June 27, 2019: “J”

“We are terminating our interest in your novel.” I stared at the words, not understanding. Why? What happened?

I will leap to admit that the literary world is one about which either I understand absolutely nothing and know it or think I understood some protocols and rules but am completely wrong.

In 1990, I was forced to resign from a job to keep from being fired—not right away, but in a month or two, after my boss had tortured me a little longer. It was a wretched feeling and I was a wretch.

I looked for work, but, if you will recall, in 1989, America was in a recession. So I applied for every possible job. One was suing people over their unpaid hospital bills from UNC. I am so very glad I didn’t get that one. The search was fruitless (or, as a freshman composition student once wrote, “Once a person is a vegetable, it is fruitless to keep them alive.” Pretty progressive for Alabama!)

So with that sort of time on my hands, I decided to write a novel; I had an MFA, right, I was qualified? Crazed and obsessed, I wrote and revised 400 pages in six months.

I hired a successful short story writer and poet who had been recommended to me to critique it. She had many many comments, but her final evaluation was, “This is a fine piece of work, and you can sell this novel easily.” She suggested an agent she knew who would be thrilled to receive it.

So I sent it to her suggested agent, who sent it right back. Then I tried to market it to any number of publishers who didn’t require you to have an agent and, when that led to nothing, to every agent possible. (My faith in this mentor faded, as you can imagine.)

At some point, I gained the interest of a prominent agent whose name I can’t recall; I only remember her as “J”. She was located in Atlanta, for some reason.

Her husband, whose name escapes me altogether, said that they were very enthusiastic about my book, which, incidentally, was titled “After the Quids.” On the phone, he behaved very familiarly and cordially with me right away, which is generally not the case with agents. He said that he’d come to Atlanta to work for Ted Turner’s TBS, but now he was helping his wife with her literary agency. He said that they thought my novel had promise, and that I should feel free to get back in touch any time to ask about the progress of their review.

Wow! I was thrilled. Maybe my life’s dream was going to come true. I mean, J was old, established, had a helluva Rolodex, no doubt. I finally had a chance.

Then a month went by. Two months. Three. So I wrote J’s husband something to the effect that I was sending a gentle reminder that they had undertaken to evaluate the novel and said that I should feel free to get back in touch and inquire about the progress. So how was it going?

J’s husband wrote back what would have shown up at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts as a Howler. How dare I. J did not take kindly to ultimatums. J was under a lot of pressure. J had many authors that she worked with. J barely knew who I was. J did NOT take kindly to inquiries. J wished I’d jump into a pit of alligators and snakes. “We are terminating our interest,” J’s husband announced.

But…what did I do wrong? I did what he suggested: wrote with great civility and deference asking where they were in their evaluation. What could I have possibly done wrong? I could not figure it out, though, as you can imagine, I played it over and over in my mind. I was having a horrible time as it was, given my employment situation. I didn’t need to be browbeaten unnecessarily, and I’m surprised that I didn’t right then descend into a pit of drink and madness. OK, probably I did, just a little.

But that was that. Everything seemed utterly incomprehensible and arbitrary. At some point, Nancy said, “It’s like there’s some secret about this publishing thing that they’re not telling us.”

I wanted to write back and say, “Look, asshole, I’m sorry you couldn’t cut it at Ted Turner’s shop, and now you’re your wife’s gofer, but you don’t need to take it out on me.”

But I didn’t. I didn’t know what the ramifications might be. Would J’s husband, even more infuriated by such a note than when I had simply asked how things were going, find a way to blackball me among all literary agents? Would my budding career (“You can sell this novel easily”) be terminated, like J’s interest? Unschooled in the world of literary agents, and, indeed, the publishing industry generally, I couldn’t guess, and I opted for silence.

One thing amuses me, something I wish I’d raised with J’s husband (he and J are no doubt pursuing other interests in the afterlife by now): you don’t “terminate” an interest; it doesn’t happen so intentionally. You might terminate a pursuit of a novel; you just lose interest. But he was obviously a business guy, not literary, and, if I attempted to broach this subject with him, he either wouldn’t have gotten it or would have exploded in yet more vicious rage.

But what really was going on with him? And why couldn’t I sell “After the Quids”? Yet something else I’ll never understand.

That was nearly 30 years ago. Many, many years of failure writing fiction ensued, and I’ve begun to get it a little, why I failed. Sometimes I read a novel and I think, Nope, I couldn’t do that. The first of this sort was Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.Dalloway, a wonderful piece of work. But sometimes I read a novel and think, wow, I’m a lot better than this.

So with all the awful stuff out there, I still don’t know why I couldn’t sell a novel. I suspect it comes down to contacts. Enough really fine contemporary fiction gets published, though, that, really, I’m at peace with it. It’s nice to enjoy reading again. In a post or two, I’m list some of my favorite contemporary novels by women. Now, THEY can write.