All the solitary hours a writer pours into a novel would avail little if not for the solitary hours poured into it by many unseen others. Anyway I assume those others also do their work in solitude; maybe they work in pairs or crews or tag teams, but I’d rather imagine them slaving over my words in a poorly lit and otherwise unoccupied room, just as I do. Maybe they will have a little music for company, but nothing too upbeat, something along the lines of Mozart’s Requiem, for example, because as everybody who has ever worked on a book knows, this work can be as grueling in its way as crawling on your knees through ten acres of ground-hugging plants to pick potato beetles off one at a time and flick them into a galvanized bucket filled with soapy water. But it can also be as transcendent as the Requiem—or as picking potato beetles when you are in the right frame of mind for it.
Knowing other people are engaged in the same underappreciated labor and squeezing a perverse kind of joy out of it is what keeps me writing, especially if it’s my field of potatoes they are picking over. Sometimes I like to picture each of my collaborators working their way down a row, their backs aching, hands filthy with beetle juice, fingernails broken, eyes going cross-eyed in the faltering light. It’s inspirational.
Thirty years ago, I would have written (and did) a dull-as-dirt acknowledgment to thank each of my collaborators. It would have had all the excitement of a divorce decree. Back then I had no idea how difficult and precarious a job it is to turn out a novel every couple of years. It gets more difficult and precarious every year. So does living. To me, they’re pretty much the same thing.
So this time, I’m putting some honest-to-God gratitude into it. I want each of these thank-yous to be the equivalent of a bear hug and a big, sloppy kiss. I want to scoop each one of my collaborators up out of the dirt and clutch them to my bosom. (And yes, men do have bosoms. I Googled it just to be sure: the breast, conceived of as the center of feelings or emotions. If you can’t trust Google, who can you trust?)
And I am using the term collaborators because that’s exactly what these individuals do: to collude, join, assist, abet, usually willingly. I also enjoy the subversive connotations of the word collaborator. If you don’t think the making of a novel is a subversive act, you’ve never made one. The sole purpose of the work involved is to undermine society as we currently know it.
My most ardent big, sloppy kiss goes out to my first and probably most exhausted collaborator, my literary agent, the wonderful Sandy Lu. This otherwise intelligent and perspicacious young woman is unfortunately saddled with a literary aesthetic nearly as ancient as my own, which is to say she does not love anemic prose any more than I do, despite a literary culture that cries out for it like an overweight infant bawling for another bowl of mashed peas. I cannot tell you how long and hard she searched for just the right editor for this novel—but not until she had run the manuscript under the microscope time after time, dye-staining every flawed cell and organelle. Without her collaboration, this novel would not be a novel; it would be a stack of slowly yellowing pages, if, indeed, it escaped the flames long enough to become one.
Also essential to the success of this collaboration was that just-right editor, my Goldilocks editor, the wonderful Anna Michels, another lover of the dark and brooding and irreverent and literary, of the academic and grisly and the grisliness of academe. Not only does she possess the consummate good taste to like this novel (insert smiley face emoticon), but also the consummate good sense to tell me all the ways the story could be improved. And then she championed the novel through a gauntlet of good reasons to simply let it fall from the vine and die, not least of which is that an editor’s own career, like an agent’s, lives or dies by the books she chooses to champion.
Agents and editors perform similar functions in that they employ their own talents to elevate both the book and its author. If they choose their acquisitions wisely, they also elevate readers and, in the best of scenarios, the culture as a whole. As literary gatekeepers, they can either pander to and perpetuate the lowest common denominator of taste, or they can exercise a delicate manipulation by challenging both the writer and society as a whole to be better than they are.
I could spend another page or so here accentuating my indebtedness to both Sandy and Anna by comparing them to other agents and editors I’ve been acquainted with over the past thirty years. But there is no comparison. I feel blessed to have these two young women on my side. I’ve always known that if I am ever to be saved, it will be by a woman. Little did I know it would take two of them, working together, to do the job.