It’s not in my DNA to say I’m a writer. When someone asks me what I do, I say I’m a literary agent. SOmetimes I say I’m an accountant if I don’t want a conversation to ensue that invariably ends up with the other person telling me about a manuscript they are writing or wish they were writing. Or that their cousin is writing.
When people ask what you do, what do you tell them.
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CONTEST: Who is your favorite bad guy (in literature) and why? I’ll ask Jean to judge the answers and top three answers will win a copy of Savage Girl.
New York Times Sunday Book Review
Sooner or later, a historical crime novel is bound to drag you down some dark alley and into the nastiest, most lawless precincts of the period. Jean Zimmerman followed this tradition in her first novel, “The Orphanmaster,” a descent into the hellish criminal haunts of 17th-century New Amsterdam. In SAVAGE GIRL (Viking, $27.95), this canny author puts all that aside and turns to the Gilded Age for a sweeping narrative, set within the cloistered ranks of high society in 19th-century Manhattan, that raises touchy questions about what it means to be civilized.
Even in this exclusive world, the Delegate family is more privileged than most. The paterfamilias, Friedrich-August-Heinrich (also known as Freddy), has taken his family and a retinue of servants on his private, sumptuously appointed 12-car railroad train to Virginia City, Nev., to visit the silver mine that’s boosting his already considerable fortune. But when the Delegates depart from this brawling Wild West boom town, they have an additional passenger, a beautiful, feral young woman from a land that’s “savage, wild, forsaken by God and man” — who’s said to have been raised by wolves. Found at a sideshow, she’ll be the ideal experimental subject, Freddy thinks, for the nature-or-nurture debate roiling his intellectual set.
Using Freddy’s intelligent but decidedly peculiar son Hugo as narrator adds another layer of suspense to the story. A student of anatomy at Harvard, this young man has an unhealthy fondness for knives and a vivid imagination when it comes to Bronwyn, as the “Savij Girl” comes to be known. But who’s to say where imagination leaves off and obsession takes over, once the family is back in its Fifth Avenue mansion and the “Pygmalion”-like process of civilizing Bronwyn (who keeps her own set of razor-like steel claws and creeps out of the house to visit the wild animals at the zoo) begins in earnest.
The wondrous sights Zimmerman rolls out for us — a picnic on the banks of the Great Salt Lake, a stopover at the “fabulous, glorious” Palmer House hotel in Chicago and visits to mansions up and down the East Coast — are all the more piquant when Bronwyn’s admirers begin turning up, cut to ribbons, at almost every whistle stop. If this is civilization, bring on the wolves.
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A feral child unsettles Gilded Age New York City in Jean Zimmerman’s Savage Girl.
How did the book come to be?
I’d always wanted to write about a wolf girl—that is, one afflicted with the genetic condition known as hypertrichosis, which causes a person to resemble an animal, with fur growing all over his or her body. Many children with the condition were exhibited in American sideshows in an earlier period. Related in my mind was the phenomenon of so-called feral children, a girl or a boy purported to be raised by wolves (or by bears, or big cats, or goats, or, in one reported case, by rats). I ultimately crashed these two ideas together in Savage Girl.
What did the murder plot add?
A random killing here and there really focuses a narrative. We don’t know who is committing the murders in Savage Girl, but indications point to Bronwyn—and with good reason. The historical record shows that feral children were prone to violent outbursts.
You often write about the status of women. Was there something in particular about the women of the Gilded Age that intrigued you?
I found the debutante to be a fascinating creature and the coming out process one that was as constricting as it was lovely. Here were the grand dames of society, banding together when a girl reached the age of 18 or so, helping to usher her into a new social status. There was some power in the process for women. The learning curve was steep. There were new gowns and dance lessons, teas, ritualized social visits, and grand balls. The fashions were extraordinary. Yet debuting was filled with the strictest rules and obligations, and if you failed, there was the threat of punishment—remaining a spinster. I wanted to search beneath the opaque surface of the debuting process to find deeper meanings. That meant talking about both corsets and bloomers.
“Zimmerman’s dark comedy of manners is an obvious homage to Edith Wharton, a rip-roaring murder mystery more Robert Louis Stevenson than Conan Doyle and a wonderfully detailed portrait of the political, economic and philosophical issues driving post–Civil War America.” –KIRKUS
Filed under: Authors, Books, Client, Editor, fiction, Literary Agent, MFA, Uncategorized, You Go Girl | Tagged: Historical fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Kirkus, New York Times Book Review, Publisher's Weekly, Savage Girl, Viking Publishers | 14 Comments »
Let’s go back to basics. Query letters. Here are ten opening lines from letters I’ve received or concocted.
Dear Betsy: I am a huge fan of your blog and The Forest for the Trees, which I recommend to everyone I know.
Dear Ms. Lerner: Your agency website says that you like the hard to categorize.
Dear Betsy Lerner: I have written a fiction novel of 130,000 words called The Lost Letter.
Dear Betsy Lerner: Have you ever been afraid, really afraid?
Dear Betsy Lerner: I am a Harvard graduate and a Buddhist.
Dear Ms. Lerner: I am a survivor.
Dear Betsy (if I may): I was about to give up writing until I read your book — I am the wicked child.
Dear Miss Lerner: Part memoir, part travelogue, this is the story of my return to Los Angeles.
Dear Betsy: My novel, The Launching of Fawn Roth, is about a young woman a lot like Lena Dunham.
Dear Betsy Lerner: I am writing to you because of your personal interest in mental illness.
If you were an agent, which one would you respond to?
Anyone want to float their opener?
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When I gave the talk at McNally Jackson, someone asked how I know if I want to represent something. I said it was physical, my palms start to sweat, I feel accelerated, I want to tell people about it. Wanting to tell people about it, knowing exactly how I would talk about it, pitch it, is also key. Sometimes, but rarely, I see dollar signs, too. For me, it’s very physical. It’s like attraction. I’ve never believed there was an objective standard — we are attracted to smell above all if you believe the biologists. Then, for me, its facility with language and sloping shoulders. With books: all you have is your gut, your taste, and then, all you can do is work your ass off to help make it the best book possible and get it in the right hands. Whatever it takes. My mother once asked me how you know. How do you know? You don’t know, I said. You believe. And with that I turned into a deranged Tinkerbelle on acid and flitted off for an irony time-out. But really, I do believe. I do.
Do you believe in your work? This is not a trick question. And please, just for a day, behave.
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I have a bad habit. Okay, I have several, but here’s the one I’m most proud of: I think I can tell how somebody writes by looking at their author photo. And basically that’s how I decide which of the Important Books to skip, because really, who has time to read them all? Before you have a freakout about how mean I am, I swear it’s not a beauty contest. It’s more subtle than that. There are some bushy browed dogs out there who still do it for me, who really seem to inhabit their faces the way the voice inhabits the page. I’m looking at you Philip Roth. Not a beauty, but a Dick That Gets the Job Done. Ditto Bukowski, says my friend Sean. Maybe Fran Lebovitz isn’t a conventional beauty, but I like the vibe she gives off in a photo.
Jonathan Franzen, not so much. I mean, way to man up for the cover of Time, homie. I know he’s America’s Author, but all I see is America’s milquetoast. I suppose he’s conventionally handsome and the article mentions his perfectly tossled hair, but I look at his face and I think of the word limpid. I flash back to how he deprived Oprah’s masses of his gifts on the grounds that he didn’t want to, or something. I see pictures of Jonathan Franzen and I think of all the emo narcies who ever tried to teach me to crochet. Five bucks says he sits down to pee.
This is why I haven’t finished The Corrections and why I’m making it my Life’s Goal to make it through the new novel. I have a feeling it’s a much more rigorous Forrest Gump. Even as I write this I feel that guilty tug of you guys in my ear: You don’t even know what you’re talking about. All the reviews are raves. Read it before you judge. But I’m telling you I’ve already made up my mind.
Botox. I’m not against it. There is a way to use injectables in moderation, so that you still look like you’re made of flesh. But Mary Karr: frozen in bitchface. Can’t read her stuff, don’t like her attitude. I imagine if she were a visual artist, she’d paint in menstrual blood. Her perma-scowl makes me want to pick a fight about the origins of her stupid faith. 
For Botox done well, see John Grisham, Jackie Collins and Justin Bieber.
Who can’t you help but loathe on sight?
* Erin Hosier, whose blog style is “on the rag,” is not the same person as Betsy Lerner, whose blog style is “perimenopausal” and on vacation.
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Betsy Lerner 