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Current Features:
Reading List - Janelle Brown gives us a list of her favorite books about suburban angst that informed her novel All We Ever Wanted Was Everything.
Multimedia - Watch Artie Lange discuss his memoir, Too Fat to Fish.
First Person - Read Julie Grau's remarks at the New York Public Library's tribute to Nuala O'Faolain.
Dispatch - View the trailer for The Beautiful Struggle.
Julie Grau spoke at the New York Public Library's tribute to Nuala O'Faolain on June 24, 2008. These are her remarks.
Some time in 1997, Michael Jacobs, who was then working as an agent for New Island Books in Dublin, handed me a big fat volume that was the collected opinion columns of a woman who wrote for the Irish Times. Michael told me not to bother reading the columns, but to read the author's introduction to the work. In spite of myself--because of course we editors are trained to uncover the reasons not to publish a book as quickly as possible--I was reeled in by the crystalline, unapologetic voice of this "accidental memoir." I soon found that I loved it, in fact, and wanted to publish it, but was beaten back by certain executive opinions who didn't feel quite as bullish as I did about the book's prospects. That I ceded to those views and didn't put up a howling fight is a great regret of mine, but when Are You Somebody? went to # 1 on the New York Times bestseller list it also gave me the greatest "I told you so" of my career.
"Go get that writer!" I was told by the same folks who'd passed on the chance at publishing Nuala the first time around. But I wasn't one to stand on ceremony, so go after her I did with the full force of the house behind me. And, after reading 100 pages of her first attempt at fiction and an intense, dazzling meeting in which it was never quite clear which one of us was doing the auditioning, I did in fact acquire Nuala O'Faolain's next work for our list. Shortly after, Nuala called me at my office.
"Are you well, Julie?" she asked.
"Yes, I'm fine, thanks," I said.
"No--I mean, are you well, are you a healthy person?" she said.
"Sure...yes...I'm fine, I'm healthy," I replied.
"Well, good! Because every day I want you to come to your office and ask yourself, 'What can I do for Nuala today?'"
I might have thought that was a peculiar little joke for a while, but soon it became clear to me that that was no joke. Ours was not to be a typical editorial relationship. At first, Nuala tested me--tested my devotion to her, my loyalty, my ability to fight on her behalf in publishing meetings. She also tested my breaking point--when I'd push back and let her know she'd crossed a line. In the early days, I didn't have the temerity to go up against Nuala very often and mostly, really, I wanted to prove myself worthy of her, I wanted to show her I could keep pace with her brilliance and stamina and fortitude. So I'd read the prodigious output that came out of her printer--draft after draft after draft. She was tireless and un-self-conscious and had the work ethic of a newspaper columnist who was used to generating several hundred words a day. Except with Nuala it could be more like thousands of words each day. She was a dogged, miraculous reviser too. Often I'd see work that was very rough survive several drafts--and it would be maddening, because I'd felt she'd chosen to ignore my diligent comments--when suddenly in its fifth or sixth incarnation, in due course, these same pages would be breathtakingly transformed into gold.
So in those early years, she would test me and I'd strive to pass each test--because could there be a better feeling for a youngish editor than the approbation of a writer you admired with your whole heart, a person who prevailed over a childhood of terrific adversity and deprivation through sheer intellectual grit to become an academic and a journalist, an opinion-maker, a feminist, a memoirist, a novelist--a somebody--whose life and survival was a singular testament to the transformative power of literature?
She'd ask me to meet her for lunch, for dinner, to discuss her work. She'd never want to hear about other writers, other books--when I was with her, she was my one and only. She'd make somewhat nasty, casually mean comments--maybe I was dim, but I was never sure if it was her intention to be so cutting toward me or if it was a vestige of her childhood. I only knew I didn't want to find myself in her crosshairs.
In no time the boundaries blurred--she'd ask me to come shopping with her to help her choose clothes for a book tour--and tell me to follow her into the dressing room so we could keep talking. I lost my discomfort at such moments surprisingly quickly--which is more about Nuala's famous candor and her ability to disarm those around her than it is about my unflappability. One Valentine's Day, before Nuala met John, she and I shared a candlelit dinner at an Italian restaurant full to capacity with lovers, where, in very close proximity, we watched Tatum O'Neal open a jewelry box from her hopeful suitor and clocked her disappointment with its contents. Of course Nuala's play-by-play made us both weep from stifled laughter.
She asked me to come to the west of Ireland to work with her on the final draft of My Dream of You. She didn't really need me there, we could have spoken on the phone or written each other emails, but I recognized that she was throwing down a gauntlet. How far would I go for her? Could she make me fly across the Atlantic, leave friends and family behind and devote five days to her exclusively? Of course she could. I got on a plane to Shannon and entered Nuala's beloved Barrtra--I understood that by making this trip I was meeting her particular needs, but I also realized that on some level I was being rewarded for all the tests I'd previously passed. We walked the misty, lush country lanes down to the Atlantic Ocean, with Molly and Roger, two wonderful dogs, beside us, and we'd talk about the novel. She pointed out the seals' sleek heads bobbing in the waves, the lichen that was disappearing from the rocks. She educated me about traveler culture. She drove me to see the marvelous grottoes and shrines tucked into the green hills of County Clare. We took steam baths in the spa at Lisdoonvarna. I read the pages as they came out of her printer, and we'd talk endlessly about the work. We took every meal together. She marvelled aloud that I wasn't getting on her nerves.
On our last day together, we went into a dress shop in Cork. Luckily there was only space for one in the fitting room. But the sales ladies recognized her instantly and swarmed around her, making a fuss, asking for an autograph, and I had a glimpse of the folk hero status she enjoyed at home. My memories of that trip, however it came about, are cherished ones--all the more so now.
I went on to publish two more of Nuala's books--a second volume of her memoirs and an unconventional biography of a turn-of-the-century Irish émigré who became a mythically glamorous international criminal. In between I killed a novel she stubbornly tried to bring to life more than once. Writing that letter, knowing how it would cut Nuala to the quick, was perhaps the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my professional life. It was also, though, a measure of how I'd grown, under her inimitable tutelage.
Years later, when she was very sick, she wrote to me in an email: "I've talked to you very often recently, especially at night. Mostly laughing at this or that. Other people might not realise it, but I loved every minute of knowing you, including when I'd let you/me down." I was sitting at my desk when I read those lines and burst into tears. I was instantly choked with regret. How could I have failed to appreciate fully every moment with her? Why did I let time go by when we weren't closely in touch? Did I not understand that she was utterly, uniquely gifted as a human being--difficult, oh yes, she could be very difficult and complicated and demanding, but she was so worth knowing. What a privilege it was to be her editor and publisher, to have passed the tests, to have been able to make her laugh, and to have a held a place in her memories of happy times--as she has in mine.
Posted in First Person | Link | Print
Artie Lange on his memoir, Too Fat to Fish
Artie Lange is the author of Too Fat to Fish, coming November 2008.
Posted in Multimedia | Link | Print
Janelle Brown gives us a list of her favorite books about suburban angst that informed her own suburban drama, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything.
When I was writing All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, I spent a lot of time reading books about suburban malaise and dysfunctional families. These were some of my favorites:
Little Children, Tom Perrotta
Such a minimal little book—like all of Tom Perrotta’s novels—but it manages to convey with so few words his characters’ feelings of entrapment. He draws, beautifully, the torpid quality of a suburban summer, the small-minded and insular community, the utter boredom of a life of confinement with only children for company. Perrotta is a wonderful satirist, probably because he has so much compassion for his subjects. And it’s funny, too.
Music for Torching, A. M. Homes
This book is the antithesis of Tom Perrotta. A. M. Homes’s unhappy married couple that burns down their suburban home in an act of petulant childishness are repulsive, unpleasant, selfish people, and she seems to find them as distateful as we do. And yet I found this book impossible to put down—both times that I read it. It’s horrifying, surprising, and deeply disturbing.
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
Franzen’s portrait of the self-destructive Lambert clan is about as brilliant a portrait of contemporary family dysfunction as I’ve read. I love the sprawl, the humor, the surprise, the poignancy, and ultimately, the hopefulness of this book—which seems to be a rare quality among suburban novels. I never get bored with this book, no matter how many times I read it.
The Ice Storm, Rick Moody
I saw the movie before I read this book, and was surprised by how busy and raucous the novel was, especially compared to the serenely clinical hush of Ang Lee’s interpretation of the material. This book is dark, dark, dark, and sad, sad, sad. It makes me so very glad that I didn’t come of age in the 1970s, which truly has to be one of the most confusing eras in our recent history.
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
One of my favorite books of all time. Yates carefully dismantles “the great sentimental lie of the suburbs”—that Leave it to Beaver world that never really existed—and sends his unhappily married couple off to their dooms. In postwar America, Mom is trapped at home, Dad can’t live up to work expectation, and their inspired plans to escape it all by running off to France are brought to an abrupt halt by an unwanted pregnancy. Their relationship is beautifully, subtly rendered and incredibly depressing.
The Complete New Yorker
Not a book, exactly—it’s the entire archive of The New Yorker on CD, and I came back to it again and again when I was writing. Here you’ve got all your classic Cheever (including “The Swimmer” and “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”) and nearly two hundred stories by John Updike—not to mention thousands of other pieces of short fiction by the greatest writers of the last century. When I need inspiration, I like just to browse through randomly and pick out stories I’ve never heard of.
Janelle Brown is the author of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything
Posted in Reading List | Link | Print
The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle.
Posted in Dispatches | Link | Print