Essays

Shutting the Drawer: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell?

1.
In May, after my novel manuscript had been read and rejected by a healthy number of editors, my husband rewrote my author bio. It read as follows:

Edan Lepucki was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1981. He currently lives in East Bushwick.

As an American woman living in an uncool neighborhood in Los Angeles, I thought this hilarious. I also wondered — not entirely seriously, and not entirely in jest — if the revision might help my situation. My situation being that my agent had begun submitting my book nine months prior (not that I was keeping track), and it remained unsold. Admittedly, there had been close calls with two different editors, but, as everyone knows, almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. I was in the same place I’d been back in September. That is, unpublished. The waiting game was starting to char my soul; if you drew a finger across it and put that finger to your tongue, it would taste bitter. Joking with my husband (“Now that I’m nursing, I’ll send them a new author photo, cleavage and all!”) was one of the few coping mechanisms I had left in me.

Now that it’s almost September (“If anyone in publishing actually worked in the summer, I would’ve sold my book by now!”), the jokes aren’t as funny. The truth is, my novel isn’t selling, and it probably won’t. There, I’ve said it. Eventually, a writer must accept rejection, accept the death of her first true darling, and move on. Can I face that sobering reality? Can I put my first book into the drawer, and shut it?

Others have done it before me. There’s a long and rich history of successful writers whose first (second, third…) books didn’t see the light of day. I remember when Myla Goldberg came to speak to the Creative Writing Department at Oberlin. She explained that Bee Season was actually her second novel. “My first,” she told us wide-eyed undergraduates, “you’ll never read.” At twenty, I thought this terribly tragic. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Dan Kois wrote about novelists who abandoned books for one reason or another: Michael Chabon’s infamously unfinished tome, Fountain City, for instance, and the burned pages of Gogol and Waugh. But the differences between these authors and myself are important. Firstly, they all had dazzling careers, failed book or not. I can’t (yet…) say the same for myself. Secondly, these authors decided to kill their books, whereas my darling was murdered.

Just let me be dramatic for a moment, okay? Murdered! My book was murdered!

Or was she? A friend pointed out that I was waiting to sell my book to publishers, when I could sell it to readers, all by myself. That’s true, of course. Self-publishing is as easy as it’s ever been, and if done well, it can even be lucrative. But, in most cases, self-published authors spend money, not make it, and they have to be their own editor, copy editor, publicist, and book cover designer (which can lead to this and this and this). I certainly could self-publish my novel, but I don’t have the cash, time, or talent to do it successfully. Plus,  there’s still a stigma to publishing your own writing. Though this is changing, I’ve never been an early adopter. (I used my AOL email account well into the new millennium, y’all; I leave the experiments to the innovative types.) The truth is, I want a reputable publishing house standing behind my book; I want them to tell you it’s good so that I don’t have to.

So, okay, I’m willing to let my book die, if that’s to be its fate. With all my talk of murder and barbecued souls, I’ll be the first to admit I’m letting myself wallow. But can you blame me? I’m grieving nearly five years of hard work. I’m mourning sentences, characters, and scenes that I’m still proud of. Letting go hurts. A lot. A friend of mine once said she didn’t want to write a novel because she couldn’t stand the idea of working for years on a project that might fail. One of my writing students recently told me she’s so afraid her book won’t sell that the very thought makes her hyperventilate. Another friend said she might die if her novel wasn’t published. I identified with all of these confessions. I felt them myself. Not-selling my novel was my biggest fear, and it’s happening. It happened.

(I was in natural, unmedicated labor with my child for 36 hours. For 24 of these hours, my cervix remained only 5 centimeters dilated. No matter how relaxed I remained, how deeply I breathed, there was no progress. None. More than once during the process, I thought, “This is like trying to sell a fucking novel!”)

(There’s a moment, right before a newborn baby breaks into a wail, when his face wrinkles up, collapses in on itself like an imploding building, and sorrow, pure and clean sorrow, sweeps heavy across his features. I know this feeling.)

Goodbye, goodbye, Novel #1.

2.
The thing is, rejection is instructive. Over the past year I’ve learned that hearing “no” doesn’t get easier if the stakes are higher. Reject my piddling short stories and I will barely flinch; mess with my dear book and I’m rendered immediately vulnerable: “immobilized, apologetic,” as Alice Munro writes in her masterful story “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” I urge my students to go for it and send out their work, that they have to get used to a life of disappointment if they want to be writers. As if one can get used to such a thing.

I’ve also learned, however, that a thoughtful rejection is a valuable one, especially coming from an overworked, underpaid editor. To have taken the time to read my work, and written feedback — that’s something I appreciate. This is called relationship-building, I am told. I have more than one friend who sold books to editors who rejected their previous one(s).

Lastly, these months of rejection have taught me the difference between being tenacious and being stubborn — and being stubborn and being desperate. My agent can continue to shop my novel around, but I have already attended its funeral. I’ve said my eulogy, eaten the casseroles, wept in the shower, screamed into my pillow. I have willed myself to move on. I must, in order to continue my life as a writer. I haven’t lost my tenacity, I’ve simply refocused it on my next book, which I’m more than halfway done with. (This is the upside of a submission process that takes forever). Novel #2 deserves my full attention and care. Without it, my work — and I — will suffer.

And this new book, it will be published. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll just die.

Here’s a link to the pdf and the review is below.

Chasing Medical Miracles: The Promise and Perils of Clinical Trials.

By Alex O’Meara. 264 pp. New York,

NY: Walker and Company. 2009. $25.00 (cloth),

$16.00 (paper).

O’Meara immediately caught my attention, when he noted that the number of clinical

trials worldwide has increased 300% since 1998 and 20 of 50 million clinical trial

participants live in the United States. O’Meara tells two stories in Chasing Medical

Miracles. The first is a critical evaluation of clinical trials and their slow but perhaps

steady contributions to scientific progress in medicine and human biology, and the other

story is about the author who wanted to cure his worsening type 1 diabetes by

participating in a clinical trial. I could not put this book down.

He says on page 3 of the introduction that he does not ‘‘advocate for or against

clinical trials’’ but instead desires to simplify the complex clinical trial business for

readers. He also views the clinical trials of today to anticipate aspects of future US

medical care.

Chapter 1 details what it means to volunteer for a trial or to become a ‘‘guinea

pig.’’ Chapter 2 is a spectacular discussion of the ‘‘therapeutic misconceptions’’ that

guinea pigs have, and the history of (e.g., Josef Mengele and Tuskagee) and the ethical

issues that arise when people are experimental subjects. Chapter 3 follows the money and

describes how clinical trials were initially dominated by universities that have been partly

replaced by more ‘‘efficient’’ private businesses and the conflicts of interest that can put

clinical trial participants at risk. (I also wondered about the drain of personnel from

patient care at this time of acute shortages in general practitioners, nurses, etc.)

Chapter 4 details a few of the lawsuits that have ensued.

Chapter 5 describes the typical subjects of these clinical trials from hopeful

individuals with health problems to the professional guinea pigs who may not represent

your average person anywhere. (What does that mean for medication dosages?)

Chapter 6 critiques how the business of trials has moved from the United States to

other nations in which human subjects protection can be weaker than in the United States

(e.g., the continuing use of placebos rather than comparing standard treatment protocol to

experimental protocol).

Uganda is the focus of Chapter 7 and serves as a model for a sophisticated effort

to grapple with the ethical issues and the logistics of monitoring and enforcing rules

during clinical trials.

Chapter 8 explains why specific individuals participate in clinical trials; O’Meara

includes success stories as well as failures. The book finishes with his personal

experience participating in a clinical trial to receive pancreatic islet cells from several

deceased donors. He was not cured, but he ends his tale and the critique of clinical trials

on a cautiously positive note.

This book is a must read for those contemplating volunteering for a clinical trial

(advice in the Afterward), and it also provides discussion starting points for those who

teach classes on ethics in research and medicine, global health, the pharmaceutical

industry, and the business of medical research.

JOAN C. STEVENSON

Department of Anthropology

Western Washington University

Bellingham, Washington

The teacher who encouraged me to write

Jay Criche made “Macbeth” seem edgy to suburban teens — and he helped me believe I could be an author

This piece originally appeared on TeacherLove.org, an online forum for sharing stories about teachers that have made a difference. If you have a story you’d like to share, please submit it here

About two months ago, we lost a great man. His name was Jay Criche, and he was a teacher.

He taught English for 30 years, 23 of them at Lake Forest High School. For most of that time, he was the head of the department, and he looked the part. He wore tweed sport coats most of the year, in weather cold or warm, and if I remember correctly, there were suede elbow patches on these sport coats. He wore small wire-framed glasses, a thick mustache, and his hair was dark, dusted with gray. He had a scholarly air because that’s what he was, a scholar. His lessons, delivered from a seemingly ancient wooden podium, were Socratic in nature, the students peppered with questions, his expectations high, his mind open and wanting to be surprised.

I took his course when I was a junior, and the first book we read was “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” In those first few weeks, he showed us a caricature of James Joyce from the New York Review of Books. In it, Joyce’s hands were rendered large, cupped and moving, as if paddling through water. Mr. Criche asked if anyone knew why the artist had depicted Joyce that way, and I raised my hand. “Is he swimming through a stream of consciousness?”

Mr. Criche cocked his head a bit, confirmed the answer, and a wave of validation swept over me. I hadn’t known, until that moment, how badly I’d wanted his approval. I was going through some rough times at school and at home — my face and back were covered in acne, my chest was concave, my last name sounded like food — but in that class, I felt I had worth. After that, I took it upon myself to impress him. Though William Faulkner wasn’t assigned reading, for weeks I brought “As I Lay Dying” to class, stacked neatly upon my other books, hoping he’d notice. (He didn’t.)

Dwight Garner reviews nonfiction from Bolaño called Between Parenthesis — cool title — while amazon.com has a terse page about The Angel Esmeralda,  a first collection of short fiction with nine stories from DeLillo, due out in November. It’s a good day to be a person who loves to read. Enjoy!

Freewheeling Essays, to Be Consumed With a Cocktail

By DWIGHT GARNER

“There is a time for reciting poems,” Roberto Bolaño wrote in his libidinous and word-drunk novel “The Savage Detectives” (1998), “and a time for fists.” His nonfiction prose, gathered here for the first time, demonstrates that the swashbuckling Bolaño could declaim and brawl at the same time. He was a lover and a fighter.

The odd jobs and left-handed journalism that fill “Between Parentheses” — the superb title is one that Bolaño selected for one of his Chilean newspaper columns — matter because of the way his novels loom over the past half-century of Latin American fiction. He’s the most controversial and commanding figure to have emerged since Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa began issuing mature work in the early 1960s.

Bolaño died in 2003, from liver failure, at 50. A spectral sense of unfulfilled promise and martyrdom, of being slightly too good for this planet, hovers around his posthumous reputation. In this regard he is something akin to Latin America’s David Foster Wallace. (Both were cerebral, unshaven, uneasy in big cities and under bright lights.) Bolaño’s masterpiece, the novel “2666,” first published in English in 2008, was never quite completed. It, like his career, will be forever pinned with an asterisk.

The excellent thing about “Between Parentheses” is how thoroughly it dispels any incense or stale reverence in the air. It’s a loud, greasy, unkempt thing. Reading it is not like sitting through an air-conditioned seminar with the distinguished Señor Bolaño. It’s like sitting on a barstool next to him, the jukebox playing dirty flamenco, after he’s consumed a platter of Pisco sours. You may wish to make a batch yourself before you step onto the first page.

“Between Parentheses,” which has been adroitly translated by Natasha Wimmer, covers a lot of acreage. There are crunchy bits of autobiography, political laments, disquisitions on food and soccer and women and exile and keeping airplanes afloat with your mind. But books were what mattered most to him, and this one is stuffed with his unruly opinions about world literature, from Twain, Borges and Melville through Philip K. Dick, Walter Mosley and Cormac McCarthy.

Bolaño was a master at shooting spitballs from the back of the classroom, and he made his share of enemies. About the Argentine writer Osvaldo Soriano, whom he calls “a good minor novelist,” he added, “You have to have a brain full of fecal matter to see him as someone around whom a literary movement can be built.” He flicked the novelist Isabel Allende repeatedly behind the ear, observing “the way her writing ranges from the kitsch to the pathetic and reveals her as a kind of Latin American and politically correct version of the author of ‘Valley of the Dolls.’ ”

He had a baroque, seriocomic scorn for Latin American professors at American universities. “To attend dinner with them and their favorites,” Bolaño wrote, “is like gazing into a creepy diorama in which the chief of a clan of cavemen gnaws on a leg while his acolytes nod and laugh.” He made plain his lack of regard for the American writers John Irving, Chuck Palahniuk and Michael Chabon.

Some of the crispest writing in “Between Parentheses,” however, is from the newspaper columns in which he appraised those American writers whose work he clutched to his chest. These included genre masters like Dick, Mr. Mosley, James Ellroy and Thomas Harris. Mr. Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels may be mass-market best sellers, Bolaño said, “but I wish most contemporary novelists wrote this well.” His riff on Philip K. Dick included this sentence: “Dick is Thoreau plus the death of the American dream.”

Bolaño was only rarely an insightful critic. He too often went for blunderbuss overstatement, ignoring fine distinctions. In these pages he calls Nicanor Parra “the greatest living poet in the Spanish language.” Enrique Lihn is “the best poet of his generation.” Leopoldo María Panero is “one of the three best living poets in Spain.” Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s short stories are “the best of my generation.” Javier Cercas is “one of the best writers in the Spanish language.” You begin to tune this static out.

Bring a machete as well as a cocktail to “Between Parentheses.” There’s underbrush to be slashed. Writing on deadline for a fast paycheck, Bolaño could be windy, and whimsical to the point of absurdity. Sample sentence: “In this uncertain future, our children will watch as the poet asleep in an armchair meets up on the operating table with the black desert bird that feeds on the parasites of camels.”

More often there’s a soulfulness that cuts against his fancifulness and bile. “To a great extent,” he confessed, “everything that I’ve written is a love letter or a farewell letter to my own generation.” He called “The Savage Detectives” a response to “Huckleberry Finn.” How do you recognize a true work of literary art? he asked. His answer: “Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant.” Genius can survive even this indignity.

Bolaño’s buzzing mind is a pleasure to dip into. Open this book anywhere and you’ll trip over observations like these: “One is prepared for friendship, not for friends”; “I enjoy vegetarian food the way I enjoy a kick in the stomach”; “Maybe she’d only been Miss Santiago or Miss Burst Into Flames”; “Editors tend to be bad people”; “He had a mother who was less a mother than a gypsy curse.”

The editor of this volume, Ignacio Echevarría, notes that these essays and speeches are entirely from the last years of Bolaño’s life for a simple reason: before 1998, when “The Savage Detectives” was published in Spanish, few had heard of him. His phone did not ring.

Mr. Echevarría makes the case that “Between Parentheses” may be the closest we can get to an autobiography of Bolaño. This may be so, but the self-portrait in this freewheeling and combative book is as distant and blurry (and as hairy) as the supposed footage of Bigfoot. The man behind Bolaño’s masterful novels remains an evocative smudge.

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories [Hardcover]

Don DeLillo

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The first ever collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011, from of our greatest living writers.

What Is the Origin of Tetherball?

About this Author

Alex O’Meara has been a writer since 1987. He has worked for the “Baltimore Sun,” City News Bureau of Chicago, “Newsday” and NBC, among other media organizations. O’Meara is the author of “Chasing Medical Miracles: The Promise and Perils and Clinical Trials.” He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Long Island University.

Curing Diabetes: Would I Do It Again?

By: Alex O’Meara | May 10, 2011
Categories: Featured, Inspirational, Type 1 | Tags: islet cell transplant

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