Unqualified Read online

  I did survive, ultimately. It was rough, and cool was never something I felt, so eventually I accepted my lack of girlfriends and left high school. But years later—twenty, to be exact—I returned.

  After graduation, I kept in touch with very few people from high school. Aside from Chad Burke—with whom I lost contact after freshman year of college—there was only Meghan, who was a grade below me and is currently a writer in New York. She was, and is, wonderful and smart and funny, but I think the thing that initially kept us connected was that we both broke out of Edmonds. So when my ten-year high school reunion rolled around, it never even occurred to me to attend. Just before my twentieth, however, some girls from my grade reached out to my older brother on Facebook.

  “They’d really like you to come,” Bob told me over the phone. I didn’t want to, quite honestly. Not because I’d have to revisit the mean girls, but because I didn’t keep up with anybody. Was I really going to fly to Edmonds to attend a reunion of people I barely knew and who, a couple of decades earlier, had no interest in me?

  Still, it seemed like I’d be sending a complicated message if I didn’t go—I didn’t want it to come off like I thought I was too good for Edmonds—so Chris and our son, Jack, and I took a weekend trip back home. It was 2014. Guardians of the Galaxy had just come out and Chris was at the beginning of megastardom. I told him that I didn’t want to subject him to my reunion, which was true, but I also didn’t want the story to be that “Anna showed up with Chris.” We decided I’d attend alone and he’d pick me up at the end. All those years later, the idea that I would come in and command any type of narrative still made me anxious. High school reunions are strange that way. They tap into so much—who we were, who we’ve become, who we want to be, and how we want to be perceived. So while intellectually I knew that plenty had changed in those twenty years, once I stepped into the school, it didn’t feel that way. I was still awkward and uncomfortable and without any good friends; and the mean girls were still huddled in the corner, and they still seemed pretty mean.

  This is where you might be picturing Romy and Michele. You might think that I swooped in and wowed the crowd with how fabulous I’d become in the decades since graduation.

  You would be wrong.

  It’s true that fame and success have given me more value to some people who otherwise might not want to talk to me. There were a couple of former classmates I chatted with who perhaps wouldn’t have been interested if I hadn’t “made it” in Hollywood. And, honestly, I was surprised, but pleased, by how little satisfaction I got from that. Because while that satisfaction might have been human, it might also have made me a giant asshole.

  The truth of the evening was that there was no “I showed them!” I was not the belle of the ball. Mostly, I was snubbed. The same girls who were mean to me when I was eighteen were whispering about me at thirty-eight. But there was something almost comforting in that—not the talking about me so much as the simple knowledge that some things don’t change. Mean girls stay mean. I was perversely happy about it.

  There was one person at the reunion who I was looking forward to seeing. My old friend Matt. We had been close in high school. I’d had a big crush on him, and of course he knew it. At the reunion, we caught up and he introduced me to his stunning wife, who was lovely, and then he turned to me and said, “I just want to apologize for being so mean to you.” I knew what he was talking about. Junior year, Matt recorded me talking shit about our mutual friend Jeff. Then he played it for Jeff, just to make me look like a bitch. (I have this theory that we all need to publicize the list of suspects who should be investigated in the event of our murder. If I turn up dead, definitely find out what Jeff was up to.) But when Matt apologized all those years later, it was insulting. Of course I remember how he betrayed me with that recording, and it definitely caused a clear shift in our friendship, but I’d been so excited to see him, and there was so much funny shit he could have referenced from our past instead. It had been twenty years. I was over it. Maybe.

  Part of the reason you go to a high school reunion, I think, is to get confirmation that other people remember you as you remember yourself. That night, when former classmates said they recalled me being quiet in high school, it was such a relief, because that’s what I remember, too. So Matt’s apology didn’t feel long overdue or make me feel in any way vindicated. It just stung. That’s what he remembered?! I thought this was someone I had really connected with, and I’d been so eager to see him. The idea that I was reduced to this one moment where he treated me like shit was kind of humiliating. I have this image of Matt and his wife driving to the reunion together and him saying, “Yeah, I was really mean to Anna, so I’m going to apologize tonight,” which I know might be said with the best intentions but just feels gross.

  After that interaction, I was done. I’d been at the reunion for all of one hour, but it was long enough for me to feel like I was in high school again, and to be ready to get out. I mean, Green Day was pumping through the loudspeakers. Chris drove down and picked me up, as we’d planned, and it did feel a bit like the lion rescuing the lioness from the hyenas. It was amazing to watch the reaction as he came through the door. I still felt like headgear-wearing, awkward Anna Faris, but when Chris came in, he was all movie star. There was a collective gasp as he whisked me away and, yes, that was fairly satisfying, I guess. I’m human, after all.

  • • •

  It took me longer than it should have to realize just how important female relationships are in my life. That shift only happened fairly recently, maybe in the last three to five years. It takes vulnerability of spirit to open yourself up to other women in a way that isn’t competitive, and that’s especially hard in Hollywood, where competition is built into almost every interaction.

  Female actresses don’t get to work together very often, so we truly don’t have a ton of face time with one another, though I do like to think that’s changing. With guys—like Chris and Seth Rogan and James Franco—they’re all buddies and do each other favors and appear in each other’s projects. And of course plenty of women do that, too, but sometimes I’m envious of the communities that male actors can establish merely because there have been historically more roles for men in any given project, so they have more opportunities to forge relationships. I have it on my to-do list to host a monthly boozy brunch with a bunch of actresses and no agenda so we can just hang out. Right now, the only times we see one another are at these crazy high-pressure Hollywood events where you’re all wearing gowns and one of you—not me, but the person I’m talking to—is nominated, so she’s distracted and freaked out and in no mood to get into girl talk. Like Emma Stone or Jessica Chastain or Amy Adams, all those stunning women who I never see until the awards shows at which they are, rightly, being celebrated and I’m busy loading up on champagne-infused complimentary snacks.

  But between filming a sitcom and recording a podcast and raising a five-year-old, I bump up against a lot of the same internal struggles that most working moms do. As much as I want to host my boozy brunch, making time for it in my schedule hasn’t been a priority. I can hardly keep up with the friends I already have. My oldest pals constantly give me a hard time for being so bad at texting them back, but that’s because I don’t want to have a texty relationship. I want to spend an hour talking and getting into the good stuff. I don’t have a lot of patience for small talk. I don’t even like the phrase. Why would I want to engage in conversation that people deem small? But that means I don’t text back or pick up a call until I have the time to devote to that person. Which often results in “Are you mad at me?” texts, which just make me want to put off a call even more, because I know the first twenty minutes will consist of apologies instead of conversation.

  I’ve heard the suggestion that I don’t need a tight group of girlfriends anyway, because your partner should be your best friend. But I’ve never bought that. The idea that your mate must be your best
friend feels to me like an overused mantra that puts unnecessary pressure on your relationship. I really believe that your partner serves one purpose, and each friend serves another. There’s the friend who you confess things to, and the friend with whom you do the listening. Or this is the person I talk to when I’m feeling lonely and sad, and this is the person I talk to about work shit, and this is the friend I’m still in touch with because we grew up together. To be honest, I think the notion of best friends in general is messed up. It puts so much pressure on any one person, when I truly believe it’s okay to have intimacy with different people in different ways. That’s why I’m so glad I never had bridesmaids. It seems like a tradition entirely engineered toward forcing you to rank your friends, and that really bothers me. It just shouldn’t happen, at least not beyond grade school.

  Today, I’m lucky to have a handful of women I count as confidantes. Allison Janney, my costar on Mom. My friend Alex, who I met when we worked on The Hot Chick together. Meghan, the friend who got out of Edmonds and writes in New York, and Kate, a dear childhood friend and neighbor who, on paper, I have nothing in common with anymore—at least not from an outsider’s perspective—but who totally gets me because, history. Six months ago I called her and said, “Kate! I was reading this article and I think I have this condition called prosopagnosia, where you are totally face blind and don’t recognize people that you’ve seen before.”

  “Oh God, you totally have that,” she said. “Remember that time at the park when you thought your mom was walking across the field and it was really that homeless guy?”

  Confirming that I might actually have prosopagnosia, instead of just saying I was crazy, might be the kindest thing she ever did for me.

  Losing My Virginity, and Other Horrible Sexual Escapades

  I had my first kiss when I was sixteen and lost my virginity when I was seventeen. It was a busy couple of years.

  The kiss was during my junior year of high school. It was a Friday night and we had just finished a production of You Can’t Take It With You, a Pulitzer Prize–winning play in which I played Essie Carmichael. It was a juicy part. Not the lead, but a good, meaty role that allowed me to show off my acting chops. (I love beef references, dear reader.) After our performance, some of the seniors in the cast rented a hotel room in downtown Seattle. I told my parents that I was spending the night at my friend Stephanie’s (yes, Stephanie was also my alibi during the Stone Temple Pilots concert where Chad and I first hooked up—“staying at Stephanie’s” was a recurring theme of my teenage years), but instead I went to the hotel room and got wasted. It was my first time being drunk, and Kyle, a senior, held my hair back while I vomited, which anybody who has ever been a drunk girl in high school knows is both disgusting and the epitome of romance all at the same time. After I was done puking, we crawled into a bed where Jeff (the same Jeff who I mentioned might murder me) was already passed out. He was lying on the right side of the bed, Kyle was in the middle, and I was on the left. I don’t know how Kyle could stand kissing me after I vomited, but we made out a little bit and then he fingered me right there in that king-size hotel bed for three. (In hindsight, maybe Jeff is right to want to murder me.)

  I had a minor crush on Kyle—he had a huge grin, big dimples, great hair. He was the kind of guy who seemed stoned all the time, but I don’t think he actually was. The fact that he was able to look past my braces and stinky vomit breath and stick his tongue down my throat was a true gift, even if it did feel like there was a slug in my mouth and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Aggressively kiss him back? Passively receive the kiss? I wasn’t sure. (To be fair, I’m still not sure I know how to kiss properly. I always wonder if I’m doing it right. Even though I’m an actress and kiss people in movies all the time, you can’t exactly ask, can you? And even though those are technically first kisses, I also think about the rush of a real first kiss and wish I could have that without all the teenage awkwardness.)

  That night at the hotel was an evening of firsts: my first make-out session, my first finger bang, my first night in a king-size bed. I was in heaven. So much so that I couldn’t wait to write all about it in my diary: I made out and was penetrated! Life is grand!

  The next morning, I went home first thing because I was scheduled to take my driver’s test. My parents—the sweet, supportive people they are—were raving about my performance in the play while all I could think was, I hope they don’t smell the vomit and cigarette smoke.

  Somehow, I passed my driver’s test. It was a major twenty-four hours in my life. But the blissful high of making out and having a license was short-lived. A few days later, my mother found my diary. She read my recap of Kyle’s finger-banging and thought it meant I lost my virginity, and she was furious.

  Here’s the thing about my mother . . . she wanted me to stay a virgin until I was married. She made that very clear. This always confused me, because my mom is not a religious person. If her views had been based on God or the Bible, I would have at least understood the root. But she was a steadfast feminist, so her message seemed complicated. I think it was instilled in her at an early age that, as a woman, your sexuality was a dangerous and powerful tool, which had to be used extremely carefully. It must have been complicated, because she and her sisters were, and are, unbelievably gorgeous women with incredible figures. Growing up, they were dirt-poor but were known as the local hotties, and each of them reacted very differently to the power that comes with being unbelievably attractive. And I’m not saying this just because she’s my mom. She’s really a knockout. I have these beautiful pictures of her framed in my kitchen, one taken when she was nineteen and the other when she was twenty-seven. At a far glance it looks like me, but when you get closer you see that she had everything that I don’t: a seventies’ Playboy Bunny look—soft hair, high cheekbones, full lips. She must have really struggled with the complicated power of feeling beautiful and the desire to be desired and the guilt she felt toward anything sexual at all.

  “Anna, you just don’t know your own value,” my mother said after she read my diary. I didn’t get it. I was supposed to be an independent woman, but at the same time I wasn’t supposed to do what I wanted with my body? It didn’t make sense.

  Needless to say, when my mom read about my night with Kyle, she was pissed—and I was, too. I was devastated that she would look at my private journal, and it was clear she didn’t even understand what she had read. I didn’t have sex that night, obviously, and it hurt me that my mom couldn’t tell that I was really quite protective of my body—something I thought she should understand just by knowing me. Let’s be honest, I could have had sex anytime I wanted, because I was a sixteen-year-old girl surrounded by sixteen-year-old boys, and sixteen-year-old boys just want to bone.

  So I did what any teenager angry at her mother would do and threatened to move out. To Stephanie’s house, of course.

  A word about Stephanie: We became friends through drama class. I was a D+ on the social level, but she was a solid B. Not superglamorous but very well-liked; she was in drama, though, and that hurt her A. Where I went to high school, doing drama was sort of social suicide. Stephanie had an International Harvester Scout, an old car that was, once upon a time, an alternative to a Jeep. Hers was white and blue, and we used to drive around Edmonds in that truck listening to New Order and it was awesome. She also had a lot of independence—her parents were kind of hands-off—so I thought it made perfect sense for me to take a break from my parents and move in with her after the diary fiasco. My mother said no (of course she did, she was a rational parent), but at the time I was completely horrified that she wouldn’t support the move in light of her betrayal.

  Nothing else came of that kiss with Kyle. It was fun, and kind of gross, and we never hooked up again.

  But that was okay, because Chad Burke came along soon after that.

  • • •

  On November 19, 1993, I told my parents I was h
eaded to—surprise!—Stephanie’s house. It was my senior year, and I was about a month into dating Chad. He was friends with some guys who were in a fraternity at UW, so we drove to the campus to crash one of their parties. We were in the frat house, deep into our red Solo cups of jungle juice, and suddenly Chad grabbed my hands, looked into my eyes, and said: “Anna, I want you to lose your virginity to me.”

  “Okay, Chad,” I said solemnly. “Me too.”

  Chad couldn’t say he wanted us to lose our virginity together, because it was going to be his second time. He slept with another girl in our high school before he and I got together (I can’t remember her name, only that she looked like Ani DiFranco), but they were never in a relationship. I found his honesty about this romantic—my standards were always exceedingly high.

  I told Chad I wanted to wait until after I turned seventeen. I don’t know why that age marker was important to me, but my birthday was ten days later, so I figured we wouldn’t have to wait much longer. After that, I told him, I wanted to do it.

  The plan didn’t quite pan out. I turned seventeen on November 29, and a few days later, before Chad and I had the chance to have sex, I started hemorrhaging out of my vagina.

  It started out as what my mom told me was my “first very heavy period.” I had to change my pad every thirty minutes and it seemed more intense than a period, but what did I know? I was only seventeen. As an early Christmas present, Chad took me to see Phantom of the Opera and I had to keep running to the bathroom and begging people for tampons because I’d used up all of mine. Eventually I bled through my dress and Chad took me home. My mom told me to take a bath and we watched as the tub filled up with blood. Later that night we went to the hospital, and I passed out in the waiting room.