I did something today that I thought I’d never do — I used the “D” word. And I’m not talking about douche, douche bag, or douchiness. I wrote a press release for a recent sale and I referred to the book as a “debut.” I hang my head in shame. I don’t know when “first novel” got supplanted by “debut novel,” but it sickens me. And it’s ubiquitous. There are no more first novels, only debuts. Debut this, debut that. Is it a debut? Debut novelist so-and-so. Debut blah blah. And it’s not just debut. There are no more presentations, only power points. A simple price has become a price point. Back in the day. 24/7. And my most despised: game change.
Why does this make me crazy?
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Do you have to be a selfish bastard to be a writer? Take no prisoners? No apologies, no excuses. GIve up your good citizen badge. Insist on your time alone, your writing retreats, your get out of jail free card, jail being every fucking family function, dinner party, and pot luck or bake sale at your kid’s school. Every time someone tells me how nice and helpful I am, I want to hang myself. Yes, that was me baking three dozen chocolate chip cookies last night. Yes, that was me chatting amicably in the parking lot. Me talking to my mother’s bridge lady’s daughter’s husband about his book on adult circumcision.
– Who is your agent and how much do you love her?
It’s true: fiction got fucked in the face by the
Over the weekend, I visited my niece who had moved into her first apartment. I was filled with nostalgia for that time in my life even though most of it was miserable. Her place had one large window which looked out on a classic New York landscape of apartment buildings, inside each window a short story in progress. I could have stared out of it all day. She had only begun to furnish it with a few pieces from Ikea, couch, tables, one chair. The first piece of furniture I bought when I became a full editor was a couch. It was black leather and the arms and back were curved and you could stretch out on the whole thing and read all day, which is exactly what I did. That couch followed me to three houses before it was finally retired to that great couch heaven in the sky.
It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it, that poetry gets its own month. There’s a lot of important and vital shit out there that doesn’t get its own month, like Stem Cell Month or Bi-Polar Month or Mountain Dew month. I’m all in favor of it, don’t get me wrong. A little poetry never hurt anyone, though the road to hell is paved with poets. Which came first: iambic pentameter or the desire to self-destruct. Or the desire to put pressure on language, flip it, douse it with gasoline, light a match. Daddy you do not do. The asshole is holy. My body electric. Hush Saxon, say it again. He forced the underbrush and that was all. Pablo Picasso, they never called him an asshole. Darkness my name is. I remember Richard Howard, glass raised to his eye, reciting The Moose. Someone said it was an egg nestled in the eyebrows of Milosz. Or Denis Johnson silent as a stone. People ask me if I still write poems: no. Though today, leafing through an old journal, one fell out. You’d’ve thought I found gold, that letter from another life. .
I’m not writing. I’m not doing it. I’m taking a break. A big fat fucking break. I’m going to the gym again, not that it shows. And no I don’t feel better. I’ve got some kind of freak anhedonic response to working out, so instead of a runner’s high when I finish, I wind up bawling in the showers most days. And lately, it takes very little to set my chin aquiver. I told my psychodrama that I was teary a lot lately, but that it actually felt good. “How does feeling bad feel good?” he asked. Really?
Sans plus adieu, un billet de blog de la perche de la publication de la bien-aimée et séduisante Vivian Swift…
Betsy Lerner 