Authors | Betsy Lerner

The Magic is In the Hole

Posted on July 30, 2009 by betsylerner

You know how lots of paperbacks now have those “Questions for Reading Groups” at the back, which could also be called, “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” These really idiotic questions that would actually insult a fairly bright fifth grader. Well, check this out.

I recently read Elizabeth Strout’s stories, Olive Kitteridge. I was deeply moved by a few stories and admired the book greatly. In fact, I keep thinking about one intimate exchange between a long married couple. The book is a huge commercial and critical success, wins the Pulitzer, all good. But then, something goes terribly wrong, and I’m not sure if anyone has mentioned it.

When you come to the end of the paperback edition, there is: “A Conversation with Elizabeth Strout and Olive Kitteridge.” Seriously.

Here’s how it begins: “Random House Reader’s Circle sat down with Olive Kitteridge and Elizabeth Strout in a doughnut shop in Olive’s hometown of Crosby, Maine.” Was someone having a cute attack that day at the marketing meeting?

Random House, the author, and her character all chat about lots of literary matters, but then Random House goes for the jugular and asks why doughnuts figure so prominently in the stories. “Olive” answers that they sure do seem to show up in a lot of the stories. Then the author allows how the doughnuts, for Olive, represent “a certain heedlessness in her desire to appease her appetites.” And then (this gets better, folks) “Olive” herself asks her creator if she has a doughnut predilection. And Elizabeth Strout chides her character, “Oh, don’t be defensive, Olive. I know exactly how pleasing a good doughnut can be.”

Am I the only one having an aneuryism here?

Full disclosure and in the spirit of true modesty, I do feel I’ve written one of the all time great doughnut scenes in my memoir, so maybe I’m a little touchy when someone takes the Lord’s name in vain. But for St. Dunkin’s sake, since when is it okay ON ANY LEVEL to have an author interview her character? Are we Pirandello?

Also, I keep forgetting to mention that in Portland, they have this place called Voodoo Doughnuts and they sell BACON doughtnuts.

Filed under: Authors, Books, Publishing, The End of the World as We Know It | 10 Comments »

Me, Myself and I

Posted on July 28, 2009 by betsylerner

A NYT article over the weekend talked about Frank McCourt and a host of memoirs in the mid-eighties that were part of a trend that has yet to abate. In the list of memoirs were two books I had edited when I worked at Houghton Mifflin: Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation. Both were acquired modestly and each had a small first print run. Both books had a brilliant jacket and inside were stories about self image, depression, and the search for love. As an editor you feel defined by the books you work on: these two said it all for me. As luck would have it, each had a devoted publicist and, while this is a romantic way to say it, publishing magic was made. And a fact of which I am impossibly proud, both books are still in print these many years later. One more thing: My daughter’s new school gave out a summer reading list of books the kids could choose from. Lucy’s book was on it. That’s all.

Filed under: Authors | 5 Comments »

Thank God It’s Monday

Posted on July 27, 2009 by betsylerner

A post over the weekend about the demise of literary fiction stirred up some fantastic debate. Thanks to everyone who weighed in.

In a June 29 New Yorker, there’s an article about a recently discovered trove of Edith Wharton letters that she wrote to her governess, the one person who encouraged her writing, truly a lifeline in a censorious home.

The closing quote speaks, I think, to our debate: “I don’t believe there is any greater blessing than that of being pierced through & through by the splendour and sweetness of words…I wouldn’t take a kingdom for it.”

Of course, that might be weighed against the blessing of being pierced through & through by Gabriel Byrne or Jon Hamm.

Filed under: Authors, Writing | 6 Comments »

Ashes, Ashes

Posted on July 20, 2009 by betsylerner

I know I wrote about Frank McCourt in The Forest for the Trees, using him, among others, as an example of a late bloomer. My books are still packed away, or I’d dig it up. The salient point: McCourt was published for the first time at the age of 66. You see some of these geezers at writing conferences and it’s hard not to think: game over. McCourt changed all that. But there was something in his NYT obit that touched me even more.

“On the side, Mr. McCourt made fitful stabs at writing. He contributed articles on Ireland to The Village Voice, kept notebooks. But at the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village, where he became friends with Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, he felt like an interloper, he said. They were writers. He was just a teacher.”

And then, “An early attempt, when he was studying at NYU, had fizzled out, but three decades later, he said, he had worked through his awkward self-conscious James Joyce phase and had gotten beyond the crippling anger that darkened his memories.”

Finally, the obit explains how, in what he thought was a note to himself, he found his voice, “That was it. It carried me through to the end of the book.”

It’s all there. The pervasive imposter/interloper complex most writers feel (many well into years of having been published). What is that about? Does a musician feel like a fraud if he hasn’t recorded? An artist if he hasn’t had a retrospective a MOMA? What is it about writing?There’s a great Mona Van Duyn poem (again packed away) about taking a vision test for a driver’s license, and the mortification she feels when asked her occupation.

Then there are the fits and starts and thirty year “hiatus” from writing. Oh, yeah, and the crippling anger. I can’t relate.

And last, finding your voice. Like what? An old friend? Like the true self? Like a gift you never expected and probably don’t deserve.

Raise a pint to Mr. McCourt. Four million hardcover copies, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle. Well, not too shabby for an old geezer.

Filed under: Authors, Writing | 6 Comments »

Drive-by Shootings

Posted on July 15, 2009 by betsylerner

For each day that I’ve been here, at the Tin House Writers Conference, I meet with nine conference attendees for a ten minute agent consult from 4:30-6:00. I never did speed dating (I was more interested in long drawn-out painful dating), but it must be a little like that, you’ve got this tiny window to make an impression. Boom!

Some writers are like the little bird in the children’s book, “Are You My Mother?” In the story, a mother bird goes off to look for food. The infant bird awakens and falls out of the nest. He wanders the countryside asking all manner of animal, cow, horse, dog, etc., “are you my mother.” Of course the book has a happy ending, but it always broke my heart, maternal longing being what it is.

Others come somewhat shattered from a rough workshop session. Others come with questions written down on index cards. Index cards! Some of the writers are all over the place and you feel the ten minutes ticking down as they race to get everything in. With some, I dig a little, curious about their project, their day jobs and lives. With others, I begin to wonder why I was born.

Last night, I broke through a shyness wall and hung out with the big game, the published authors. Drank.

Filed under: Authors, Writers | 6 Comments »

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