How are you supposed to behave when a good friend becomes a famous writer? When she invites you to a reading and you feel the urge to rush out the moment she heads back to her seat, but you can’t figure out how to exit? What are you supposed to do, wave at her across the room as you lope outside for air?
I don’t love her stories or novels, mind you, but to be fair I can only read them with one eye open. We’d known each other since college and sent long letters at Christmas for 25 years after that, full of funny, self-deprecating descriptions of our lives. And we always remembered each others’ birthdays. Then she stopped responding to my cards, so I stopped sending them. Was it her rejection or her success that turned my feelings of friendship to schadenfreude?
I seethed in jealousy. I swam in it. I lost hours on the Internet reading fawning praise of her talent, brightening at the occasional blunt criticism.
What, I wonder, has it been like to have the huge advances and the fat royalty checks, the prize money and the invitations to speak at packed auditoriums? Surely her intention wasn’t to torture me and make me feel invisible, but she has managed to do that nonetheless.
She and I shared an apartment in New York for a year after college. For her birthday that year, her parents gave her two tickets to the ballet, and she invited me. We watched an exhilarating performance: the magic of Baryshnikov from fourth-row seats. Leaving Lincoln Center for the subway, we got separated in the throng, and I arrived on the platform just in time to see the subway doors close with my friend inside. We stared at each other for a moment in mute shock, then I watched her move away from me, slowly at first, then faster and farther, until no one would have been able to tell we’d started out together.
How do you manage to nurture, quell, or otherwise live with your envy and schadenfreude when someone you know catapults to literary stardom?
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I was on a flight from Amsterdam to Newark the other day when I noticed that every other person was reading a Kindle. Then it hit me. I am almost fifty years old and I might never have a book published. By that I mean a real book that I can hold next to my heart and then put away on a shelf. Even better, on my mother’s shelf. Something I can finish. Something I can dedicate. I have written all my life, but nothing has ever been really truly finished. I enjoy my status as a late bloomer, but now I see I may be too late for a real book.
Hello everybody, this is world famous author Vivian Swift filling in for Betsy today. I know, I know — I look familiar: Haven’t we met? I get that all the time. ALL THE TIME. Just last week, at Betsy’s book event at She Writes in Manhattan, I introduced myself to three or four complete strangers and two of them looked at me funny and asked, “Haven’t we met before?” I hate that. Like I said, I get asked that all the time; I just have one of those all-American cover girl faces. And an identical twin sister, but that never figures into the scenario except for that one time in that airport bar in Rome.
Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. I didn’t touch the screenplay all weekend. I worked instead on what I call “work work.” Read and edited all weekend. Saw one movie and took two long walks in what was arguably the “perfect fall weekend.” But otherwise, I read. In the hammock, on the patio, on the couch, in my bed. Everywhere I go a trail of manuscript pages and eraser shavings, coffee mugs and Diet Coke cans. I didn’t even read the freakin’ NYT and the cover of the book review is a review of the new Philip Roth by 
Often when I turn down a project, the writer will ask me to recommend other agents. Obviously, I would like to help him or her but it’s sticky. In the first place, I often don’t know who to recommend, or I don’t feel comfortable making a referral which implies my belief in the project. But there’s something else: agents do not look kindly on agent referrals — at least in my experience. If a writer approaches me and says Slinky Suburban at ICM thought you might like this, my first thought is: why didn’t Slinky take it on herself? I wonder how other agents feel about this. Are you happy to get a referral, no matter from where? If I turn something down and have a very strong hunch that another agent will like it because of some inside knowledge, I will refer that agent to the writer — and once in a while make an introduction.
Betsy Lerner 