Today, a box of jellybeans arrived for me with an unsigned card. The card had a menacing message, equating the junk inside the box with the junk of publishing. And the jellybeans themselves boasted unusual flavors: vomit, pencil shavings, ear wax, and the like. Unsigned notes are always a little frightening, as are snot-flavored jellybeans. As it is, I don’t sleep well and often wake up screaming. Sometimes, while walking down the street, I imagine a car jumping the curb to take me down, or a bicycle messenger’s bag somehow catching my coat and taking me down where I am then run over by a taxi cab. Every morning when I turn the key in the ignition, I am ready to meet my maker a la Michael Corleone’s first beautiful wife. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just didn’t like your book. But hey, I turned down The Liar’s Club so what the fuck do I know. Please don’t mow me down in a Best Buy, please don’t spit in my kasha, and please don’t send poison jellybeans because you know I’ll eat them some late night when I’m reading someone else’s submission and wishing I were dead.
What’s the worse gift you’ve ever received?
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An editor recently rejected a project. He was apologetic because he really liked the book; he just couldn’t get in-house support. Then, he allowed that it might have been different had the author been younger. I pretended not to hear it because had I heard it, my head would have exploded. Look, I’m a realist. Everyone knows that the world loves an ingenue, a hayseed, a bright eyed and bushy-tailed, or PYT. But for fuck’s sake, this is writing. Experience used to be an asset. Oh, boo hoo. Great writing but the author wears Depends. Terrific prose, but her dentures were slipping in the meeting. La-de-da. My nursing home fantasy has always been the same: read all my diaries and letters and smoke cartons of Marlboros. Then I would turn to the Russians. Hopefully find a couple of gals to play Bananagrams with, watch the Oscars.
Truman Capote said when god hands you a gift he also hands you a whip. I think I got two whips. Suddenly, the word “whip” looks ridiculous. You know how that happens when you worry a word? I sit at a table and meet with writer after writer and try to find one helpful thing to say, one moment of connection. But all I’m really thinking about are the stacks of Mike N’ Ike boxes in the concession stand. Concession? That’s a loaded word. Driving home from PA, I tried to visualize my screenplay as a live action movie. I try to see every scene. Sometimes I’d lose track and think about all the men who have been mean to me, every humiliation I subjected myself to (yes, Lena Dunham, you may be the voice of your generation but you’re no Allen Ginsberg, and you didn’t invent shame, not by a long shot). I get an email from a woman I spoke with, she says I turned it all around for her, saw the forest for the trees, she is totally inspired to attack her book with the shift in emphasis I recommended. I haven’t even showered today.
I received an email recently from a guy who wanted to know why I didn’t respond to the comments left on the blog, specifically when questions are directly posed to me. I think he found it rather…ungenerous.
I did something today that I thought I’d never do — I used the “D” word. And I’m not talking about douche, douche bag, or douchiness. I wrote a press release for a recent sale and I referred to the book as a “debut.” I hang my head in shame. I don’t know when “first novel” got supplanted by “debut novel,” but it sickens me. And it’s ubiquitous. There are no more first novels, only debuts. Debut this, debut that. Is it a debut? Debut novelist so-and-so. Debut blah blah. And it’s not just debut. There are no more presentations, only power points. A simple price has become a price point. Back in the day. 24/7. And my most despised: game change.
Can writing be taught? Can lovemaking be taught? Forget lovemaking. Can you teach someone how to kiss? How to stand on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 44th Street and to all the world appear as if you are not contemplating the curb and its elegant heel. Can you teach someone how to properly sponge around the faucet when you finish the dinner dishes? Can you teach someone to appreciate sleep? To understand the perfect weight of a heavy head meeting a soft pillow, the body forgetting itself, a cotton nightgown swimming up? Can you teach someone to punctuate? Probably. Can you spell hopeless? Can you teach someone to write funny? To cook a perfect hard boiled egg so that the shell comes off in two perfect cracks. Can you teach someone how to cry, softly at first, and then in rivulets like rain down a Texan window. What about cliche? Can you teach it, beat, eat it, fuck it? Can you teach someone how to make something satisfying, to withhold your tongue for as long as possible?
Do you have to be a selfish bastard to be a writer? Take no prisoners? No apologies, no excuses. GIve up your good citizen badge. Insist on your time alone, your writing retreats, your get out of jail free card, jail being every fucking family function, dinner party, and pot luck or bake sale at your kid’s school. Every time someone tells me how nice and helpful I am, I want to hang myself. Yes, that was me baking three dozen chocolate chip cookies last night. Yes, that was me chatting amicably in the parking lot. Me talking to my mother’s bridge lady’s daughter’s husband about his book on adult circumcision.
Betsy Lerner 