I'm a bit jealous of Leslie Knope

Announcing Joan's book club pick for June

It’s probably been a while since I got personal on Park It, outside of my occasional vacation photo dumps. I’m sure most of you would describe Park It as strictly business. But this week’s episode struck a bit of a chord with me.

Leslie publishes a book in this episode, the definitive history of Pawnee. And I certainly don’t know enough to write a book about the history of Pawnee, but I have always wanted to write a book. It’s been the dream for as long as I can remember.

by the way, this is a real book you can buy

I always was the type to have my nose buried in a book growing up. I read absolutely everything. When new books in a series I loved came out (Warriors, anyone?), I would sit in a chair in the corner of my room and not put it down until I was finished. I’d stay up late into the night and only come down for dinner when my parents threatened to take my book away. In the second grade, the school I went to did a Friday book sale at lunch. I’m not quite sure how these economics worked out, but they’d sell copes of the Magic Treehouse and Amelia Bedelia books for $1 each. My parents would send me to school every Friday with a $2 allowance, which would get me 2 books to get through the next week (plus a few I’d check out from the library). One Friday, I accidentally threw away my cash with my lunch and quite literally burst into tears in the middle of the cafeteria. What would I read!!!! Reading was, quite literally, my whole life.

When I got older and learned that writing was an actual job — books didn’t just appear into the universe fully formed — I knew that being a writer was the only career path I wanted. I became obsessed. It was all I thought about. I wrote short stories about Thanksgiving turkeys and tried my hand at silly little poems and began countless and countless drafts of a YA fantasy novel set at a fake middle school in my hometown. I gave all of my friends superpowers and passed around chapters for feedback at lunch. Unsurprisingly, this started some drama based on who had bigger roles, who had what powers, all that jazz. I even started a Facebook group:

5 MEMBERS!! new york times bestseller on our hands

I scribbled little stories and ideas and quotes in journals all through high school, wrote stories and stories that won me Scholastic Writing Awards (and a trip to Carnegie Hall one year! sorry to brag sheesh), and applied to colleges exclusively for their creative writing programs. It’s how I ended up at Berkeley, actually. Best English program in the country!

Since I was 10, books and writing have been my North Star. I’ve never known exactly what I wanted to write. I’ve gone through fantasy phases, literary fiction phases, phases when I was obsessed with celebrity memoirs, phases when all I wanted to read were books ABOUT writing itself. I entered college thinking I loved fiction and I left college with a 76-page thesis about the memoirs of 3 comedians. The writing itself has always evolved — but the fact that I want to write never has.

It’s why I do Park It! I love Parks and Rec so very much, but I love the act of sitting down to write each week even more. It was important to me, when I started this thing last year, to figure out how to prioritize writing in my life again, to figure out how to have something to say each and every week to all of you. Even if it’s about L’il Sebastian or Joan Calamezzo’s book club or Ron Swanson.

I feel very lucky, working at Substack and being exposed to so many amazing creative people in my job. It’s given me so much insight into a process I was sooooo incredibly naive about a few years ago. And even though the publishing industry is so rapidly evolving and things like Substacks are taking up much bigger spheres of influence in the public conscience, more than they ever have … that one north star dream that I’ve always had still hasn’t changed: I really, really, REALLY want to see my name on a book someday.

like this is the kind of confidence I need to channel every day

I have no idea about what and I have no idea when and I have no idea how. But I know it’s still something I want because the first thing I felt when Leslie held up her book in this Parks episode was jealousy.

I feel the same whenever any character in a movie or TV show has that glorious moment of opening a box and it’s just filled with a stack of books with their name on it. Once I was watching one of the Sex and the City movies with my friends and when Carrie first sees her book, I honest to god let out a quiet, accidental groan. And of course my roommates heard me and started cackling and I didn’t hear the end of it for weeks. I even feel that way in the “All Too Well” short film, when redheaded Taylor steps out to do a reading from All Too Well (the book). There’s just a part of me what will always want it to be me!

I haven’t actually “worked” on any sort of book since I was 14, passing around my YA novel to my friends at the lunch table. I haven’t written an essay longer than a Park It post since 2022. I have pages and pages of Google Docs that contain random little thoughts I have about movies like Princess Diaries or memories I have from camp. But these moments of jealousy and longing — however utterly embarrassing that they happen in semi-public — are good conviction that the dream is still alive 15 years later. It was quiet for a while, but it’s still there. I have no clue whatsoever how it’ll come true but I’m really not in any rush.

Whenever that time does come, my first aspiration is to be picked for Joan Calamezzo’s book club.

jesus christ

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There’s this REALLY tender in the time before the credits in this episode where Leslie talks about Pawnee. I would totally encourage everyone to go watch it, mostly because I can’t seem to find a single video of the specific moment, so everyone’s stuck with this tumblr post instead. It just kinda makes me go :,)