Sarah Jessica Parker says Northwestern graduates were 'a beautiful burden'

Sarah Jessica Parker told Northwestern University graduates they had become ‘a constant distraction, and a beautiful burden.’ That is the kind of line that wants to be Joan Didion and lands closer to a Notes app draft written after three iced coffees and a crisis about whether the cap looks cute.

On The Megyn Kelly Show, Parker’s commencement address got treated less like a speech and more like a crime scene. The prosecution’s case was simple: Parker had 23 minutes, a lectern, a famous name, an audience of young adults entering the working world, and she spent too much of it explaining how hard it had been for Sarah Jessica Parker to prepare to speak to them. Not exactly ‘ask what you can do for your country.’ More like, ‘ask what your graduation has done to my sleep schedule.’

Sincerely, sincerely graduates, even though we’ve just met, you have become, over these last few months, cohabitants of my life, a great part of my waking thoughts, a constant distraction, and a beautiful burden.

To be fair, this is a classic commencement-speaker trap. The famous person wants to seem humbled, so humbled, impossibly humbled, by the invitation. But humility can curdle fast when the subject keeps returning to the speaker’s own nerves, own process, own awe at the room. Suddenly the graduates are no longer the point. They’re the vibe.

The line is corny. The roast is meaner than it needs to be.

The show is right about the speech’s mushy self-focus. Parker’s phrasing keeps inflating the occasion until it floats away from normal human speech. She didn’t just prepare for a graduation address. She was ‘haunted’ by the students. She didn’t just look out at a crowd. She imagined each singular soul emerging from the collective, like a prestige-TV opening credits sequence about higher education.

And I finally get to now see all of you extraordinary people. And having thought of you for so long, having struggled to find the right words to inspire you, having been haunted by you, I just want to say wowza, you are much better looking than I even imagined.

But the attack also goes from criticism to pile-on with whiplash speed. The host spends the opening mocking Parker’s hands, nail beds, shoes, voice, age, and career. That doesn’t make the commencement address better. It just makes the segment feel like it wandered in from a group chat that should have stayed private.

I think she’s trying to be funny and charming, but she’s not, because this speech is all about Sarah Jessica Parker.

Still, the central complaint has a point. Celebrity commencement speeches often promise wisdom and deliver lightly steamed autobiography. The celebrity tells you fear is normal, failure is useful, the world is hard, and, if they are feeling especially brave, that you should be yourself. Parker’s version, at least from the clips played here, adds a Carrie Bradshaw mist machine to the usual formula.

Carrie Bradshaw at the lectern

The show can’t resist dragging Sex and the City into the frame, because of course it can’t. Parker has spent decades trying to be both herself and not-Carrie, a literary New Yorker by association, a shoe icon by contract, a serious reader by Instagram aura. A commencement stage is exactly where those identities start wrestling in public.

Sex and the City poisoned generations of women, many of whom I met working in media, in journalism.

That claim is too sweeping, and also very 2004. Blaming a generation of women for watching Carrie Bradshaw is like blaming men for watching Tony Soprano and then buying too much deli meat. Influence exists. So does audience agency. The sharper, less overheated critique is that Parker’s speech seems unable to leave the Parker mythos at home. Even her compliment, ‘you are much better looking than I even imagined,’ comes dressed as flirtatious banter with a room that didn’t ask to be cast in a rom-com.

The useful lesson for listeners is not that Sarah Jessica Parker is a fraud, or that commencement speeches must be TED Talks in gowns. It’s simpler: if you’re asked to speak to graduates, don’t make them sit through your emotional weather report before offering the forecast.