreigners is not the only whor-
ish thing I do: I also write sitcoms. For the last fourteen
years I’ve written for shows like That ’70s Show, How I
Met Your Mother, Chuck, The Neighbors, and shows you’ve
never heard of that nonetheless afford me two over-­the-­
top lucky things: the money to buy plane tickets and the
time off to travel. What this means about my life is that I
spend about nine months a year in a room full of, mostly,

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 2  Kristin Newman

poorly dressed men, telling dick jokes and overeating and,

sometimes, sitting on the floor with Demi Moore, Ash-
ton Kutcher, and a chimpanzee (before all three found the
age difference insurmountable). In the writers’ room, we
talk a million miles a minute, tearing each other apart for
sport and, often, out of love. Sometimes someone makes
me cry, and I pretend I’m doing a “bit” where I “run out
of the room to cry” even though what I’m really doing is
running out of the room to cry. If I’m lucky enough to be
fully employed, I get about nine months of this and then a
three-­month hiatus—­unpaid time off from this weird non-
corporate grind.
Most days, the writers’ room feels like I’m at the most
entertaining dinner party in the world. Other times, it feels
like I’m at the meanest, longest one. I keep both versions in
perspective with my real life’s work—­running away from
home to someplace wonderful. And then, sometimes, hav-
ing sex there.
Throughout most of my twenties and thirties, in the
hiatus months (or years) between shows, I spent between a
few weeks and a few months a year traveling. When money
was tight, I took road trips with a tent, and when it wasn’t,
I got on a plane and went as far as I could, to places like
China and New Zealand, Jordan and Brazil. To Tibet and
Argentina and Australia and most of Europe. To Israel
and Colombia and Russia and Iceland. In the beginning, I
took these trips with girlfriends, but soon my girls started
marrying boys, and then they started making new little
girls and boys, and so then I started taking the trips alone.
Some of these girls would eventually come back around

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 3  What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

after a divorce for a trip or two, but then leave me again

when they got married for the second time before I’d man-
aged to do it for the first. (When I complained to my friend
Hope that she had lapped me in the marriage department,
she replied, “I’m not sure the goal is to do it as often as
possible.” I love her.)
Anyway, everyone around me was engaged in a lot of
engaging, marrying, and breeding while I remained reso-
lutely terrified of doing any of it. I did want to have a fam-
ily someday . . . ​it was just that “someday” never seemed to
feel like “today.” I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom
and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry
obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul. That wres-
tling match threatened to body-­slam me into a veritable
Bridget-­Jonesian-­sad-­girl singlehood, which I was reso-
lutely against, both personally and as an archetype. And
so to ward that off, I kept moving.
Pretty early on in my travel career I discovered two
vital things. First, that I’m someone a little different on
the road, and that vacation from being my home self feels
like a great sleep after a long day. Second, that you can
have both love and freedom when you fall in love with an
exotic local in an exotic locale, since there is a return ticket
next to the bed that you by law will eventually have to use.
These sweet, sexy, epic little vacationships became part of
my identity—­I was The Girl with the Great International
Romance Stories at dinner parties, and around the writers’
room table. And I began to need my trips like other people
need religion.
But my mom will be pleased to hear that my addiction

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 4  Kristin Newman

to sexy people in sexy places really grew out of a nonsexual

obsession: I love to do the thing you’re supposed to do in the
place you’re supposed to do it. That means ­always getting
the specialty of the house. That means smoking cigarettes
I don’t smoke at the perfect corner café for hours at a time
in Paris, and stripping naked for group hot-­tubbing with
people you don’t want to see naked in Big Sur. It means rid-
ing short, fuzzy horses that will throw me onto the arctic
tundra in Iceland, or getting beaten with hot, wet branches
by old naked women in stifling banyas in Moscow. When
these moments happen, I get absurdly happy, like the kind
of happy other people report experiencing during the birth
of their children. And getting romanced by a Brazilian in
Brazil, or a Cretan in Crete . . . ​this, to me, just happens to
be the gold medal in the Do the Thing You’re Supposed to
Do Olympics.
I love that I am but one of millions of single girls hit-
ting the road by themselves these days. A hateful little ex-­
boyfriend once said that a house full of cats used to be the
sign of a terminally single woman, but now it’s a house
full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures. He said it
derogatorily: Look at all of this tragic overcompensating in the
form of tribal masks and rain sticks. But I say that plane tick-
ets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women’s
progress as a gender. I’m damn proud of us.
Also, since I have both a cat and a lot of foreign souve-
nirs, I broke up with that dude and went on a really great
trip.

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