a story
Hey you,
I haven't, um, finished any books this week, but I'm writing anyway because I want to tell you a story. If you follow me on twitter or know me in real life you might've heard it before, maybe a few times, but... look, this newsletter is free.
When I was 19, I was an intern at a literary agency in Manhattan working for an agent, M., and her assistant, whose name I can't remember because I'm a bad person and also because he was at the agency so briefly. (I've had three different internships at literary agencies, which maybe says something not-great about me, but anyway I want to take this time to note that of these three internships, three of my bosses quit in the middle of the summer. That's 100% of my bosses. The first time was heartbreaking [because I was infatuated with the assistant I was working for], the second time it was kind of funny, like, "Ha, I guess it's me," and the third time it was genuinely hard not to take personally!) One of the main things I did was read the slush (unsolicited query letters) M. received, usually in the form of a short introductory letter and the first ten pages of their manuscript. Sometimes the slush was laughably bad and sometimes it was quite good, but more often than not it was grindingly mediocre, which is why they make interns go through it.
If I liked the first 10 pages of something I'd request the next 40 pages and if I liked the first 50 pages I'd request the whole thing, and if I liked the whole thing I wasn't really sure what happened because it had never happened before. This was the middle of my second summer interning at the same agency.
OK, so obviously where this story is going is that one day I read a manuscript I did fall in love with. It was a young adult novel about a girl named June who went to a pretty conservative high school and had shitty conservative parents who caught her reading a book that had, like, sex and cursing in it (if I remember correctly, it was Eleanor & Park) and how everything spiraled out of control from there with books getting banned from the school library and the librarian getting fired, as a result of which June starts a library of banned books out of her locker.
I wrote a really glowing reader's report for M., and one day she told me she was going to actually read the whole manuscript, which was kind of a big deal. In the meantime I followed the author on twitter, and I had the name of the agency in my twitter bio, and I tweeted about how I was reading a manuscript I loved but which had a badly-named mean girl – because, oh yeah, in the manuscript, there was this girl who bullied June named Sarah. She followed me back and I was like, hell yea!
I do want to say in my defense that I didn't do any of this because of some misguided idea of the level of influence I had at the company but because I was certain I was right. A different kind of hubris.
A few days later M. called me into her office and said she could see why I liked the manuscript, that I had a good eye, but the story just wasn't realistic. And I thought, Oh, I should stand up for this! I should defend my point of view! But instead I said, "Right, sure, gotcha," and felt very very embarrassed and helped to draft a rejection letter that I thought wouldn't kill the author and went on with the rest of my life.
And a year later I was working at a different literary agency, this one in Boston, and I was on twitter (which, yeah, now that I'm seeing my pattern of usage laid out in front of me like this doesn't feel very good at all) and I checked my notifications and saw the author had liked one of my dumb tweets. On a sort of whim I searched my laptop to see if I still had the manuscript, and I did, buried somewhere in my downloads folder. I skimmed it pretty quick and decided yes, as good as I remember, and without thinking too much about it (you know, like someone inconsiderate) I sent her a DM asking if I could email her. And she said OK, and I wrote her an email that read (I'm paraphrasing): "Hey, I'm that dumb asshole from last year. I'm still a dumb asshole but I'm at a different agency now and maybe you could try querying here? And say I sent you?" and she did, because authors need whatever hope they can get, I guess.
I told R., the agent I was working for that time around, that I found a manuscript he might like to take a look at. He asked where I found it and... I didn't intend to lie. I realized in the moment he asked that I didn't want his first impression of the manuscript to be that it was rejected by a different agent, and an instant later I heard myself telling him that I told my dental hygienist I was working at a literary agency and she said I should read her, uh, friend's manuscript and I couldn't say no when she had all those tools in my mouth, haha! (Like all of the best and most believable lies it was full of unnecessary details.) "And it actually turned out to be really good," I said.
And then I didn't hear anything from anyone for weeks until after a month or so the author DMed me and said something about how she was reviewing the agency contract, all casual. That was the middle of the summer. I know she spent some time making edits; she and R. decided it would work better as a middle grade novel, for example, and these things take time, and for a while I didn't think about it. (Also, in the background my personal life and the country were both absolutely falling to pieces!) A few months later, on Valentine's Day, she sent me a message, which I read while I was standing in line to pick up my takeout order for one at a cornish pasty restaurant. The message said that the book sold to Random House Kids, and I wept, and the people around me in the restaurant were visibly uncomfortable, but like, you were in a cornish pasty restaurant on Valentine's Day too, dude! Not sure what you were expecting!
Then the author sent me cupcakes while I was out of town, which meant I had to text my hot neighbor Jake From Next Door and ask if he'd refrigerate them for the day, and he did, and then when I got back I visited him inside his apartment for the first time, so that was two victories in one.
All of this to say that Allison Varnes's book Property of the Rebel Librarian comes out a week from today, and it would mean a lot to me if you ordered a copy for the 8-12 year old in your life, or donated a copy to a classroom or school library, or even donated the price of the book to a literacy organization or your local library.
The moral of this story, of course, is not that it's important to believe in yourself or to stand up for your convictions but that I was right. The first time I read Allison's manuscript I thought, Oh, this is going to be a book, and I'd never had that thought before, and I was right.
And also it is a comfort to think that there are people in the world who I don't really know exist who might be looking out for me.
TL;DR: It's important for your career that you like all my tweets.
Your friend,
Smalls
P.S. I am currently reading Dril Official "Mr. Ten Years" Anniversary Collection