What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding: A Memoir

by Kristin Newman Narrated by Kristin Newman

Overview

Kristin Newman spent her twenties and thirties dealing with the stresses of her high-pressure job as a television comedy writer, and the anxieties of watching most of her friends get married and start families while she wrestled with her own fear of both. Not ready to settle down and yet loathe to become a sad-sack single girl, Kristin instead started traveling the world, often alone, for a few months each year, falling madly in love with attractive locals who provided moments of the love she wanted without the cost of the freedom she needed. She introduces listeners to the Israeli bartenders, Argentinian priests, Finnish poker players, and sexy Bedouins who helped her transform into "Kristin-Adjacent" on the road-a quieter, less judgmental, and, yes, sluttier version of herself at home.



Ultimately, Kristin's adventures led her to a better understanding of what she was actually running away from at home and why every life hurdle seemed to put her on a transatlantic flight to the unknown. Equal parts laugh-out-loud storytelling; thoughtful, candid reflection; and wanderlust-inspiring travel tales, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding is a compelling and hilarious debut that will have listeners scrambling to renew their passports.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

04/14/2014
Television comedy writer Newman (That ’70s Show, etc.) seems to have the perfect job: nine months writing and three months off to pursue her passion for travel. The memoir begins in 2000, when she is 26; a six-year romantic relationship has just ended. To cheer herself up she takes a trip to Paris and Amsterdam, where she pops some Ecstasy, flirts with a lesbian, and begins a tradition of using travel to heal a broken heart. Throughout the next decade (the memoir concludes in 2011) she visits Russia, Argentina, England, Iceland, Australia and Brazil (among other places), always finding romance, adventure, and plenty of (well-documented) sex. While her friends are marrying (and having children), Newman seeks freedom and fun. The only child of divorced parents, Newman is wary of marriage, though she longs for a lasting relationship (readers will find themselves rooting for Argentinian (almost ex-) priest Father Juan). Newman includes witty travel trips (e.g., “You don’t wear booty shorts to the Western Wall on Shabbat”).The author is quick to point out that she’s “not a slut in the United States of America” and defends a female’s right to a sexy vacation romance. Ultimately, however, Newman’s funny and unflinchingly honest memoir reveals that even though there’s nothing quite like a great party in an exotic locale with a hot guy, true love doesn’t necessarily require a passport. (May)

From the Publisher

“There are lots of books out there about being the single girl in your crowd, but Kristin Newman's is a special one; it's truly hilarious and travel-oriented, which makes it perfect for summer.”—Glamour Magazine

“If you liked Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, try What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman.”—The Boston Globe

“Newman adeptly mixes humor and heart, making this the perfect read for anyone in search of love, adventures abroad, or both.”—Booklist

“Kristin Newman reminds me of David Sedaris, but with more joy.”—Diablo Cody

“Kristin Newman’s tales of wanderlust are at turns hilarious, embarrassing, and then truly inspiring. Her thrilling escapades make me want to get up off the couch and book a ticket to some exotic locale for a sexy adventure of my own.”—Jane Lynch

‘Kristin Newman explodes the idea of the ‘singles scene’ into a thousand tiny fragments and scatters them globally. This is misspent youth well-spent.”—Patton Oswalt

“I knew that [Newman's] book would be incredibly funny, but it’s also so heartbreaking, insightful, and full of adventure, romance, and sex sex sex! Do yourself a favor and read this book!”—Will Forte

“I have had the pleasure of joining Kristin on some amazing adventures and can say without question that she is as good a writer as she is a traveler. Which is to say, slightly better when she's had a few glasses of wine.”—Nick Kroll

“Kristin puts the ‘lust’ in wanderlust and makes adventuring and even mis-adventuring sexy, fun, and at times even inspirational.”—Jill Soloway, writer/director

“Unlike the rest of us, Kristin took the road less traveled and that has made all the difference. Her sparkling wit and adventurous spirit will seduce you just as it did that guy in Argentina . . . and in Russia . . . and in Jordan . . . and so on . . .”—Nell Scovell, co-author of Lean In

“What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding is sly disguised as sexy. It reminded me of George Eliot mixed with a woodshop safety film . . . a complete delight.”—Stephen Tobolowsky, actor, author of The Dangerous Animals Club

“Kristin’s book is such an uproarious, side-splitting, jaw-dropping-while-miraculously-somehow-also-self-reflecting page-turner, it makes me feel like I traded in my own wife and children for a time machine and a spot in her globetrotting duffel bag.”—Rob Kutner, writer for Conan, author of Apocalypse How and The Future According to Me

“Riotously funny, brutally honest, and hopelessly romantic . . . Newman’s global romps and brave takedown of the dated, divisive dichotomy between happy breeders and desperate singles is one of the most refreshing things I've read in a long time.”—Attica Locke, nationally bestselling author of The Cutting Season

“Makes the reader wonder if life should always be about deep introspective moments with earth-shattering realizations, or if there’s space for spontaneous conversations with random acquaintances . . . Newman’s irreverent and ultimately graceful memoir suggests there is.”—Etinosa Agbonlahor, Off the Shelf

“[Newman] writes about other countries and other people with a curiosity and affection that is crucial to being a good travel writer. I found myself, as an Indian, wishing [she] would make her way there and report back to me about my own country.”—Diksha Basu, The Rumpus

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"[A] funny and unflinchingly honest memoir." —Publishers Weekly

Library Journal - Audio

10/15/2014
Newman has been a television writer for such well-known shows as That 70's Show, How I Met Your Mother, and Chuck and brings her comic skills to this witty tell-all about her own romantic exploits—cleverly tagged "vacationships"—during the frequent trips she took abroad in her 20s and 30s. Terrified of romantic commitment after the slow dissolution of her parents' marriage, Newman filled the emotional void while traveling by assuming an alter ego she named "Kristin-Adjacent," a "slower, softer, and yes, sluttier" version of who she was at home in Los Angeles. Several months out of the year Newman charged into a dizzying variety of short-term international adventures, mingling with such colorful characters as Rodrigo the Brazilian surfer, Diego the Spanish instructor in Patagonia, Aleg the Russian bartender, and, most important, "Father Juan," an Argentine ex-seminary student with whom Newman had her most lasting and emotionally compelling affair. Newman herself narrates this audio edition with mixed success; the anecdotes are by degrees exhilarating, unbridled, and often quite embarrassing, so the courageous candor of the material lends an air of intimate charm, as if Newman was sharing her stories with a best girlfriend over a shared bottle of wine. However, her delivery is also a bit shrill and grating in places, underlining an essential immaturity and superficiality in the tone of the narrative. VERDICT This is an entertaining, light listen, heavy on broad comic strokes, with little real insight into the places the author visited or many of the people she met. Listeners looking for a good, tantalizing comic yarn will be delighted, but there is little of substance here.—Claire Abraham, Keller P.L., TX

Kirkus Reviews

2014-03-29
A Hollywood sitcom writer's unabashed account of how she spent 10 years of her young adulthood traveling the world and having "sweet, sexy epic little vacationships" with foreign men. Newman began traveling the world in her mid-20s. A painful breakup with her first love led her to board a plane to Europe, where she traveled all the way from Paris to Amsterdam. Two years later, she took a single-girl trip to Russia with her best friend. An encounter with a bartender led to the discovery of her libidinous alter ego, Kristen-Adjacent, and the start of her new life as "The Girl With Great International Romance Stories." Newman then traveled to Spain, where she "tussled with a Barcelonan who…[wore] black panties," and on to Canada, where she made out with a friend, then back home to obsess over the perfect man she never got but who invited her to chic parties all around the world. During hiatus from her work as a comedy writer, when all her other girlfriends were now "too married or too pregnant" to travel with her, she went alone to Argentina, where she took two lovers. One, a former priest, became an on-again, off-again flame and her reason for returning to Buenos Aires in subsequent years. On a trip to Brazil, she took up with two different men within a 24-hour period and had still more "vacationships" in Australia and Israel. Ambivalent about commitment to the point of neurosis but now adult enough to realize that she had all along "absolutely [been] looking for love," the now late-30-something Newman finally settled down without regrets for her wild and wicked past. Though entertaining and, in its way, liberating, the book often crosses the line between uninhibited and overdone. Too much information, too little substance.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171274283
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/30/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding
Kristin Newman

Prologue
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 whorish 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, poorly dressed men, telling dick jokes and overeating and, sometimes, sitting on the floor with Demi Moore, Ashton 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, having 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 after a divorce for a trip or two, but then leave me again when they got married for the second time before I’d managed 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 resolutely terrified of doing any of it. I did want to have a family 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 wrestling match threatened to body-slam me into a veritable Bridget-Jonesian-sad-girl singlehood, which I was resolutely against, both personally and as an archetype. And so toward 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 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 riding 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 tickets 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 souvenirs, I broke up with that dude and went on a really great trip.
 
 

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