Five years in the wilderness...
In 2010, Gail Hochman, my first literary agent, passed on The Revolution of Every Day, firing me after five years together. It felt as big as any break up, nearly as devastating as the end of my first marriage, even though we parted on the most amicable of terms. That sounds like ridiculous hyperbole until you take into account that I had put all of my professional and artistic hopes and dreams into her hands. Or projected that power on to her, anyway. I wanted to publish books, and to publish them well. I wanted to be read and respected as a novelist. I wanted to put books out into the world and have people read them and care about them. And at the time, I believed that having a literary agent was the only way to make that happen. And then I didn’t have her anymore. So yeah. I took the breakup hard.
Gail had taken me on right out of grad school, agreeing to represent my first novel, Drowning Practice. I loved the book at the time, but looking back now I have no idea what she saw in it. I mean, the sentences were pretty, because I do that well. But who cares about pretty sentences when the substance of the book is a hot mess? Drowning Practice boils down to this: a thirty-year-old woman (guess how old I was when I wrote it) walking around Park Slope and feeling sad about her dead father. Which...you know... fine, if you do it well. But I reread it a couple of years ago and could do nothing but cringe. My editor at Tin House wanted to see it and I refused. Though it came close a couple of times in the two years that Gail shopped it around, it was never published.
While Drowning Practice was failing to find a publisher, I was writing The Revolution of Every Day, which took on much more complicated things than a sad Park Sloper with daddy issues, and attempted a much more complex structure, and wrestled with real recent history. I was pretty proud of it. I remain really fucking proud of it. It’s a good book. Gail (who is a wonderful person and an excellent, smart agent) couldn’t get comfortable with the squatters. We went through a couple of rounds of revision and she just couldn’t click with the book the way she would need to to sell it. I was adamant about not setting it aside in favor of a more marketable project. We parted ways.
I don’t blame Gail for this at all. It was a very kind thing to do, to recognize we weren’t a good editorial fit and to set me free. Because I never would have walked away on my own. What unpublished writer just walks away from a top agent because the editorial fit isn’t quite right? I’m so grateful to her for passing on the book, because she wouldn’t have been able to sell it with the necessary enthusiasm.
I’m even more grateful that Drowning Practice was never published. Holy crap. May it fester deep in The Drawer. I’m grateful now, but in the summer of 2010 when Gail and I split? Damn. That was a low, low period for me. My first book, which I didn’t yet find to be an embarrassment, had failed to sell, but I’d comforted myself with the knowledge that at least I still had an agent in my corner who believed in my work. And then Gail fired me and I didn’t even have that. I was back to the beginning. I spent over a year trying to get a new agent for Revolution, but no one wanted to represent it. Who cared about a bunch of squatters, right?
In the spring of 2012, I said FUCK IT, and started submitting the book to small independent presses on my own. That July, I accepted an offer from Tin House Books and negotiated the contract by myself. Tin House proved to be the perfect publisher for Revolution, and my experience with them was wonderful. I published a novel I believed in, and readers found it and embraced it. It’s been a huge privilege, a fantastic experience all around. And I did it without an agent.
So... No. My career wasn’t sunk when I couldn’t get an agent for my novel. My career is doing just fine.
And yet...there were times in the process when I wished I had a little more help, when I wished I had that contract-savvy advocate in my corner. Someone looking out for the big picture. And so when I finished my new novel, I started looking for an agent again.
It’s a lot easier once you’ve published your first novel, if it went okay. Damn easier.
And so now, after five years on my own (okay...four and a half years), I have an agent again. I am so very happy to have signed with Maria Massie. She gets my new book. She’s enthusiastic about it. We’re a good fit. I look forward to working with her on many books, for years to come. But having had much more success on my own than I did with my first agent, I think I’m in a better place this time. I’m not putting all of my hopes and dreams on her shoulders. That’s more of a burden than I should expect anyone to bear. I haven't found a savior. What I’ve actually done is outsourced the business-negotiation aspects of my writing career to an expert, and acquired an advocate and ally. That feels a hell of a lot better than clinging to the idea of someone with the power to make or break my career.
Growth. Maturity. Go figure.
In other news, my kids are on spring break and I’m slowly but steadily losing my damn mind. Tell me a joke. Or a story. Please. I just want to hear from someone who isn’t asking for a snack or yelling about what their sibling did or didn’t do.
Yours,
Cari
PS: You don’t have to live in Oregon to cast a vote for the Oregon Book Awards Reader’s Choice award. Maybe you’d want to...you know...throw a vote my way? That’d be pretty great.
PPS: Yes, it seems like I’ve been a finalist for the Oregon Book Award for fiction for a very long time. We’ll find out who won at a big ceremony on April 13th. We get to dress up and either win or lose in front of an audience. Yay. Cross your fingers for me. I’ll keep you posted.
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The Revolution of Every Day
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