You know how when you don’t bring an umbrella, it rains? I didn’t bring a notebook on this trip, didn’t bring a sad copy of my screenplay, didn’t even have a pen in my pocketbook. In my previous so-called life, this would have been anathema; more: treason. I always traveled with at least one little notebook, usually a loose leaf the size of a deck of cards and in it I scrawled ideas, line for poems and always words whose meaning escaped me and that I would dutifully look up when I arrived home. Not this time. It was a wing and a prayer and a call for rain.
On the back of my electronic ticket, I scrawled what I hope might be a way back into the screenplay and an idea for a play based on a biography I read (a play! Jesus, who am I now, Arthur Miller?). Naturally, I am anxious about looking at those notes, for fear they are as ill conceived and fleeting as the clouds of St. Ives where I walked and where the sun occasionally broke through the clouds and illuminated a stretch of beach or a few boats moored at the quay.
Do you know that feeling?
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I am aware that I use this blog primarily as a place to work out my problems and give voice to the exquisite agony of writing and publishing. And that I indulge a particular kind of melancholy that infuses much of my day and relationship to writing and to art. But over the years I’ve had some peak days that I would be remiss in not mentioning. When I got my first promotion, when I received the Tony Godwin prize for editors under 30. (Yes, I was once under thirty.) When my author and friend Kim Wozencraft got a million dollar film deal for her first novel and we went to the Brasserie and ate steak and drank martinis. (Later at the office, I puked and fell asleep under my desk.) When two books I had edited (Prozac Nation and Autobiography of a Face) were well reviewed on the same page of the New York Times Book Review and both of their careers took off (both books still in print). Working with Temple Grandin. Selling my own book and buying a Cartier Tank watch. And yesterday at the BEA.
I spoke to graduate students at Columbia today. The usual. How to find an agent, how to put a proposal together, how to turn your dissertation into a trade book. How to write a query letter. To attach or not to attach pages. Make multiple submissions or not. All the important talmudic questions in the great book of publishing life. Walking through the campus, I gave a nod to the staircase that leads to Dodge Hall, home of the writing divisions. I still remember my first day of school, intimidated beyond belief, attempting to look cool and like I knew where I was going, when I tripped and was splayed out on those steps. Before I could even tell if I was hurt, I popped back up and hoped no one had been looking. The fall caught up with me later, or it foreshadowed greater collapse to come. But I always remember that fall, the symbolic freight it imported on a young woman thrilled out of her mind to be attending an MFA program, to starting her life after a disastrous undergraduate careerl
Everyone keeps asking me what I think of Girls, Lena Dunham’s new television show for, by, and about twenty-something women and women who remember what their twenties were like. They assume I will REALLY like it. First, I fucking hate it when people makes assumptions about what I will and will not like. (I hated Welcome Back Kotter, ET and Joni Mitchell.) Then, I feel suspicious; why are they assuming I will like it so much? In this case, obviously Lena Dunham’s size twelve body is to blame, then her “quirkiness,” her dysphoria. I had an allergic reaction to the show at first. But I kept watching, mostly out of jealousy. Lena Dunham is, like, 25 (I’m not going to pedia her, you can look it up if you care). And now ,five or so episodes in, I’m really liking it. It asks you to like it on its own terms, unlike most half hour comedies that will go down on you they’re so desperate for approval. Not Dunham, she takes off her clothes and drops her drawers, but you don’ t really know what makes her tick or what she’ll say next. I think that’s what I like about it: it’s not completely predictable. She’s a really good writer, too, god damn her. And a really good director. How! How! These kids today, they’re so fucking talented. My college age intern admitted that he watched it, called it a guilty pleasure, and then asked that he not have to talk about it. Say no more.
Fantastic responses to the HBO movie of the week contest. Thank you. A winner will be announced on Monday. Thanks to everyone who wrote in. An embarrassment of riches.
Anybody watching Hemingway and Gellhorn on HBO, when writers were writers and all they had to do was drink and fuck and fight, in addition to typing? It’s so great to see writers’ lives on the small screen. I think Clive Owen should play Picasso instead of Papa. I’m liking Nicole as Martha, but the aged Martha is too Benjamin Buttony for my blood. Jesus, I just read on Cheat-o-pedia that she killed herself at 89. Whoa. Oh my, Hemingway going down on Gellhorm. Kidman breast. This is just way too steamy. Plus cats.
While I was in graduate school, I worked at a literary agency in Gramercy Park. I sat at a desk piled high with slush and every week, after I did the typing and filing, I studiously combed the pile even though it never yielded any gems. One day, as I was leaving, I said to one of the senior agents, “I’d just like to find something once.” “Yeah,” she said, “tell me about it.” I couldn’t understand her world weariness. After all, she had a roster of clients, surely she knew something about discovering talented writers.
Betsy Lerner 