People often ask me why I left editorial and became an agent. It’s a good question but I’m tired of it. Why did I leave Judaism and become and atheist, why did I quit heroin for methadone, why did I cut off my beautiful long hair for this veritable shrub? Why did I stop writing poetry for screenplays? Why Coke Zero instead of Diet Coke? Why did I cut off my left foot in favor of my right, why did I pluck out both of my eyes? Why did Celeste give up her throne? Why did Antigone die alone? Why did I change from a butterfly to a cocoon. Friends, I had my reasons.

What about you?

Filed under: Uncategorized | 45 Comments »

I’m back from the brisket brigade, otherwise known as New Year’s dinner at my mom’s. I have to hand it to her, at eighty she still makes homemade gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup, brisket, chicken, potatoes, Kasha varnishkes and honey cake. This post is an appreciation of the woman I never really appreciated. My mother always made us look words up in the dictionary. “Mom, what does Blah mean.” “Look it up,” she’d yell back. And then we’d have a conversation about usage. My mother admitted to me that she had picked out a pen name from a young age when she wanted to be a writer. Lynn Carter. My mother smoked Tarryton’s and drank scotch. I can’t believe she didn’t put pen to paper with those vices. She was a big reader, and I remember her reading to us in bed, taking turns between my older sister’s and my twin bed on alternating nights. And how I loved having her in mine when it was my turn.  She was very theatrical and gave her thumb a good lick before turning a page.

What about your mom? Oh, happy new year.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 81 Comments »

Today, I received a three page query letter from a man who had one project ready to go and four others he wanted to mention. If you know me at all, you know I think query letters should be about a paragraph or less. Great title, brief description (no plot if you can help it) and your creds. If you know me at all, you know that I think it’s advisable to pitch one project and one project alone. And to lead with your best and most recent work. To make matters worse, this writer couldn’t settle on a title and devoted an entire paragraph to what amounted to a brainstorming session on titles. Normally, I would jot “please decline” on the top of the letter and shove it into an inbox near my assistant’s desk, and within a day or so, an intern would send a rejection letter. Basta.

Only, I liked the sound of the book. And so I kept reading, and I liked the sound of the other projects. And I invited the writer to send me the book that was completed. I know there’s a moral to this story and it has to do with a mythical beast and a pocket full of change. Who knows, there’s a good chance the pages are not up my alley, not my cup of tea, that they won’t rock my world or float my bloat. There is also a good chance the world will explode and single cell amoebas will vote on the next National Book Award winner and it will go to my twin sister Hela.

Are rules made to be broken, or are they marvelous?

Filed under: Uncategorized | 36 Comments »

This is a shout out to my client William Todd Schultz and his new book An Emergency in Slow Motion about Diane Arbus. When I was studying in London for my junior year, I lived in a single room in a dorm in South London. All the girls ditched the dorm in favor of a flat on the King’s Road. But I stayed. I craved solitude more than anything. And this cinder block room was the room of my own I had longed for. It was the year I read Hardy, Dickens, Hopkins, and Larkin. The year I drank red wine and ate peanuts from a cellophane sleeve while I read aforementioned writers. It was the year I started to write academic papers in the first person. The year I saw Truffaut’s Wild Child. It was the year I went hunting for psychedelic mushrooms with a pale young man who looked a little like a mushroom and wore crepe soled shoes. And the year I hung exactly one poster in my room: twin girls  in matching dresses and hairbands.

Thus began my love affair with Diane Arbus. And so it was my great good fortune to connect with William Todd Schultz who was at work on a psychobiography of the photographer. He had even been in touch in a series of long phone calls with Arbus’ last psychiatrist. But more than this extraordinary new window into her life, I loved his approach to understanding this great artist. He looked at each of the central mysteries of her life in a way that I found thought provoking, tempered with common sense and respect, and complex. Ever since I was a teenager, I have always been fascinated by the great artists who took their lives. This book is tremendously helpful in thinking about the making of art and the unmaking of a life.

It’s such a huge topic, artists who take their lives. I don’t know where to begin to ask a question.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 56 Comments »

I was at a dinner party over the weekend with a group of people I was mostly meeting for the first time. One of them turned to me at one point and said that she had read my memoir. She wanted to know if it had been difficult to write. It wasn’t. In fact, it was easy. Even the parts I sobbed through. I knew what I wanted to write. I had over twenty diaries from the time period I was writing about. I had an in-depth outline, but more than that I knew every key scene I had to write and the way each one connected  to the next like the stars in the big dipper. I knew what I would say and what was off limits. It was all clear to me, there for me.

What was hard were all the terrible false (fictionalized) starts I had attempted over the years. What was hard was the outsized jealousy I felt reading one memoir after another, believing I could do better while unable to write anything at all.  Funny how that works. I had made many mountains out of my little mole hill.

WHat’s more difficult: writing or not writing?

Filed under: Uncategorized | 36 Comments »

Today, the most remarkable thing happened. A client sent me an idea for a non-fiction book. I liked it, but had that same old sinking feeling that it wasn’t “big” enough. What does that even mean. We know what it means when we are talking penis size, portfolio size, your number of Twitter followers, and yes I’m looking at you Ashton Kutcher who apparently has all three. But what the fuck does it mean to have a big book, to conceive of one, to put a proposal together that feels…big. Well, it can be idea driven (Tipping Point), story driven (Sea Biscuit), personality driven (Keith Richards). It can be new age driven (the Secret), it can be high concept  (The Seven Habits of Highly Defective People). It can be real-estate driven (The Fuckin’ South Beach Diet.) Oh, canine-driven (Marly and Me). Goopy-driven (Morrie and Me). Or find a little known story set against an exciting moment in history (Devil in the White City). Or you can just be an exception to all that (Just Kids).

What happened today was that after a few exchanges, it turned out that there was a much “bigger” story in the backdrop. In fact, the more my client told me about it, the more I realized he was on to something that had never been done. The most important history books had completely left this out. If I were a miner, I would have thought: gold. It was also exciting to me because we made the discovery together. And in so doing, I was reminded why I love working with writers, how exciting it is to see an idea come alive, and to know that over the next months that idea will find its expression on the page, and if we are right and lucky, that a number of publishers will read it and be astonished, too, that they didn’t know about this story. And that it has reach, and power, and depth. And they will pay a lot for it because they think they can sell a lot. i.e. it has the potential to be a big motherfucking book.

Of course, some big books started small. What’s your favorite big book and small  book? Wildly popular or a small gem?

Filed under: Uncategorized | 44 Comments »

The Fall is always a time when projects are flying fast and furious around town. Publishers and editors are in a buying mood with the back to school snap in the air. Foreign publishers are criss-crossing Manhattan in search of a big book to bring back in their suitcase. Scouts are chasing down every lead so that their publishers are pre-Frankfurt ready. So how do you feel if you’re an agent without a big Fall book to sell? How do you think?

You remind yourself of all the books you are working on, developing, that take time. You remind yourself that it’s cyclical. You remind yourself that you sold five books in the Spring. You ask yourself if you’re really cut out for this. You tell yourself to man up. You can’t have a big book every season, or can you? You think about all the other agents, the good, the bad, and the vile, and you imagine them dunking a fat shrimp in cocktail sauce at the Four Seasons, or sharing a round of golf with Bill Murray.

How do you keep your nose to the grindstone? HOw do you stay focussed? Blinders on? Stay the course?  When some young MFA brat is getting a half million dollar deal? When a writer you loathe gets a rave review, is on NPR, and The Colbert Report. How do you not write about zombies or vampires. How do you just do your work, when all around you are eating shellfish?

Filed under: Uncategorized | 45 Comments »

Some writers want to work without thinking or caring about market concerns. I get that. Some are hyper-aware of marketing concerns and want to reach a specific audience. I get that, too. There are some projects that have some kind of magnetic force field that draws the market out. You can often see it first inside the publishing house where interest pools around a book in the form of buzz, of galleys disappearing, of people wanting to work on it, a kind of momentum starts to build driven by in-house reads, rep enthusiasm, etc. Most books, however, need a push. And to that end,  while you are writing, or when you’re shopping your project, and again when it is published, the clearer your idea is of your market, the more likely you might actually reach it.

Who IS the market for your book? For Forest for the Trees: aspiring and jaded writers, students of writing, teachers of writing, and happy, hopeful people. The market for Food and Loathing: People with bi-polar, eating disorders, Jewish self-hatred, mother issues, people in love with their shrinks, people who hate their shrinks, self-hating shrinks, Twelve step drop-outs, and fast-food connoisseurs.

Who is the market for your book?

Filed under: Uncategorized | 54 Comments »

On the front page of the New York Times Book Review on Sunday was a review for Leah Cohen’s new novel, The Grief of Others. It was a rave. And for the first time in my life I felt pure joy, not a shade, not a hair, not a whiff of jealousy anywhere to be had. And she’s not even my client. She was something else. She was my first.

I was a young editor at Houghton Mifflin where I received a proposal about a school for the deaf that would eventually, and somewhat controversially due to its enigmatic nature, be titled: Train Go Sorry. Its author was this impossibly kind young woman who was able to bring Lexington School for the Deaf to vibrant life.

I didn’t give birth to Leah Cohen, but you’d think I had given how proud am I of her. She has worked quietly and diligently over the years producing a beautiful body of work, fiction and non-fiction. And in both realms she does what the best work accomplishes: she makes the non-fiction read like fiction and vice versa.

How do you feel when good things happen to people you went to school with?

Filed under: Uncategorized | 28 Comments »

Dear All:

I’m posting early because tonight’s the Emmy’s and as you know, I’m up for an award. They created a new category this year and it’s for the over fifty with absolutely no chance of every getting a pilot shot, let alone on the air, but thanks for filling up the world with all of your hopelessness and caramel-covered delusions, thanks for double-bagging your brilliant ideas and suffocating the life out of them, thanks for the sausage casing and thanks for the cream cheese. If only every idea you had were merely derivative, if the sound track you heard  wasn’t your own ass gasping for air. This is awarded to the person with the biggest blanket, with perfect tits and a penchant for splinters. You are here tonight because god loves you, because the stars know how to spell your name, and the password is: syndication.There was a lot of competition.

What category are you nominated in?

Filed under: Uncategorized | 34 Comments »