Lana, circling back after last week’s call. Have you given any more thoughts to a collab? SPOT—The Best Period Underwear. Period.—would love to have you as a spokesperson—

Hi, sorry but Grayson told me to text you and ask if you knew where his Bulgari Octo Roma watch is, he’s supposed to wear it tonight and get a picture—

I feel my blood pressure rise as I look at them. It’s like a self-propagating to-do list every time I open up my phone.

I get into the back of the waiting G-Wagon, handing my phone to Lisa Michele, my personal assistant.

“Oh, ew, there’s so much here. Okay, I’ll forward these on over to myself.” She pokes at the screen, then hands it back. “So annoying that they keep contacting you instead of me.”

I pull down my Dodgers hat so far that I basically can’t see, a signal that I’d like to be left alone.

Lisa Michele doesn’t get it, and starts scrolling through her own phone. Chaotic bursts of noisy video start and stop as she jumps from one clip to the next. It’s one of her worst habits. She looks up my hashtag and then watches all the videos about me.

“This is so great,” she says. “Literally everyone loves you, I’m not even kidding. Like all the old people on Instagram especially for some reason, but also like everyone my age.”

I let my head loll to the right to look at her. She’s an impossibly perky twenty-two-year-old with vocal fry and upspeak, a piña colada vape pen, and a degree in Social Media Management from Northwestern. I’m only eight years older than her, but whenever I listen to anything at all that she says, I feel like the old version of Rose in Titanic.

Not least of all because that is the reference that comes to mind first.

The car jerks as someone cuts into our lane and I grab the bar on the door, gripping so hard I think I might crack one of my Gel-X nails. My heart pounds in my throat.

“Oh, well actually, lies, not everyone loves you,” Lisa Michele says, reacting to her phone screen but not the jerking of the car. “Some of these comments are … real cringe.”

I take a few deep breaths.

To understand my career as it stands, all you need to do is read the six-page think piece written about me and the show I’m on, Brilliance, that was recently published in the New Yorker. The article was called “The Era of Eras Has Ended.”