Illustration by Layer Ø Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment For nearly 30 years, I've made a career out of allowing others to pay me for the pleasure of breaking my heart - also known as writing for television. And every time Hollywood breaks my heart, I heal it by running away from home. I've used travel as medicine often enough that I wrote a book about it - a comedic travel memoir called What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding, about my single-girl years of addiction to (especially) solo travel. And because enough people have tucked that book into their carry-ons when they ran away, from 2022 to 2024, I got to make a TV show based on it. Related Stories Movies Arab Cinema in Focus at Rotterdam: Filmmakers Talk Funding Hurdles, Streaming Benefits and Downsides Movies Sci-Fi Doc 'Hungry' Promises an "Immersive" Exploration of How to Avoid "Extinction Events" (Exclusive Rotterdam Clip) It was a magic-filled yet dramatic process. We had to shoot two pilots because the first one, filmed in Latvia, was about a girls trip I took to Russia. That Eastern European lightning in a bottle got us a series order. And then ... Putin invaded Ukraine. And no one wanted my actresses interviewed about a life-changing girls trip to Russia. So we shot a second pilot in Iceland. Then I moved my family (I finally bred!) to Argentina for four months, and we wrapped shooting (even the billboards) the day before the last writers strike began. I followed WGA orders to not edit during the strike. And because the strike ended just after Disney's new deal with Spectrum excluded many of its linear platforms, my network - Freeform - subsequently lost 30 percent of its viewers. And somehow, the earnings reports were helped by shelving my completed 10-episode, $50 million life's work. So you might say that in my chosen field of heartbreak, I am at the peak of my career. It is not the worst thing Putin has done, but it's the worst thing he's done to me. The week that my life story became a tax write-off, a life raft arrived when the series that I left to make my show invited me back. Only Murders in the Building is a soft landing at any moment in history, but at that moment - when no one in my house had made money for six months and Hollywood all but stopped making TV - it saved me in every way a person can be saved. Most essentially, it allowed me to hide, in a creative fetal position, writing for someone else's baby, when I felt too unsafe to try again for my own. But regardless of how filled with kind humans and comedy legends your hiding spot may be, duck-and-cover is no way to live one's life. And so, after two years, I made the nearly impossible decision to leave one of the last jobs in Hollywood. Three hundred writers applied for my job. I settled into "writing from home," hunting for what was next, with the fear that, perhaps, nothing is next - for any of us. But then my phone rang. Legendary travel company Abercrombie & Kent's founder, Geoffrey Kent, launched the luxury safari when he came up with one of the pinnacles of human innovation: bringing along refrigerated coolers so you could have ice with your G and T in the bush. So when I got an offer to go on a press trip with A&K to Kenya and Uganda, where I could fulfill my dream of visiting gorillas in the wild, it felt like a golden sign from the universe that stepping into the nothingness had been the right decision. My medicine had arrived, and boy did I have time to take it. I hadn't gotten on a plane alone since making my show, and I remembered only when I walked by myself into Tom Bradley that the weight of my world would just lift off of me the moment I entered the chaos of people from every country in the world hugging their loved ones goodbye. And doing it alone is always something special; I can feel myself physically cracking open, turning outward, toward the world rather than toward a travel companion. I teared up just walking through the terminal. So, yes, there was some weeping at LAX. But I was determined to be cool when I met my travel companions the next morning - two friendly veteran journalists and our delightful A&K PR guide, Jean Faucett. But not saying things out loud is not my strong suit, and so it was a matter of hours before I confessed that I was so stunned to have gotten this trip when I needed it so desperately that I might now believe in God. "I get about 13 press-trip offers per day," responded Elizabeth, an art and design writer, "although a lot of them are to Florida." I resolved that if I could not be cool, I would be fun, the life path all comedy writers choose around middle school. By the trip's end, Jean would want to take me to every glorious property in her portfolio. Two of the surprising number of female bush pilots in Kenya. Courtesy of Subject We w