Life After One-Word Virality: Yes, I’m the Person Who Came Up With #Scandoval

I shall tell you, O Muses, of a woman of one device—an iPhone 15—who wandered not far from her couch after she read the TMZ story of Vanderpump Rules stars Tom Sandoval, Rachel Leviss, and Ariana Madix, and who posted onto Instagram stories a portmanteau so clever that it instantly entered the Bravosphere.

I am talking, of course, about #Scandoval, a word that I, a lowly lifestyle journalist and nascent author, invented on Saturday, March 4, 2023.

A momentary backtrack. Sometime in the wee hours of March 3, I, like so many other Bravo-obsessed Americans, learned that longtime partners Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix, of the reality television show Vanderpump Rules, had split. The former had been caught cheating, reports indicated, with Rachel “Raquel” Leviss, the one-time fiancé of another cast-member.

Details seeped out through Deux Moi and other gossip sites. Was it true that Madix had learned of Sandoval’s escapades by intercepting a NSFW video call from Leviss on Sandoval’s phone? Were reports of a physical altercation between cast member Scheana Shay and Leviss—both of whom were filming Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live in New York that night—accurate?

Eventually, viewers like me would come to know the entire story, every sordid detail revealed through a series of larger-than-life Easter eggs, unmasked throughout the season of arresting TV. But at that moment, we knew nothing, and neither did the show’s producers, who were forced to call the cast back for a last-minute show overhaul.

My own literary brain, for what it’s worth, shot into overdrive. By morning, unable to concentrate on anything but the alleged infidelity, I had already remastered Sandoval’s deeds. Tom Sandoval’s scandal. A scandoval. I posted the portmanteau on Instagram in the morning, tagging Bravo Daddy Andy Cohen and thinking very little of it. “I coined the term ‘Scandaval’” I wrote, experimenting with the first spelling of the phrase. “But I give you all permission to use it.”

A few minutes later, a word I created became canon when Andy Cohen reposted my Instagram story to all five million of his followers, urging them to follow suit. A #Scandoval was born. My word, weaseled from my brain with more facility than a worm crawling into RFK’s, suddenly had power. It had force.

People I hadn’t heard from in years saw my name appear in Cohen’s feed. In my career as a journalist and essayist, I had written pieces—large pieces, thoughtful pieces, pieces that took time and reporting and that had drained me of time and resources and, in some cases, sleep and sanity—and these pieces, with one exception, had garnered relatively little critical or commercial attention. They had simply faded away, replaced with the next issue of the newspaper, the next issue of the magazine. And yet. All it had taken to make me very, very popular was to write one single word. That was it.

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Writers, of course, seek permanence. We want to be remembered, and, ideally, we want to be remembered for our highest quality work, but I am perhaps best known not for the 6,000-word essay that earned me a James Beard Award nomination but, rather, for one single word—six letters—that have become part of popular culture’s lexicon.

My career has always been one of attempted overperformance. To stay germane, I must exceed my last great work. My next essay must be better. More people must read it. My achievements must pile up atop one another, stacked higher and higher. There is, of course, no true ceiling in the job of writing. We brandish and polish words and make sentences better, clarify thought, look back upon old work and turn red in the face with embarrassment. So where is the space held for the things that have made us notable that are only adjacent to the work we do as thinkers?

After I invented a very minor word that made me a mini Bravolebrity—that landed me on podcasts and saw me tagged in every related Instagram post—I had to sit down and do the very major work of writing a book, my debut, Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly. There’s no virality when it comes to the long slog of writing a book. No instant gratification. No one knows the battles you wage with yourself when it’s you and the blank pages, you and the fact-checkers, you and the red edits.

There is, too, the self-doubt, paralyzing. When someone likes your short and pithy movements on the page, that’s no guarantee that they’ll like all of you, all 80,000 words of you. Even when someone can tolerate you for 6,000 words, there’s no proof that the equation can multiply. Will they hang around? Will they follow you through until the end of your journey?

Scandoval was my lightest, funniest, best material, but any halfway decent writer can pal around in the shallow end of wordplay. That’s good writing. Great writing is the kind that keeps people up at night, that wills them to repeat your words back to you. Great writing comes at some kind of sacrifice. Great writing doesn’t always make people love you. Great writing sometimes makes people loathe you. And, more often than not, great writing doesn’t make you famous, or make your work part of the public conversation. Great writing is not reposted by people with Instagram followings in the millions.

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After #Scandoval, I was invited to watch DJ James Kennedy—a Vanderpump Rules cast member who I should note, has since been accused of domestic violence—spin at Mémoire, a nightclub in Boston. At dinner, an hour before the show, my friend and I were seated one table away from the Vanderpump Rules star, and, after a brief explanation of my relationship to the Bravo world, I got a photo with him. It was another example of the word and world that united: cause célèbre, yes, but my true work? No.

Still, #Scandoval exposed artifice in the architecture of the show. An invigorating penultimate season, which offered viewers the ability to watch an affair ignite in real time, gave way to a flat, uneven final one. The show’s stars, too aware of cameras and the limitations of reality television, could no longer parse real life from acting. The moment had passed. Like all viral moments, the fame was fast, furious, and quickly forgotten.

Almost exactly two years after I catapulted #Scandoval into the Bravosphere, I have arrived at a new crossroads. My book, now nearing birth, is a work much longer and more complex than its slim and witty sibling. It’s almost certain not to garner the same attention as those six letters did.

And yet I trust that my hard-fought process—writing, revision, research, the interrogative rigor that longform requires—have led me to a deeper (if less popular) conclusion, which is that the best stories we tell aren’t the ones that go viral. The best stories are the ones that we keep chipping away at, the ones we devote our whole selves to, the ones we craft, the ones we care about more than clicks or likes or reposts. My own purpose, as a journalist and, now, as an author, is to focus not on the flash of fame, but on the long journey, the one that winds and wends, in no particular direction, really, but that yields the satisfaction of a job well done.

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Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly by Hannah Selinger is available now via Little, Brown and Company.