Fourteen years ago, a slim memoir with a simple but perfect title came into the world and created a storm of media: praise and scorn. A sales rep at Random House had sent a copy to my husband with a handwritten note: Great art? Maybe. Provocative? Definitely. The book was The Kiss. The author Kathryn Harrison, a novelist with three books to her credit at that point, was being taken to task for, among other things, revisiting material from her fiction for this memoir, particularly her incestuous relationship with her father.
I turned away, but not because she was continuing to mine her life for her writing (a ridiculous charge on any level), but because I was insanely jealous. As a young editor working on memoirs, I envied the tidal wave of attention hers was getting. But even more, I was jealous as a writer. She had moved a boulder. She had found prose as stark and terrifying as the incident she was writing about. She found the words, and she hit a nerve. I couldn’t touch it.
Years later, I met Kathryn Harrison when we were both on a publishing panel. I went home that night and found the copy the rep had sent. Interestingly, I had never sold it off over two moves; it still had the note. I think I read the memoir in one or two sittings. It was actually the mother daughter story that initially captivated me. I read it a second time, more slowly, how did she find the control and composure, how did she level her gaze, how did she pin each sentence down?
I received a reissue of The Kiss this week from the publisher. I thought I’d just read a few pages, but I reread the entire book having been captured by the earliest lines which brilliantly telegraph the entire story, “standing against a sheer face of red rock one thousand feet high; kneeling in a cave dwelling two thousand years old; watching as a million bats stream from the mouth of a Carlsbad Cavern into the purple dusk…” It’s all there like Goya’s Caprichos and Van Gogh’s blackbirds let loose over a tragic land. It’s also worth getting for the afterword by Jane Smiley and the Q&A with Kathryn Harrison if you’re interested in memoir or are writing one.
If you could ask Kathryn Harrison a question, what would it be?
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Today, as I was walking to work, I heard a nice looking guy in a suit say, “I love you,” before he snapped his phone shut and put it in his trouser pocket. And I thought for a moment how fragile we all are, especially men, imagining his wife sitting at a granite counter in workout clothes, her yoga mat near the door, rolled. They don’t have kids yet. It’s early on. He’s trim and going places. Her ring swims on her finger. His shoes have a buckle. It’s starting to rain. I can’t see his face. Love you. Love you, too. On NPR, I listened to a woman describe the last phone call with her husband before he died in one of the World Trade Towers. My husband referred to our marriage as an ecosystem and in my mind it’s a fecund marsh with cattails fat as wurst, or a desert buzzing with death, or a field of alfalfa even though I have never seen a field of alfalfa. Though there were trees as big as dinosaurs in my home town and I have wrapped my arms around them and felt my veins thrum with life. In tenth grade, my friend’s father told us to never trust a man’s declaration of love before, during or after sex. Man, was that good advice.
How do you define “making it” in publishing terms? Money, acclaim, awards, or as some people swear, the joy of doing it. Getting that first agent, contract, royalty statement with a check attached. Holding your head up high at a family wedding or bar mitzvah? Having publishers vie for your self-published novel? Seeing a stack of your books in a store, or even one wedged into a shelf? The New York Times Book Review? The Daily Show? Is it fan letters? Publishing before your 30? 40? 50? Having a car sent for you? A major motion picture starring (your favorite actor). Being wooed by Andrew Wylie? A plum table at The Four Seasons ( I’m old school). Respect?
I call it the Rapture of the Deep. It’s when a writer is so deep into his work that he begins to think everything in the known universe relates to it. He could be staring at a laminated menu, a horse galloping in an open field, or a proctologist snapping his rubber glove, and believe that each of these tableaus relates to his work. Or the day’s headlines about taxes, popularity ratings, or Ashton Kutcher filling in for Charlie Sheen, and somehow relate these events with his novel. In scuba diving, rapture of the deep results from oxygen deprivation and can cause a diver to swim in the opposite direction from the surface when he needs air. Rapture is a sublime combination of narcissism, compulsion, and expansiveness; it can be confused with mania as it shares some of the same symptoms: racing thoughts, grandiosity, exaggerated self-regard.
Today, dear readers, I decided to make pitch calls to a handful of movie people instead of just sending an email. My heart was pounding even though they could all be considered good acquaintances. I realize how much I hide behind email, how second nature it’s become. I think I get one hundred emails to every ten calls. I heard about an agent in LA who only uses the phone. I like to imagine it’s a dial phone. Why does that seem radical? A few years ago, I made a vow not to use email for difficult conversations. That lasted for about six seconds.
Today it was announced that an editor who left to become an agent has returned to the publishing side. Couldn’t hack it, I guess. Ha ha. It’s not easy working for the devil. A decade ago when I joined the dark side, I was petrified. Mostly, I now realize, it was losing my identity as an editor that upset me. That, and the child sacrifice. What’s that smell? I never wanted to be an agent. Turns out, I’m actually cut out for it. A lot of people ask me if I miss editorial life, if I would go back. My dream is to rehab a dead factory in New Haven and start my own publishing company and film production company. ANd I want to offer classes to high school kids, and have screenings, and a cafe. I guess if someone offered me an imprint and said here’s your budget, hire your own people, do what you want, that would be cool. I always liked putting on a play. In the wake of yesterday’s pity party, I have to admit I love my clients and sometimes I feel as if we are on a grand journey and over the course of many books we have built a library of our own imagination.
Tonight’s post isn’t for everyone. If you don’t like it or if you detect a spelling or grammatical error or just some shit writing, please leave some love on someone’s else blog because over here at Betsylerner.com, I am about to fucking snap. I’m not used to being played. I’m a middle child. I love to manipulate, triangulate, irritate. I like to come between people, isolate, dominate. So when I get the boomerang shoved up my ass, I don’t like it. I took it all day. It was open season.
In the NYT article about Bob Loomis’ retirement from Random House after nearly sixty years, Jon Karp (now publisher of Simon & Schuster) said that Bob would signal boring prose with the marginal comment, “We know.” That gave me a good chuckle. I have always used the rather boring “repetitive” or the more jaunty “rep” to signal prose that has lost its will to live. Sometimes I write, “slows narrative,” or “condense?” There are many euphemisms for boring, but “we know” has a the genius of the light touch with a just a dash of condescension. Woe to the writer who does not heed.
Yesterday, my mom treated me to lunch and a Broadway show. On the train into the city, I broke a cardinal rule: I told her the plot of my new screenplay, which I’ve finished in long hand, but just need to type out. I yammered on about what happened, and then, and then, and then. Every now and again I stopped to ask if it was too melodramatic? She insisted it wasn’t. Do you want to hear more. She did! On one occasion she bit her lip as the plot thickened, then squeezed her eyes shut as a bad thing was about to happen. Where do you get this stuff, she asked more than once. Not an indictment so much as a true bewilderment. And this of course is hilarious to me, because I think it’s so obviously about us, metaphorically speaking.
Nearly every writer I met with in Miami was working on a memoir. Each one had a story more harrowing than the next: disease, abuse, mental illness, etc. Each one moved me, and you know I’m a misanthropic bitch who really only cares about a handful of people in the universe and where I’m going to get my next Twix bar. So what the hell happened down there? Am I going soft?
Betsy Lerner 