Publishing

by Gail Godwin

  Samantha, an early starter if there ever was one (age twenty-one, Oxford University graduate, an auction for movie rights), already had anecdotes of her own: while she was on a pre-book tour in Australia, an interviewer asked her how much her agent had made on her so far. “But that was easy,” she said, “I simply told him I had no idea.”

  My book tour memories whirl around in my head like familiar old clothes in a see-through dryer. In the whirl I spot the awful things I did and the awful things that were done to me and shudder over them first. I remember strutting about on the carpet at Regis College and I remember getting up from a dinner table in Cincinnati, declaring in a huff I was canceling all my engagements for the next day, and stalking off to my hotel room. The local publicist knocked on my door through the night and there were flowers and notes outside in the morning, and of course I went through with the interviews and the luncheon. What had set me off? The other author the locals were hosting had written a diet book and part of his act was to stand beside a life-size cardboard replica of himself as a fat man and give his spiel. At the previous night’s dinner, the publicist had triumphantly informed him that he was booked on all the morning TV shows. “I’m sorry we couldn’t get any TV for you,” she said to me. “Novels are harder to book.”

  Though I’m sure I suffered as much as the publicist during that long-ago night (I lay on the floor and never got undressed), it seems funnier now, and quite prescient of things to come: that author in 1982, I don’t remember his name or his book, was successfully “building his brand.” All by himself he lugged his cumbersome double, folded to the size of a carry-on garment bag, on and off all those flights.

  And I remember the escorts, those individuals who are paid to meet you at the airport, get you to all your interviews, and be your companions while you are in their towns. There are angel-companions, like the one in Madison, Wisconsin, who took one look at me when I staggered off the plane and said: “I am going to iron your clothes while you take a nap.” And there was that prince of escorts, David Wenger, who founded one of the first escort companies in D.C. and would later become my model, even in physical appearance, for the character of Francis Lake in The Good Husband. Between The Diane Rehm Show and a bookstore signing, David and I were sitting in an outdoor mall. “How did you come to choose this line of work?” I asked. He thought for a minute and said, “It suits me to serve people’s needs.” This is what the young seminarian Francis Lake replies to Magda Danvers when he is driving her to the airport the morning after her strange lecture. (And Magda, being Magda, retorts: “What about your own needs? Who’s going to serve them while you’re off serving everybody else’s?”)

  And then there were the devil escorts, like the woman who drove me at top speed along a Los Angeles freeway while regaling me with the details of two of her recent authors who had suffered heart attacks, one at the radio station toward which we were heading (“he vomited first . . . we thought maybe it was just something he ate”) and one in this very car (“her tour had to be canceled, of course”).

  And there are the confiders who drain your empathy, like the young man who couldn’t keep a girlfriend (“You’ve got to learn to play harder to get,” I heard myself advising him as we pulled up outside a pharmacy to get me some cold medicine.) And there was the sad fellow who had charge of me for five days, up and down the Northern California coast: he wore a black suit and was enduring horrible domestic trials. He wept inside the car until the windows fogged, and I kept reminding myself, Soon this will be over for you, Gail, but not for him.

  And then there are the “compare-and-contrast” escorts, which are the most dispiriting of all. (“Sue Grafton always makes the bestseller list the first week of her tour. . . . What are you in now, your third?”) (“Be glad you’re not like X, she always draws a crowd, because people want to say they’ve seen her, but then nobody buys her book. Whereas your crowd is not big, but at least we sold fifteen books.”) (“You’re early! When I went to pick up Shirley MacLaine, her handler was standing outside her house giving me the finger. Shirley MacLaine goes ballistic when people are even one minute early.”) (“I’m loving your novel, though I’ve only just started it. Last week, I had that writer who cut his own hand off, and our schedule was beyond frantic.”)

  At the beginning of my Flora book travels, in May of 2013, Bloomsbury arranged a brunch at Sarabeth’s on Park Avenue South for me and my editor, Nancy Miller, and two other novelists, Caroline Leavitt and Emily St. John Mandel, who were also full-time bloggers. (“This is going to be smart women talking about writing and whatever else occurs,” SallyAnne McCartin, my publicist, told me.)

  Caroline Leavitt was about to begin a book tour for her tenth novel, and Emily St. John Mandel’s third novel had been published the year before. I told them I was saving the final chapter of my Publishing book until I had completed my book tour and asked for their thoughts about the author as public presenter of her books. Caroline, who interviews writers on her Carolineleavittville blog (she had interviewed me in 2010 for Unfinished Desires) was just beginning a forty-city tour (with intermittent returns home for rest, she said) to promote Is This Tomorrow. Her publisher, Algonquin, encourages her to tour (on a budget), whereas Emily St. John Mandel told us she used the money from her French sales to send herself on an American tour and she was seeking a new publisher for her next book. Emily also accepted expense-paid invitations to go anywhere in the world and had recently returned from Writers’ Week in Adelaide, Australia, where she had interviewed other authors and promoted her most recent novel, The Lola Quartet. I was equally impressed and alarmed by the amount of time both writers felt they had to spend on the road and zipping across continents to make themselves available to the public in service of their books.

  And I was struck particularly that Emily, so generous with her own appearances and interviews, spoke with a respect bordering on awe for one writer at the Adelaide Writers’ Week because she would not allow any interviews. (It was M. L. Stedman, the London barrister and author of The Light Between Oceans.) This has stayed in my mind.

  “Today an author has to brand herself,” Caroline said when we were discussing wardrobes. Her trademark has become her red cowboy boots. This started some years earlier when she was invited to give a talk to 150 librarians. It was to be her first onstage appearance, and, being “pathologically shy,” she asked an actor friend for help. The friend told her to prepare for the event as she would prepare “to be the kind of character who would be having a blast up there.” Caroline bought a pair of ten-dollar red cowboy boots on eBay “because I was sure that a woman who would wear boots like that could only give a talk that would mesmerize. The astonishing thing to me is that it’s worked so well that now people come to my readings in their own cowboy boots and want to take pictures of boots against boots.”

  I described my elegant silver jacket, bought for a book tour at an Emporio Armani in lower Manhattan twenty-four years earlier. For years I wore the jacket with a big Victorian brooch pinned on the right lapel, but for my 2013 tour, wanting to emphasize the “silver eminence” persona I felt I was growing into, I added a double row of silvery Venetian beads made by a Woodstock jeweler.

  Emily said her main aim was to travel light, with lots of powdered soap to rinse out garments; but she had two favorite outfits she counted on—the identical dress in different colors. (Emily sews her own clothes, I found out from a later blog; I also learned from her blog that she has a new publisher.)

  “By branding yourself,” Caroline elucidated in a follow-up e-mail to me, “I also meant that readers want to be able to know who you are quickly—or feel they know who you are. I get a strong response from audiences whenever I say something personal about myself that relates to the book. For Is This Tomorrow I talked about growing up in the only Jewish family in a prejudiced Christian neighborhood and how I was bullied. This was so painful to me that I didn’t want to talk about it, but I decided it was important to the book. A few books back I
would never have revealed so much about myself to people whom I didn’t know, but now I do, and I somehow find it liberating.”

  Caroline talked about the growing practice among bookseller-hosts of offering a “facilitator” to their authors, a local somebody or a fellow author who will engage you in conversation as part of the event. It takes some of the pressure off your performance, she said.

  I found that to be true, but with caveats. It’s a fact that audiences don’t tolerate long readings anymore, and, unless you are a spellbinding reader, anything over fifteen minutes is long. Yet they want to see the author in action and come away feeling they know the person who wrote the book they are (perhaps) going to buy. They have gone to enough readings and watched enough talk shows to expect an entertainment. A facilitator can share the pressure, that is certainly true, but you have to be on the lookout for those who see their facilitating role as an opportunity to hog the spotlight.

  I had two facilitators booked for me on my recent travels. After a few minutes of backstage discourse with the first one, an adroit self-promoter, I realized I had to set some limits.

  “Here’s what I’ve always felt most comfortable doing,” I told her, taking refuge behind my silver eminence persona. “The bookstore owner introduces me and then I will come out to the lectern and read a little and talk about how I came to write this novel. After that you will come onstage and we’ll sit down in those armchairs and have a dialogue about writing and then I’ll take questions from the audience.”

  Since I knew and admired my second scheduled facilitator, the novelist Angela Davis-Gardner (this was for Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, N.C.), I was sad for both of us when she fell on the day of my appearance and had to cancel. I knew she would have prepared scrupulously and imaginatively and that she was a favorite with local readers; the audience would be disappointed, too. So, after my introductory remarks about how Flora came to be written and the reading of three short passages from the novel, I said I was going to imagine the questions I thought Angela might have prepared and then try to answer them. This I did for about ten minutes. Then I encouraged questions from the audience “on any topic from writing habits, personal history, family, geography, psychology, religion, you name it.” What followed was a high point in my experience of communal rapport. Not only did I find myself working out my next novel with them (“My late uncle was a judge here; I hope he won’t mind if I turn him into a woman and move him across the state to the mountains”) but a cousin I had never met announced himself from the back of the room. Then there were some delightful back-and-forths between me and a lady whose late father had rented my uncle his law offices in the 1930s, and between me and a reader of Father Melancholy’s Daughter and Evensong who asked if my ideas about God had changed, “and, if so, how, exactly?” What was absent from that gathering was a single ego fluffed up like a hen on top of a rehearsed question meant to impress the room or challenge the author.

  After the 1982 Viking tour for A Mother and Two Daughters, there were eight more, including the double coast-to-coast tour for The Good Husband that Linda Grey set up, herself accompanying me on the first one, for booksellers. I did modest tours for Evensong (1999) and Heart (2001), an East Coast tour for Queen of the Underworld (2006), where a reader commented while I was signing her books: “My, you’ve had a nice long run, haven’t you?” For Unfinished Desires (2009) I did a New York reading at Barnes & Noble and was invited for a second time to the National Book Festival in Washington. In the spring of 2013 Bloomsbury sent me to seven cities for Flora (which included the January prepublication trip to the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute in Kansas City).

  I often think about my return trip aboard the Adirondack Trailways bus to Woodstock after my first Today show appearance. On that bus full of strangers, I still felt too visible for my own good, even though nobody was noticing me. The facial numbness that had begun while I was talking to Jane Pauley had now localized itself in the right side of my mouth. This is the retribution for too much attention, I thought. I’m about to have a stroke. I was, after all, going on forty-five.

  On the self-promotion comfort-level scale, I guess I am closer to the Cormac McCarthys than to the Norman Mailers and Jasper Milvains. (Oh, how Jasper would have loved blogging and tweeting!) Once I’m in front of an audience I can perform, but when it’s over I collapse in solitude and wonder how I did it.

  What make the performances worth it are the experiences I bring back and the connections and reconnections I make. I wouldn’t have met the inspiration for the character of Francis Lake if I hadn’t needed a D.C. escort for my appearances and interviews.

  If I hadn’t given that reading at the Ninety-second Street Y in Manhattan, I would not have looked up from signing books and seen Dorothea, my U.S. Travel Service colleague from the London days. “Please don’t leave,” I said. “I’m not leaving,” she said, “I live quite near.” From that moment until the end of her life, we developed the friendship we had begun in 1960s London. Dorothea had married a Harvard professor and was now widowed and raising her daughter, Katie. I would stay over at her Fifth Avenue apartment, one of those old layouts that included servants’ quarters, and after we had talked into the night I would curl up between fresh sheets in the maid’s tiny suite, complete with its own bathroom.

  If I hadn’t gone on a London book trip for The Finishing School in 1985, I would not have met up again with Irene Slade, the fiction-writing teacher from the City Literary Institute, who had set me on the path to Iowa with my English vicar story.

  If I hadn’t gone to Sweden in 1994 for The Good Husband, I would have missed that illuminating backseat conversation with my Swedish publisher, Solveig Nellinge of Trevi, after my talk at Uppsala University. We had been discussing Doris Lessing, whom Solveig proudly published, and I was saying how exceptional it was when an author—in this case, Lessing—had been able to access such a large amount of her material.

  “She seems capable of using herself up before she’s done,” I wistfully observed.

  “Yes,” Solveig agreed. “With so many writers, you know, you feel their borders are never reached—not approached, even.”

  Even since the drive back from Uppsala I have been pondering Solveig’s theory about a writer’s borders. There is the vertical dimension to consider, too. You have to ask not only How far am I from reaching my borders? but How deep have I dug inside them?

  II. REVIEWS

  Some reviews of my book to hand. The qualities which people are the most willing to grant me are just the very ones I most detest.

  -André Gide, The Counterfeiters (1927), translated by Dorothy Bussy (1927)

  That’s Edouard, the novelist, writing in his journal. Over many rereadings of Gide’s brilliant novel, I have tried to figure out what the detestable qualities were for Edouard. From reading Gide’s journals I have come up with some guesses.

  Book reviews and book reviewers don’t require any appearances or performances from the author (unless, like Norman Mailer, you show up at newspaper offices to pick a fight with the book review editor—how many of those are left now?). But reviews definitely contribute to an author’s public image. Sometimes even a well-intended review will corral a writer into a cramped enclosure she chafes to kick down. For example, “While X’s characters will cut you up and eat you, Godwin’s will bring you casseroles.” I get which qualities the reviewer is trying to convey to her readers, I like those qualities, but please, spare me the casserole corral.

  Toward the end of his life, John Updike said that he had come to believe his bad reviews and be suspicious of his good ones. That has resonated with me. I won’t go so far as to say criticism makes me feel more comfortable than praise, but criticism has often made me stronger. Harvey Ginsberg, my editor for A Southern Family and Father Melancholy’s Daughter, told me his rule for authors had always been “If a review makes you wish you had done something differently, file it away. If not, toss it.”

  At cocktail h
our, Robert and I sometimes competed against each other in our Waves of Boredom game, which involved dredging up memorized quotes from our very worst reviews. The game’s title derived from the lead of Robert’s awful review, early in his career, in the Boston Globe: (“Waves of boredom swept over the audience when the opening notes of Robert Starer’s Concerto . . .”) Two of my big winners were “See Jane Think, See Jane Love” (New York Times headline for Anatole Broyard’s put-down of The Odd Woman) and “Laughs Are Few in Iowa City” (Larry McMurtry trashing The Odd Woman).

  Robert and I found Waves of Boredom so much fun, I think, because it reversed the stakes. If you wanted to win the game you had to prove you had been the bigger loser.

  In Buddhist practice, negative and aggravating people and events count as your important life teachers. Some of my lowest hours, review-wise, have become my teachers.

  LONDON, 1982

  Robert and I are staying in the Primrose Hill house of my English publisher, Tom Rosenthal, who has planned a full day to celebrate the publication of A Mother and Two Daughters. We are to be driven to Cambridge for a booksellers’ luncheon and then a special tour has been laid on to show us parts of the university not everybody gets to see. But when I come downstairs to breakfast, Tom reluctantly hands over the reviews in London’s morning papers.

  The four of us drive in silence to Cambridge. Editor Jane Turnbull at the wheel, Tom in the passenger seat, Robert and I in the back. Daffodils. Greening fields and hedgerows. Silence. Robert looks so sad. Tasty lunch with booksellers, one or two of whom make light remarks about the “silly” reviews. Robert and I are taken away by a lovely giant of a man in tweeds to look at Pepys’s handwritten diaries.