was graduating from high school when
we got to see her in Brokeback
Mountain, and I kind of melted for her
when my young fashion-design-major
heart saw her fringe bangs and impos-
sible outfits in The Devil Wears Prada.
Rachel Getting Married coincided with
my first bout of Big Girl Depression and
my sixth change of college major.
When I crawled my way out of the fog
of mental illness, I danced around a liv-
ing room with two little boys I babysat
while their parents worked real full-time
jobs, and we sang every song from Rio at
the top of our lungs. It was near impossi-
ble to miss the backlash after Les
Misérables, but the peanut gallery called
her charming again by the time The
Intern came out, and her performance in
Ocean’s 8 was often referred to as a full-
scale comeback. In May, she received
her star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
She also got married and had a baby
somewhere in there.
I responded to the first email thank-
ing my friend for thinking of me, assuring
them I would attempt to think of my flut-
tering interests, pursuits, and projects as
being in service to a more complex cre-
ative life. Then I looked at my calendar
and responded to the second email say-
ing I wanted to do the interview.
The blazer I wore for the interview
was a mistake. It was my favorite—fun
and comfortable. But on the deceptively
humid, overcast day I’d walked into, it
created a clammy barrier between my
sweat-soaked skin and the weak, recy-
cled air of the subway train. The bodysuit
I wore under it was modest enough
paired with the blazer, but without it,
positively scandalous. I smiled apologet-
ically at almost every person I encoun-
tered for my damp appearance. When I
walked up to our meeting place, the
doorman asked if I needed to sit down. I
assured him I was fine and waved to a
tinted window just in case she was
behind it. Anne Hathaway slid from the
backseat of the black SUV outside the
building where we’d come to learn to
make sushi. She was dressed in blue
jeans and a black shirt, with a long-sleeve
flannel tied around her waist. She
hugged me and I apologized.
As we walked toward the elevator, I
asked how she was feeling today, a quick
mood check. Hathaway turned to me
with that even-brighter-than-you-think
smile, tilted her head a bit, and answered,
“Honestly, I don’t know yet.” She
explained that she’d gotten up, rushedaround, and hadn’t really had a moment
to check her own temperature. Then she
asked if I’m good at small talk. I told her
some version of not really. “Good,” she
said, smiling again. “Me neither.” I
thought this must have been intended to
make me feel better because she’s won
an Academy Award and a Golden Globe
for her ability to perform. Not that this
moment felt like a performance; it didn’t.
She was kind and warm and I think genu-
inely excited to learn how to make sushi.
She said she’d wanted to do this for a
long time. “Ordering sushi, all the con-
tainers, napkins...” She waved her hands
around to represent the mass of...stuff
that inevitably arrives with your takeout.
“It would just be less expensive and less
wasteful for me to do it at home.”
Hathaway supports many eco- and envi-
ronmentally friendly initiatives in the
United States and around the world. “I’ve
been very lucky in life, and I just see this
as my responsibility as a person with the
time and means to do it.”
We greeted our cooking instructor
and host before removing our shoes
and bags. She told us where to find
aprons, and with the longer collar of
Hathaway’s black shirt, the lace detail
at the neck of the apron made her look
like she’d gone back in time and taken
us all with her. I noticed the gentle,
instrumental music in the room and
asked Hathaway if she grew up in a
musical household. She did. But not
the coolest music for her age group.
Her family listened to a lot of musicals,
though her vocalist mother, who had
also played the role of Fantine, would
often listen to singers like Ella
Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin as well.
This bit of cultural distance in music
wasn’t the biggest deal to the kids at
school, but then, of course, there was
the singing. “My family sang con-
stantly,” Hathaway said, laughing at the
memory. “I didn’t know that wasn’t nor-
mal until the seventh grade. One day a
friend just sat me down and said, ‘I
need to talk to you about the singing.’”
Hathaway was embarrassed but, in all
the most important ways, undeterred.
She may have stopped constantly sing-
ing in the hallways of her school, but
she did not stop singing. She sings
(and dances) in an episode of the series
Modern Love, to be released this fall
from Amazon Studios. “I think there is
no better way to express joy in a perfor-
mance,” she says. “Singing and danc-
ing forces you to open yourself up toAt the top of June, I woke up to rain on
my window and two unread emails. The
first message was from an older friend
passing along a quote from the author
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love; City of
Girls) on the differences between peo-
ple she called “Jackhammers” and those
she called “Hummingbirds.” According
to Gilbert, Jackhammer People and
Hummingbird People are distinct in how
they deal with the work they want or feel
they are meant to do, but neither
approach is more useful or more desir-
able than the other. She defends the
poor Hummingbirds who “bring an idea
from here to over there, where you learn
something else and you weave it in.”
They are undervalued connectors and
innovators who change what we believe
is possible, she says, insisting that this
perspective “ends up keeping the entire
culture aerated.” However, when Jack-
hammers like Gilbert find their meaning-
ful goal or work, “we don’t look up, we
don’t veer, and we’re just focused on
that until the end of time.” She writes,
“It’s efficient; you get a lot done.”
The next email asked if I was avail-
able to interview Anne Hathaway. There
would be a movie of hers to see, The
Last Thing He Wanted, a Netflix original
film adapted from the book of the same
name by Joan Didion. Despite being
deep enough in my own book-writing
process to finally begin using the word
no liberally, I wanted the assignment. I
feel pop-culturally tied to Anne
Hathaway by age and interest, and I find
the trajectory of her career fascinating.
Anne Hathaway is a Jackhammer.
I’m part of the generation of 30-
something women who were teenagers
when Hathaway showed up in The
Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted. I
“My family sang constantly. I didn’t know that wasn’tnormal until the seventh grade.”