Frances Star is a penname. It is a reference to both my history and my future. I will reveal many details about my life in writing for Miss Know It All but I wish to keep my real name a secret. For all that I will tell, I don’t want my family or friends to suffer even the slightest insult as a result of our blog.
Now here is my story in a nutshell: I was born in the late seventies to unconventional parents (read: pseudo hippies who didn’t plan for me but didn’t necessarily plan for anything). Both my parents are very smart but both lacked focus and discipline so in turn my childhood lacked those same things. This made our lives both wonderful and scary at the same time, never predictable but always interesting.
For most of my young life, we lived year-round in a summer beach community off the coast of Long Island, New York. My father built homes and my mother stayed at home and took care of me and helped my father with his business. Along with a handful of close friends and their children, we enjoyed living in a place that for nearly 8 months out of the year was removed from larger society. It was a safe, beautiful place where children could play anywhere, anytime without the normal cautions of suburban life. Cars were scarce and in all its 60 miles there were less than 1,000 year-round residents, making the word “stranger” uncommon. When I was in the first grade, my mother began looking for homes on Long Island.
By this time my brother, Jack, arrived I think that sparked her perceived need to start living a “normal” life. It wasn’t long before my parents marriage turned for the worse. Despite the big new house and luxurious family vacations – summer in the south of France, a long winter trip to Australia, 2 warm weeks at a resort in Puerto Rico – my parents were unhappy and eventually divorced. The separation and divorce lasted 3 years but the signs of trouble were apparent well before that. I was 13 by the time my parents finally cut loose of one another. Jack and I lived with my mother at first and despite her repeated attempts to move us around, I put my foot down and finished high school in the same town we had moved to on Long Island. Every divorced child knows that with divorce comes power and every divorced child will wield that power (if they recognize it) to do what they need to to survive. Survival to me meant protecting Jack and me from another upheaval in our already unstable lives.
Jack and I graduated from the same public high school on Long Island. It was not a particularly good school and despite the fact that most of our immediate neighborhood was an affluent waterfront community, our classmates were mostly children of divorced, lower-middle class families from “the other side of town”. None of my friends had summer homes or wealthy Grandparents living in Manhattan, as we did. They didn’t know what it was like to see an opera or shop at Barney's. These kids did not travel as I had.
Up until that point I was a good student but the divorce left me scarred and at the age of 13 I was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer. Throughout high school I struggled with wanting to do well in school and just wanting to feel numb. My circle of friends were what some parents would deem “the wrong crowd” but really they were just like me – kids with divorced/single parents who didn’t have a lot of supervision.
Luckily, I was a good test taker and my SATs scores guaranteed that I could get into a decent college. So, without much effort, I entered a small, private liberal arts college in Manhattan. My motivation was more about living in New York City than being a student. That sixty miles from the blue-collar, Long Island town where I’d spent so much of my young life was, for me, the equivalent of putting a difficult past behind me. I was liberated by my new surroundings - the people and the City itself, which (at that time) was pulsing with possibilities.
A former ballerina, I used the few contacts I had to get a foot in the door with some modeling/talent agents and over the following two years I did get some work, but only a little. I soon found that school, and doing well in it, was much more rewarding. By my second semester I was getting almost straight As and receiving the attention of my professors. Always driven by a strong competitive edge, I realized that I wanted a more challenging academic environment and decided to transfer during my sophomore year. Wanting to stay in NYC, I picked the obvious - NYU and Columbia.
My decision was made for me as Columbia didn’t accept mid-year students and I wanted out ASAP. I graduated from NYU in January of 2001 with a major in Print Journalism. Not wanting to move to some small town where I could actually get a job writing for a local paper, I decided to stay in Manhattan and look for a job in business. This decision was born more from my desire to stay in this City that I felt was now my home and also due to the strong influence of my Grandfather who had become my mentor during the last four years. He lived in the Carlyle on the Upper East Side and had urged me to forge a career in which I could earn “real money” and never have to rely upon anyone. Having been a successful entrepreneur himself, I hung on his every word and set out to find “a job that paid”.
That led me to my first job in a construction company, where I was hired to assist the partners. It was a struggling mid-sized company that needed help in marketing, development, human resources, and project completion. Two years later, I was the in-house problem solver on all these fronts. But I was bored and felt that this company, like my first college, was limiting.
My Grandfather’s influence was again going to shape my next career decision. He introduced me to a man he’d met in Paris while staying at the Hotel Plaza Athenee. This man worked as a commercial real estate broker and advised me over lunch, with my Grandfather in attendance, to find a professional mentor in commercial real estate and to focus on one the top females in the industry. He even gave me her name and got me an interview in his firm. Four months later I had my real estate license and offers from the top four commercial real estate brokerages in Manhattan, two of which were with the top two women in the industry (they were also sisters but that’s a story for another time).
I chose one of the sisters and began working as an associate on her investment sales team, selling some of the most prominent real estate in Manhattan. This job too had its drawbacks. My new boss, a leader in her industry and a role model for many women within it, was a narcissistic egomaniac the likes of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. Despite the child-labor -like working conditions there was a silver lining...It was at this job that I met my husband, who I’ve been married to for the last two and a half years.
After two years we both my husband and I moved on, although it was a difficult transition. And then, after a short stint at a start-up firm, I took a position with the largest residential real estate company in New York City where I still work to this day. I am a strategic marketing and sales consultant for luxury condominium developments. For the past three and half years this has been my profession. While it is not my dream job, it, along with my past positions, has given me substantial professional credentials and earned me a decent living for a 30-year old. That and my husband make me proud of the decisions I’ve made as an adult and now, hopefully partially due to this blog, I will chart another, more challenging course.
