I Can't Complain (6 page)

Valentine’s Day 1984:
I hear from a friend who works in admissions at Harvard that many coworkers are avid
All My Children
fans. They brown-bag their lunches on this day and bring in a TV to watch Jenny and Greg’s wedding as if it’s a moon launch.
So much for the Ivy League,
I think. My other favorite firsthand report of Harvard meets
AMC:
an applicant comes in for an interview. The admissions officer, a guy even, asks him if there’s anything interesting about himself. The boy says, “Well, it might sound silly, but my hometown is where the outdoor shots for a fictional town, Pine Valley, in a soap opera called
All My Children
are filmed.” Thrilled and breathless, the admissions officer says, “Can you excuse me for a minute?” He leaves, tells a coworker, then returns to the interview after he composes himself.

August 1985:
I attend my cousin Laura’s wedding in Central Park. There, at the hot hors d’oeuvre table, I ask a fellow guest if his wife went to high school with Laura because she looks familiar. He asks modestly, “Do you watch a program called
All My Children
?” I gulp; try to look only mildly cognizant of such an entity. “Um—why?” I ask. “Because she plays a character named Midge.” I love Midge, who plays a teenage sidekick in a minor role. He finds his wife and introduces her to me. I manage to say, hoping to sound like a thoughtful reviewer of the arts rather than a breathless fan, that she is a terrific actress with excellent comic timing. She is most gracious. After the wedding (cell phones haven’t been invented) I call my friends Joan and Tammie,
AMC
watchers, from the hotel phone—very expensive—to tell them that I’ve met Midge. Silence. “Remember Midge?” I ask. Neither does.

Circa 1988:
A friend flying in first class gets the sense that
AMC
’s James Mitchell/Palmer Cortlandt, unprovoked, is making a pass from the adjacent seat.

1996–1997:
I switch channels from
All My Children
to watch CNN’s coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial. I never return.

2003–the present:
At three separate author events I meet three actors emeritus from
Ryan’s Hope,
which I especially liked for its acknowledging the existence of Catholics and Jews. They are Faith Catlin, who played Faith Coleridge; Louise Shaffer, who played (among many roles in other shows) the villain Rae Woodard; and Malachy McCourt, who played Kevin MacGuinness.

Faith, Louise, and I are Facebook friends. I’ve seen Louise’s Emmy statuette (best supporting actress) in person. I learn that a mean character can be nothing like her offscreen persona. When I bake, it’s often her excellent red velvet cake.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1986 my editor sent bound galleys of my first book, a story collection, to six authors, soliciting endorsements (AKA blurbs) for the back of the jacket. The first turndown came from an extant Lost Generation novelist, apparently irked by a lofty editorial assertion. “If I wanted to read Dorothy Parker, I’d read Dorothy Parker,” she grumbled.

“Nothing to worry about,” my editor said.

Eventually kind words arrived from a short-story wunderkind who’d once shared a cubicle with my editor, from a novelist I’d met at a party, and from a writer published by Viking, which was also publishing me. My fondest hope, a comedy-of-manners top dog, didn’t answer. On one hand, I understood. Wouldn’t everyone want her anointment? On the other hand, I knew she had worked in publishing. How could a former solicitor of blurbs not send a collegial turndown? My heart didn’t break, but it hardened. The final no arrived from a short-story starlet, pleading overwork but wishing “Ms. Lipman well.”
What a mensch,
I thought.
What a gifted and sensitive soul.

The first time an editor asked me for a blurb, I put my work aside and sat down with the manuscript. It stank. I wrote a full-page apology explaining how flattered I was, how disloyal I felt to my brother author and to my imprint, but that I couldn’t lie. When the editor didn’t respond, I called him.

Huh? Oh, that. Don’t give it a second thought.
He certainly hadn’t; he’d sent it to every living author on his list. And by the way, some rather big fish loved it.

My policy—no compromises and no dutiful blurbs—was codified after a minor moral dilemma. A prizewinning author, who had praised my first novel in private and my second in print, suggested I might have something kind to say about his new work. I called my editor for advice. She cut me off as soon as she heard the problem: that I hated most of it. “Don’t do it,” she said firmly. “He won’t remember who was sent the book versus who came through. Never blurb something you don’t like.”

“I won’t,” I promised. (P.S. End of friendship.)

Nonfeasance is the norm in blurbing. Publishers expect little. Several galleys per month arrive at my door. I always open the envelope, and I always read the editor’s letter. I like the personal, the flattering, the imploring: “In so many ways this book reminds me of yours, Ellie—. . .” (Heartwarming adjectives follow the dash.) Or, “I would be in your debt—more in your debt, that is, than I already am for having your wonderful books to enjoy, if only . . .” Am I truly this novelist’s favorite author? Did her book group really do
The Inn at Lake Devine
? Maybe not, but what gratifying editorial unctuousness.

Cover-letter scholarship has made me didactic. When a dear friend’s novel was being sent to her A-list, I stepped in to preach. The cover letters needed to be enlivened, personalized, grovelized. Mention the deserving author’s worshipful admiration for the recipient of this letter. No form letters. No lifeless “I think you will agree that . . .”

Will I blurb a book because its editor implores me charmingly? No. Will I take a stab at it? Yes. When do I decide? I read until something stops me: Clunky sentences. No life. No story. Too much story. Too many italics. Too earnest or pretentious or writerly.

I generally give the promising stuff, the big-name stuff, and the friend of a friend’s stuff a fifty-page trial. That’s enough. If a few chapters don’t set my matchmaking antennae aquiver, if I’m not thinking,
I can’t wait to send this to ———. She’ll love it. Maybe she’ll blurb it, too,
I put it down.

A manila file folder labeled
TO BLURB OR NOT?
holds the galleys’ cover letters, which I always mean to answer. Mostly I do; I e-mail the editor and make my excuse: “Thank you, but I’m judging a contest and therefore have cartons of novels to read over the next three months.” “I’m on deadline.” “I’m leaving soon for a book tour.” And the truest of all, “My name is on so many books this upcoming season that I fear it will render those endorsements meaningless.” (My computer stores this document under “blurb moratorium template.”)

“I saw your name on a book,” people say. “Did you really like it, or were you being nice?”

“I’m never nice,” I answer. “I never write something out of obligation.” The specter of the old Logrolling column in
Spy
magazine is a helpful tool. “Can’t do it,” I say. “He reviewed my third novel in the
Berkshire Eagle,
and we quoted it in the front matter.”

I appreciate the sociology and transparency of blurbs: heads of MFA programs praising their darlings, editors turned novelists praising authors turned girlfriends. I will see a mentor thanked in the acknowledgments for his support, his faith, his in-law apartment. Then I turn to the back cover and see the acknowledgee declaring the book “huge, important, dazzling, incandescent.”

I don’t think I’ve ever bought a book specifically because of a blurb, but I’ve returned a few to the shelf because of an overwrought rave from a pretentious jackass with whom I’ve had the misfortune to serve on a panel. Similarly, I’ve been put off by bombast, declaring this author the best of his generation, the heir apparent to . . . , the greatest living practitioner of . . .

Not that I haven’t offered up a few overstatements in my day. I have gone on record predicting intimations of immortality and major prizes for books that were stillborn. On the other hand, I’ve been dropped from the jackets of second editions once the book hit the big time, and I’ve dismissed novels that Oprah went on to bless.

Modesty and reason make me wonder if anyone will notice “Elinor Lipman” on four books or eight or ten in one year anyway. Just when I think it’s vainglorious to worry about overexposure, I receive something like reinforcement. “I saw your name on so-and-so’s advance reader’s copy,” a bookseller will write me. “We’re recommending it in our newsletter.”

Perhaps I am too full of myself. When I feel a blurb coming on, I alert the editor that my seal of approval is on its way, as if it’s an emergency; as if she’s the answering service, and I am five centimeters dilated. Male editors are businesslike in their gratitude; female editors are more apt to be ebullient. One confided turning cartwheels in the corridors of Alfred A. Knopf. Can I believe them? I want to. And still better: hearing from the object of my admiration. This winter I received a handwritten note that brought tears to my eyes. “For as long as I live,” an author wrote, “I will never forget that you went out of your way to help my first novel.”

What’s in it for me? Just that. If the system works, a shiny new hardcover will be turned over by a logical fan who thinks:
I like her. She loves this book. Therefore I’ll love it, too.

Word gets around in editorial circles, so blurb ubiquity begets more padded envelopes. I screen their contents because it’s something I can do. In sports announcer parlance, I am giving back. Critics have been described as people who go into the street after battle and shoot the wounded. No blurb can be a bulletproof vest, but in my own experience it can put a square inch of Kevlar over a worried writer’s heart.

I
F I DIDN’T OCCASIONALLY
leave my house and talk to readers, I might not know that constructing a novel without a blueprint is considered by many to be peculiar. The truth reveals itself as I visit bookstores and book groups. “Any questions?” I ask at the end of a reading. Someone invariably asks, “Do you know the ending of your books in advance, and do you outline?” Most seem shocked when I say, “I know almost nothing before I start. I just put one foot in front of the other.”

Of course their astonishment is most gratifying. It implies—and often a kind soul will say this out loud—that the story seems tight, premeditated, and, my all-time favorite adjective, seamless. Flannery O’Connor, I tell them, also wrote by the seat of her pants, but she called herself an intuitive writer.
Intuitive.
I like that.

Then I bring up Edith Wharton, all-star emeritus on the no-outline team. Legend has it that a completed manuscript she submitted was lost in a fire at her publisher’s. The editor asked her to rewrite it, saying, effectively, “How hard could it be since you already wrote it once?” Wharton replied, “I couldn’t possibly rewrite it.” When he asked why, she said, “Because I already know the ending.”

More hands shoot up, and some of the audience members express relief. Either they are writers, too, and find the task of outlining a novel in advance too daunting, too time-consuming, too unappetizing. Or they are readers who want to believe that there’s a little magic along the way, a muse pushing the figurative pen. I explain as best as I can how the muse has to be me. I am both writer and audience. I push ahead because I too want to know what’s going to happen. The twists in the fictional road are what make the long journey fun. As Robert Frost famously said, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

People also ask about another authorial curiosity: they’ve heard that characters can get pushy and start calling the shots. At times I’ve felt something close to that, most notably with my second novel,
The Way Men Act.
I thought I was writing about Libby and Dennis, whose Main Street friendship was supposed to take a turn for the romantic. Yet when their paths crossed, nothing happened: no chemistry, no spark, no amorous advances.

As I began chapter four, my narrator, Melinda, stepped up with, “For the sake of clarification, I will say this one time that Dennis and I slept together before Libby moved back to Harrow.” I exhaled, greatly relieved, and thought, “So
that’s
what’s going on. Not only is this about Melinda and Dennis, but Melinda is an unreliable narrator.” (P.S. Great fun to do an unreliable narrator.) Voices in my head? I see it this way: a new wrinkle suggests itself and prompts my fingers to type the words a nanosecond before I am fully conscious of having devoted some brain cells to the problem. Where the solution comes from, I don’t know. To call it inspiration seems to forget the hours spent puzzling, revising, deleting.

The spark that ignited
My Latest Grievance
was, like most beginnings, a what-if.
What if a child didn’t find out until she was a teenager that her mother had been married before?
No, make that her father, and make them . . . (need an occupation) . . . college professors. Why? I don’t know. I’d claim “setting” except for the fact that I didn’t lock that in until page 34. My narrator and her parents started out on a side street, off campus. But then the ex-wife and soon-to-be-troublemaker was barging into their lives as housemother on the campus where they taught. This created a point-of-view problem for me: how was my narrator, Frederica, going to observe the shenanigans on campus if she lived a couple of miles away? Pragmatic (as opposed to dreamlike magical) solution: move everyone to campus! Frederica not only lives in a dorm, too, but never lived anywhere else. Suddenly, I had my feet planted, and finally I knew what I was writing about: Frederica could be the Eloise of the campus, who sees and tells all (to quote a very kind critic) “with her mercilessly honest updates.”

Do I plan to turn over a new leaf? To buy some index cards? To sketch a fictional family tree or create a montage of Post-it notes that track my plot? I suspect not. I start with one sentence. I write another. A character speaks, a door opens, and I find my way in.