I am aware that I use this blog primarily as a place to work out my problems and give voice to the exquisite agony of writing and publishing. And that I indulge a particular kind of melancholy that infuses much of my day and relationship to writing and to art. But over the years I’ve had some peak days that I would be remiss in not mentioning. When I got my first promotion, when I received the Tony Godwin prize for editors under 30. (Yes, I was once under thirty.) When my author and friend Kim Wozencraft got a million dollar film deal for her first novel and we went to the Brasserie and ate steak and drank martinis. (Later at the office, I puked and fell asleep under my desk.) When two books I had edited (Prozac Nation and Autobiography of a Face) were well reviewed on the same page of the New York Times Book Review and both of their careers took off (both books still in print). Working with Temple Grandin. Selling my own book and buying a Cartier Tank watch. And yesterday at the BEA.
Neil Young and Patti Smith in conversation at the BEA in front of 1,300 booksellers and publishing people and book lovers. I got to sit right up front, hang in the green room, go in Patti’s limo and touch Neil’s poncho. They were amazing, funny, warm, sweet, real. One story from the conversation: Neil talked about how his dad, a writer, typed on the third floor of their house every morning and that no one was allowed up there. So I went up all the time, he said, and my dad would say, Hi Windy, his nickname for being super talkative. I like to imagine that: a boy growing up in a house punctuated by the clacking of a typewriter. And a benevolent father.
Tell us about your peak days as a writer. (Tomorrow back to gloom and doom, I promise.)
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I spoke to graduate students at Columbia today. The usual. How to find an agent, how to put a proposal together, how to turn your dissertation into a trade book. How to write a query letter. To attach or not to attach pages. Make multiple submissions or not. All the important talmudic questions in the great book of publishing life. Walking through the campus, I gave a nod to the staircase that leads to Dodge Hall, home of the writing divisions. I still remember my first day of school, intimidated beyond belief, attempting to look cool and like I knew where I was going, when I tripped and was splayed out on those steps. Before I could even tell if I was hurt, I popped back up and hoped no one had been looking. The fall caught up with me later, or it foreshadowed greater collapse to come. But I always remember that fall, the symbolic freight it imported on a young woman thrilled out of her mind to be attending an MFA program, to starting her life after a disastrous undergraduate careerl
Everyone keeps asking me what I think of Girls, Lena Dunham’s new television show for, by, and about twenty-something women and women who remember what their twenties were like. They assume I will REALLY like it. First, I fucking hate it when people makes assumptions about what I will and will not like. (I hated Welcome Back Kotter, ET and Joni Mitchell.) Then, I feel suspicious; why are they assuming I will like it so much? In this case, obviously Lena Dunham’s size twelve body is to blame, then her “quirkiness,” her dysphoria. I had an allergic reaction to the show at first. But I kept watching, mostly out of jealousy. Lena Dunham is, like, 25 (I’m not going to pedia her, you can look it up if you care). And now ,five or so episodes in, I’m really liking it. It asks you to like it on its own terms, unlike most half hour comedies that will go down on you they’re so desperate for approval. Not Dunham, she takes off her clothes and drops her drawers, but you don’ t really know what makes her tick or what she’ll say next. I think that’s what I like about it: it’s not completely predictable. She’s a really good writer, too, god damn her. And a really good director. How! How! These kids today, they’re so fucking talented. My college age intern admitted that he watched it, called it a guilty pleasure, and then asked that he not have to talk about it. Say no more.
Fantastic responses to the HBO movie of the week contest. Thank you. A winner will be announced on Monday. Thanks to everyone who wrote in. An embarrassment of riches.
Anybody watching Hemingway and Gellhorn on HBO, when writers were writers and all they had to do was drink and fuck and fight, in addition to typing? It’s so great to see writers’ lives on the small screen. I think Clive Owen should play Picasso instead of Papa. I’m liking Nicole as Martha, but the aged Martha is too Benjamin Buttony for my blood. Jesus, I just read on Cheat-o-pedia that she killed herself at 89. Whoa. Oh my, Hemingway going down on Gellhorm. Kidman breast. This is just way too steamy. Plus cats.
While I was in graduate school, I worked at a literary agency in Gramercy Park. I sat at a desk piled high with slush and every week, after I did the typing and filing, I studiously combed the pile even though it never yielded any gems. One day, as I was leaving, I said to one of the senior agents, “I’d just like to find something once.” “Yeah,” she said, “tell me about it.” I couldn’t understand her world weariness. After all, she had a roster of clients, surely she knew something about discovering talented writers.
I was never very good at weekends, and long weekends could be my undoing. When I read in William Todd Schultz’s biography of Diane Arbus that she killed herself on the Monday of a long weekend, I felt deeply sick and sad. Those Mondays in the city over a holiday weekend can be so grim. The city hissing quiet. Things folded up. Movie theaters barely filled, the air conditioning rumbling like dawn’s garbage trucks. And everyone away at some fabulous place with friends and capris and some asshole in a kiss the chef apron grilling swordfish steaks and asparagus. For a while, to combat loneliness, I joined a hiking club on that met on Sundays. It turned out to be a tight knit group of Holocaust survivors taking 3 mile hikes in a thirty mile radius outside the city. Then, we would take two tables at Bagel Nosh on the upper west side and eat. I don’t know why other people are workaholics, but for me work was my great escape from myself. It still is. This is a post for weekend writers. For every little bit of time that you can steal, that you can protect, that you can work.
We call them pull quotes. Quotes you can pull from reviews for the back of the book. Here are a few from today’s NYT for the poet Michael Robbins. “This man can write.” “It’s a declaration that feels nearly as fresh as anything in Elvis Costello’s first LP or Quentin Tarantino’s first film…this is a linguistic booty call.” “What puts these poems over is their sheer joy and dizzy command.” “Here’s a book to hand the (as yet) nonpoetry reader in your life.” Praise the lord. Dwight Garner has a major bone for Michael Robbins. And Garner is the only critic I read and admire 98% of the time. This review is a love song. And the lines he quotes make you want to run out and buy the book or 
Betsy Lerner 