HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'I thought I wasn't a jealous person, then my co-host wrote a bestseller.'

This article originally appeared on Holly Wainwright's Substack, Holly Out Loud. Sign up here.

I thought I knew what jealousy felt like.

I'd felt it before, of course. Searingly, when my first serious boyfriend stopped answering my landline calls to his mum's house and started being spotted in the park with that girl who was 'just his friend'.

Many times, for people who had the things I coveted in different eras of my life: Long legs, Australian citizenship, zero credit-card debt, the leisure time to binge-watch, a house with multiple bedrooms… you know, the usual.

But these were pangs, waves of a mucky disquiet that rolled across a day. Generally speaking, jealousy has not been not my driver. In fact, I have often preached abstinence from envy, understanding that your torment over someone else's actions, possessions, thighs, rarely affected any outcome.

At least, that's what I thought.

Listen: Jessie and Holly discuss this mortifying era of jealousy with guest host Stacey Hicks on Mamamia Out Loud.

A few years ago, my great friend Jessie Stephens released her first book, Heartsick. Jessie and I are co-hosts on Mamamia Out Loud, maybe the reason you're reading this, maybe not, and we have worked closely together for the best part of a decade. Jessie is almost 20 years younger than me. She is — and no throat-clearing required here — an absolutely excellent person. Extremely talented, incredibly hardworking, principled in the best way, she's kind, brave, smarter than almost everyone and funny as hell. I love Jessie, a lot.

Also, for a few months in 2021, I wanted to kill her.

Not literally, I'm not dangerous. But for a wild little period, thoughts of my friend Jessie tormented me. Kept me awake at night, intruded when I was writing, washing up, cooking, walking, reading to my kids, working alongside her.

You see, Heartsick was good. Really, really good. If you haven't read it, what are you doing here, go. It's a non-fiction account of three women's heartbreaks, and it's sharp and poignant and well crafted, accessible and cerebral at once. At first, I was delighted and proud of her. Mia Freedman — my friend, our boss, Jessie's mother-in-law, yes, it's complicated — and I had been full of advice for our young first-time author.

"'Heartsick' cemented Jessie as a young writer of respect and renown." Image: Supplied.

At that point, I had written three novels, Mia had published best-selling memoirs and we counselled Jessie on not getting too disappointed if publishing her first book didn't change everything. Advances are small for debuts, we told her. Australian books don't sell that many copies, we said. Keep a realistic lid on your expectations of success.

Well, LOL. Heartsick was the sensation it deserved to be. American publishing houses were bidding to publish it before its Australian release. That is a BIG deal, friends. The amounts of money Jessie was telling us about then were… decent. It was optioned, of course. It led to a bigger domestic deal. A piece in The Australian literary section calling her The Next Big Thing. It cemented Jessie — deserving, talented, hard-working Jessie — as a young writer of respect and renown.

And still, I wanted to (metaphorically) kill her. If you're thinking, 'well, of course you did', then you're much smarter than I am. Because what was rocking my foundations was that I was completely blindsided by how I felt about it.

I am not a jealous person. I celebrate my friends' successes. I know there's enough pie for everyone.

These were the things I had told myself about myself for decades. The way I advised other people, like my children, to be. The way I saw other established, grown-up women I admired behave: generously. That's who I thought I was, and yet here I actually was, sliding into that slurry of mucky disquiet — and it was threatening to swallow me.

I had a book deadline of my own to get on with. You see, the novel I had written and released the year before, I Give My Marriage A Year, was also a success. Not a 'bidding war in America' kind of success, but a respectable, good seller in the local market that shuffled me up a rung in the pecking order of 'commercial' Australian authors. Things were going well for me, and I had the next book to deliver.

But I couldn't write it, not then. Every time I put my fingers to my keyboard, my mind would play Jessie's song: So talented, so smart, so young, so original, so fresh… Look at me, with my little relationship stories, life half gone and mediocre everything. I would close my laptop and swallow my bile.

My professional jealousy didn't drive me to be better. My professional jealousy shut me down.

This week, Mel Robbins, self-help superstar, was on the No Filter podcast with Kate Langbroek, and she was exceptionally Mel-Robbinsy. If you are familiar with Robbins, you'll know she's a tough-love person. She's a 'stop wallowing and get your arse up' person. No snooze alarms, no zero days, no excuses.

Generally, I'm not a fan of those people. They remind me of the Biggest Loser trainers yelling 'lazy slob!' in people's faces while ignoring the oceans of complexity that bring anyone to a place where they're willing to be so humiliated.

But I can recognise there's something freeing and powerful about Let Them. And so I hungrily listened to Robbins talk to Kate, and when she got to the bit about jealousy, all my inner bells started to ding.

You can listen to what she said, via a very funny story about kitchen cabinets, here:

The long and short of it is, Robbins sees jealousy — not the 'f**k you' we mutter as we scroll past someone on a boat in Mykonos when we're on the 6am to Central, but serious, keep-you-up-at-night jealousy — as the big, flashing signpost to where you should be going. Where you should be putting your energies, long term.

She says that you only truly envy what you truly want.

And I thought: That's absolutely true.

My ugly obsession with my friend's success was extremely enlightening, once I was able to actually admit it was happening, to speak its name to some close trusted people (including Jessie herself), to let it breathe. Only then could I see what it was actually about.

I was scared. That I'd finally got around to the dream that I'd had since I was seven years old — to be a writer, with my name on the spine of a book — and I wasn't good enough at it. It was too late to get good at it. I had missed the boat. I was never going to be The Next Big Thing, because I was That Old Thing.

And I was lying to myself. I thought that I was just happy to be at the party, to have achieved the feat of authorship at all, to do just well enough to get the opportunity to do it again. And all of that was true, but I would not admit that what I also wanted was more. More recognition, more people reading my work, more financial security in a notoriously insecure profession.

Look, not to get all Mel Robbinsy on you, but when I'd finally figured that out, once I was brave enough to be able to admit its source, my ugly obsession began to fade.

I could get back to work. I could sleep. I could stop plotting to kill one of my favourite people.

Cut to four years later and Jessie Stephens is still brilliant, and I still work alongside her most days of the week. She published a novel next, Something Bad Is Going To Happen — you've probably read it — and it was also excellent and also a smash. It got optioned. She's working on scripts for it, as well as other screenwriting projects with her equally talented sister, Clare. She's a besotted mum, now. She continues to challenge and push herself — and all of us who work with her — to be better and braver every day. And I don't hate her for any of it. I love her for it.

I am still writing books. My most recent novel, He Would Never, has been my most successful so far, and I am extremely proud of it. I am just happy to be here, in the profoundly fortunate position of getting paid to do creative work that I love. But I am also still hungry. And that's okay. In fact, it's probably essential.

My jealousy taught me that.

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Feature Image: Supplied.