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Self-described "broke ass": The Broke Diaries author Angela Nissel
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When you're broke,
it's a good idea to hang with someone like Angela Nissel. She's like
that funny-as-hell girlfriend who's crazy enough to make you forget
the tons of water you drank before bedtime so that your bladder would
be too full to let you oversleep (works great when you can't afford an
alarm clock).
Nissel's also the author of The Broke Diaries: The Completely True and Hilarious Misadventures of a Good Girl Gone Broke (Villard Books), a newly-released collection of sarcastically hilarious journal entries from her days as a financially-challenged University of Pennsylvania medical anthropology major. The Broke Diaries began as a online journal that developed a cult following and had readers (including myself ) consoling, empathizing, and laughing at situations from scamming for free textbooks to dating a chicken farmer just to get a free rotisserie dinner. |
While cutting her anthropology classes to tinker with her site and hit guys up in chatrooms for web building tips, she grew increasingly adept with the web design skills. Looks like it paid off--Nissel's also the co-founder and (until recently) the webmistress of Okayplayer.com, a popular music-oriented web host and design company that also features hip-hop and R&B artists including Common, The Roots and D’Angelo.
Currently in L.A. working with Aaron McGruder (creator of comic strip The Boondocks) and acclaimed director Reginald Hudlin to adapt a feature script based loosely on The Broke Diaries, Nissel took some time out to dish the dirt about her success...and finally being able to splurge on 35-cent Ramen noodles.
So, you’re done
with the Broke Diaries book tour. How was it?
Yes, I’m done--oh my God, thank goodness! It was crazy—I’d leave one city right after the book signing, rush to the next city and do another and wake up early so I could make a 7 am morning show appearance. It was cool getting to meet so many people, but it was like, ‘Oh my God!’ The time that you have to yourself, it’s like, ‘Thank you, thank you!’
I remember Brian, my publicist at Villard, telling me, ‘Expect about 7 to 15 people at your first reading,’ and then at the NYC signing, there were about 100 people there! I told everybody, ‘Bring 20 friends!’ (laughs) So, it turned out good.
How’d the idea for The Broke Diaries come about?
It’s funny, because there was never a moment that I was like, ‘I’m going to write The Broke Diaries.’ I was just really...broke. I liked the Internet, saw a lot of web communities and wanted one of my own, but I never thought it would come from being broke! My website included other things as well, like “guys to avoid at the club,” but the Broke thing really took off. People were like, “Write more broke stories!”
Did you promote
the website any, or was it just word-of-mouth?
It was just word-of-mouth, which eventually got to my editor. I was like, “Whoo! That’s some good word-of-mouth!” And it’s now the same thing with the book. I can’t believe the amount of press it’s getting—it’s really cool. Even before that, people were like, “My girl told me about this book!”
I admired your
attitude about laughing at hardships. But
was there ever a time where you were like, “Oh shit! I’m
broke!”?
Oh, hell yeah. The first two years at Penn I spent being jealous of other people, saying, ‘Well, why don’t I have a rich daddy?’ Because I didn’t have a lot of money, I dropped out of school in the second semester of freshman year and worked at [clothing store] Mandee’s. But then I was working with 40- and 50-year old women who were making $5 an hour and literally fighting each other over sales that we didn’t get commission on. And I was like, “Damn! I’ve got it way better. I’ve got a guaranteed work-study government job, a little bit of money, and I can get a degree so I don’t have to be at Mandee’s, hopefully. That made me change my attitude. You learn—nobody wants to be around someone who’s broke, mean and depressed.
Was it harder to
just let things flow, knowing that you’re writing in a book now?
The hardest thing about writing a book vs. for the Internet: Whereas hardly anyone in my family’s online, I knew that they all read books (laughing)! At first, I was really afraid to write—I was like, "Aw, man—my aunt’s gonna know I wrote about her," you know? But my editor was like, “Well, it didn’t put me to sleep,” so I thought, "Let me just keep writing with abandon," like I used to.
I just love your sense of humor—it's sort of dry and sarcastic. I could really relate; I was just cracking up. Did your style of writing always come to you naturally?
Yeah, I think so. With the website, my sense of humor still came out, but I didn’t take as much time with it as with the book, because I was like, “hey, this is free!” But I was really kind of paranoid with the book—I went over things several times, got the thesaurus and even had to kill a few entries because people were like, “Hey…these just aren’t funny!” The humor kind of comes naturally, but I think that there are always things you can do to make it funnier, and that’s what I tried to do in the book.
How did you go from being a medical anthropology major to web design and Okayplayer.com?
(laughs) Because it’s hard to get a job in medical anthropology! I really began to get into web design during the beginning of my senior year, after my internship at Dateline NBC. At Dateline, I was on the Internet whenever I didn’t have to get Stone Phillips some coffee or whatever…I was just on there, and I just kind of fell in love with it. Later, [hip-hop group] The Roots needed a website, and I was like, “Hey, can I try to do the site?" He was like, "Yeah, let’s do it," and I tried to do it with a community feel—not only concentrating on what colors went together, but getting people to come and creating a community. And it blew up!
Do you still
revert back to “broke behavior”?
Compare your "broke" experiences to Nissel's at www.thebrokediaries.com
