http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/fashion/27Cover.html
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And That Was All
Posted on September 27, 2009 by betsylerner
Please Kill Me
Posted on September 25, 2009 by betsylerner
I started reading the newspaper in earnest in October, 1978 when Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen. I was eighteen years old and a freshman at NYU. I would buy The New York Post, The Daily News and The New York Times and go to the fourth floor of Bobst Library where you could smoke, spread out my papers, fire up a Marboro and read all about it. I wasn’t even a huge Sex Pistols fan. They were living in the Hotel Chelsea and I walked by whenever I could, though I was timid about going inside. When I finally did, I couldn’t believe the array of art all over the walls; it wasn’t squalid so much as beautifully run down. I know it’s ridiculous to romanticize them, and I wonder what it was about their sordid union that captured me so. Sometimes I ask my husband to kill me, choke me to death or take me out with the cast iron pan he uses to make stews, but he says I’m not getting off that easy.
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My Bologna Has a Second Name
Posted on September 24, 2009 by betsylerner
Unadulterated pity party: I didn’t get to go to Italy. Last minute trip to the doctor for codeine-laced cough syrup yielded a strong warning not to get on a plane. Fortunate is the person I would have been sitting next to. I am a passenger’s worse nightmare.
So, no me sitting in a cafe with a double espresso, bottle of mineral water, a book in my lap, notebook on the table, writing what was sure to be the best work of my life. No me crossing a piazza in my Chrome Hearts taking in the glorious rosey stone of Bologna, the open markets, or catching a ride on a Vespa. No dining with Italian publishers and trying to sort the wives from the mistresses. No fun at all.
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My Bologna Has A First Name
Posted on September 23, 2009 by betsylerner
I’m going away for a few days to an unnamed Italian city. I’ve got to pack like now and I’m still all ungapotched about what to read. I”m pretty sure I’m taking the new Lorrie Moore (I know, predicatable, but still). And probably the James Atlas biography of Saul Bellow. I also want to read Katherine Harrison’s The Seal Wife and Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy. I’m all over the place.
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The One That Got Away
Posted on September 19, 2009 by betsylerner
When the venerable editor and publisher Robert Giroux died last year, his NYT obituary listed some of the illustrious writers he worked with including Flannery O’Connor, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. Equally interesting to me were stories about the ones who got away. One of these writers brought in his manuscript on teletype paper pasted together into a roll of 120 feet long and demanded that no changes be made. Giroux would not agree and Kerouac walked out, On the Road with him. Giroux had also courted a new short story writer whose work had appeared in The New Yorker. When it came time to offer on his first novel, the brass at his company said it wasn’t right for them: adios Catcher in the Rye.
With this is mind, I surveyed some of New York’s top editors asking if they would divulge which books got away, either because they didn’t recognize their value (either commercial or literary) when they saw it, or because the deciders said nay. Friends, the results:
“My saddest loss was the three day auction of the Steig Larsson trilogy which I was sure I was about to land,” writes one editor. He goes on to say they lost the book to Sonny (that’s Sonny Mehta, publisher of Knopf, and known pistachio nosher). “If you’re going to lose it might as well be Sonny.”
NOTE: Everywhere I’ve ever worked, there was no publishing house people would rather lose to or win from more than Knopf. I worked for a publisher who actually defaced a jacket with a ball point pen because she was so frustrated with the art director. “Well, what do you want?” the art director screamed back. “I want Knopf jackets!” the publisher yelled. “Can you make a Knopf jacket?”
Then there’s the so-called beauty contest, that is when two publishers make the same bid and the author chooses the publisher/editor she prefers. One editor writes in, “I wish I had acquired The Physick Book of Deliverace Dane. Our offer was identical to the acquiring publisher, but the author went with the other house. ” That’s always a great feeling, like standing in line at your camp social, or for that matter sitting on a bar stool at 3:00 a.m., and not getting picked, not that that’s ever happened to me.
“I passed on Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld.” another editor shares. Years later she approached Sittenfeld for a blurb on a debut novel and praised Prep in the letter. Sittenfeld wrote back saying she’d be glad to read the novel, but did the editor remember that she had turned down Prep? Ouch. P.S. She never got the endorsement.
Another editor is still smarting over her boss’ refusal to let her bid on Kevyn Aucoin’s Making Faces. (What’s with that spelling of Kevin??) The book immediately hit the list and the editor shares how she relished the “oh-so-immature-yet satisfying feeling of I-told-you-so.” (Disappointing, but not exactly Holden Caulfield.)
Another editor admitted that she cried over losing The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. And also regrets not getting a shot at Edgar Sawtelle and Olive Kittredge. (Note to self: post a list of novels that are titled with the character’s name? Have a contest? Too nerdy?)
Another editor confessed: “I turned down Guernsey even though I thought it was a very commercial idea because it was stiffly told. Of course then it was rewritten and the rest is history.” And another, “I passed on Shopaholic because I had a current bestseller and thought I didn’t need another one. Ha.” (Funny, no matter what I have, I always want another.)
In the If-You-Don’t-Have’Anything-Nice-To-Say-Don’t-Say-Anything-At-All department, one editor addmitted to having passed on Cold Mountain. But she didn’t just decline, “I airily declared to the agent that I grew up on a Civil War battlefield and that if I didn’t believe it, noone would.” Thanks for sharing.
And then there’s the horse. Everyone wished they had published The Biscuit. For two years, all editors said when asked what kind of books they want to publish was Seabiscuit. One editor wrote in to say that she offered, “Except, I told the agent is was worth $50,000.” What are the odds that the book would’ve wound up on the NYT Bestseller list for 23 weeks? And be made into a feature film starring the incredibly sexy Jeff Bridges and be nominated for an Oscar?
And last, our annual “The One That Got Away Award” goes to the editor who claimed he “turned down James Patterson’s first novel Along Came a Spider because it was so poorly, sketchily written even though it was pacey, as the Brits say. MISTAKE!” Hey, you don’t get the prize for nothing.
Full disclosure: When I was an editor, I turned down The Liar’s Club. I just didn’t believe her.
Filed under: Authors, Books, Editor, Rejection | 25 Comments »
Fat Content
Posted on September 17, 2009 by betsylerner
I Am a Piece of Shit
I received a manuscript yesterday from an editor looking for a blurb. It’s a book by a person with an eating disorder. It doesn’t look like anything I would ever read. I can’t do it. Until now, I’ve basically blurbed every book I’ve been asked to, which predictably have been books on writing and fat books. How can I say no? I was an editor for sixteen years. It’s hands down the worst part of the job, trawling for blurbs. You know what makes me insane, when a writer says that he or she has a “policy” of not giving out blurbs. A policy? What do they think they are? Statewide Insurance? Can’t you just say you don’t have the time or you don’t care? Do you really have to make a policy? And is it a policy if you make it up and enforce it yourself? Because I should have a policy of not weighing myself the morning after I eat pepperoni pizza.
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The Breakfast Club
Posted on September 16, 2009 by betsylerner
Jim had a breakfast club, a group of friends who met every Friday at a diner in Chelsea for the last nine years. Many were in attendance at the wake and funeral. It was just last Friday when Jim didn’t show up that the group suspected something might be wrong.
A young man from the club spoke at the wake. He was shy at first, talked about coming to New York from Madison, Wisconsin and his great good luck to fall into a breakfast group with one of New York’s finest. He told the story of how Jim got one of his nicknames. Apparently a fight was escalating and Jim, afraid of fighting, pulled some kind of psycho routine instead, got the guy’s head in a lock and bit off part of his earlobe. Our young man allowed as to how this pre-dated the Mike Tyson incident. And thus Jim was dubbed Starry Night for the painter, the poetry, the ear.
Only later, after the wake, after the funeral, as I was walking up Sixth Avenue, thinking about how much Jim loved to walk the avenues of his city, did it occur to me that he probably appropriated, embellished or made up that story completely. I got back to my office. The clock read 12:12. A most propitious hour. Sleep well, Starry Knight.
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Jailbait
Posted on September 16, 2009 by betsylerner
It’s funny, I can never seem to find my book in a single Barnes & Noble, but apparently the nation’s correctional facilities are stocked. I have received an inordinate amount of fan mail over the years from the inmates of America. The most memorable was from an inmate who said that his three favorite books of all time were: The Bible, A Clockwork Orange, and The Forest for the Trees.
Then the trail went cold until today when #1183049 wrote to say that I encouraged, challenged and chastened him. He said I raised the bar. (In all modesty, he said I set the bar, and I think he knows something about bars.) He said my grasp of a writer’s heart was maternal. Come to mama.
I always wondered about those women who fall in love with the nation’s incarcerated. Are conjugal visits hot or do you just feel rushed and self-conscious? Are the guards watching? And is that hot? Did Wally Lamb teach in prisons before or after having two Oprah pics? Do they have Papillon in the library, one of my favorite books from High School? Or, no joke, Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul?
It’s extremely touching and a little scary getting letters from prison. It’s impossible not to wonder what the circumstances were that led to a person’s incarceration. Or what it took for them to write and send a letter. I’ve never written back – was too afraid of all those dead men walking. I think I’ll send a note to #1183049. Wish him well.
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Forced Entries
Posted on September 15, 2009 by betsylerner
The last time I saw Jim I had gone to his apartment in Brooklyn to help him sort through the many drafts of his novel in progress. He wasn’t well, but for all his body’s betrayals the raconteur was in fine form. It took at least of couple hours until we parked ourselves in front of his computer and got to work. He had color-coded passages he wanted to ask me about and the screen looked like a Dan Flavin installation. The day was spent in serious debate over everything from adverbs (which I felt he used too liberally) and semi-colons, emerging themes, and what his main character Billy Wolfram would or wouldn’t do. Before I left, he showed me some memorabilia from his rock and roll days, and then we talked about the ending.
When I left, I was relieved to be in the fresh air, to feel the late sun on my face. I double-checked that I had the flash-drive where I had stored for safe-keeping the many drafts floating on Jim’s desktop. I looked back at his strange little building sort of stranded on the edge of Brooklyn, imagined I saw him in the window, and waved just in case. I wanted to go back and I wanted to go home.
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Betsy Lerner 
