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You've heard the book publishing podcasts that give you tips for selling a lot of books and the ones that feature interviews with famous authors. Now it's time for a book publishing show that reveals what actually goes on behind the cover.
Hosted by New York Times bestselling author Anna David, Behind the Book Cover features interviews with traditionally published authors, entrepreneurs who have used books to build their businesses and more.
Come find out what traditional publishers don't want you to know.
00:01
Okay, so first of all, so many things. Okay, so you're fancy.
00:07
That's my that's my name, fancy. No, I actually know somebody named fancy. Shut up. Yeah, it's in my new husband's family. There's a character named fancy. I'm not kidding. Oh, my God, a character, but this is a real person. I mean, there's a person named I haven't met fancy. So to take it back, I became familiar with you because two men that I knew separately said you must know Jeanne Durst.
00:36
And they said it Brad Pitt and George Clooney, yes, yes. And they said it when we were in bed, which was, which was weird. There's a lot of that. I get that a lot. And they said, You just wrote in this moment, you're reminding me so much of her. They said it simultaneously, talking about me, very erotic. Yes, Alas, no. But they were gentlemen, writers. We you, we know they are. I told you Jeff, and then Toby was this other one. Yes, yes. Oh, Toby Huss, okay. So, okay, so I thought he hated me, but go on, there's they don't matter. What matters is you and me. They both talked about you and said, and I think Jeff said you would love her. You guys have so much in common, you need to know her. And I said, Who is this woman you speak of? And I believe I befriended you on the Facebook. I think I did possible. I think I did could be possible. And then you stumbled in to my life, and I see exactly what they were talking about.
01:41
Yeah. So tell me the story from your point of view. Well, I feel like I had the same experience, like I don't, it must have been Jeff, but that people were like, well, you know Anna, David. And I was like, I don't. And then I felt like I should, right? And then it was a long time before we actually met. And then I said to you, I would really like to be your friend. And as I recall, you had, what did I say? You just had a kind of frightening look on
02:07
your face. I went, I blanched, as they say. I just, I think, I think you just associated I might have left him. I was floating above the chair, actually, truth. I just, but this is true. And I said, and I said, I said to myself, self, she does not seem as excited about this possibility as you do, so you might have to rescind that. Well, that's funny, because I have a friend who
02:33
we were at a party, and she, you know, we haven't been friends that long, you know what I mean. So to me, I have a lot of long term friends. And this friend was like, the she introduced herself, she was like, I'm Genie's best friend, but she doesn't know it, right? I think you bring that out. People, are you best? Are you close? I think it's a compliment. When I heard somebody say this recently, that they made everyone feel like they were a good friend. Yes. So, so there's that, but there's also the narcissism thing. You know, how narcissists can make you feel like you're the most important person. So you're calling me a narcissist in the first two minutes of your podcast, three minutes. That's what I didn't tell you. That's what this is. This is called intervention. Yeah, exactly. That would be the best podcast. Such a better one. Instead. This is about books. Okay, so you, I knew that you had this very funny book that was very successful, that did a lot of things, but I didn't know the details till I went down the genie DARS wiki rabbit hole yesterday and saw it had all things. Tell me the story of selling your book and what happened? Oh, so, I mean, I'm one of these people who, like, I was writing plays in New York I was doing plays in Vermont. Like I was not a professional writer, really, until I was like 40. I mean, I was writing, maybe I had a piece in The New York Times Magazine, a humor piece. I was doing plays, but, like, my book was really the first time that I sort of crossed over. So what I'm saying to you is, there's years of slogging it out, years of working for 200 people, you know, doing a play, plays in my living room, that kind of thing. So it really pisses me off when young people are like, I've been out here for a year. What's going on, man? I'm like, give it the old saying used to be, you want to be an actor. Give it five years. You want to be a writer. Give it 20 Oh, but I would say 22 so basically, like, I had been working on this book. And what's really interesting is that, I mean, if you care about thinking about writing and what something's trying to be,
04:40
I wanted it to be a series of stories about this family, and they were named the charters. And it was going to be individual stories, very, JD Salinger, right, sort of about, like the glass family ish. And the problem with my idea, which I was very committed to, because.
05:00
Because real writers wrote fiction and bullshit writers wrote memoirs. Okay, what year was this, by the way, so this was like, I mean, I sold my book in 2010
05:10
but my whole life. I mean, I'm a third generation writer. I know my grandmother, my grandfather, my cousin won the Pulitzer for feature writing my dad. So I know the struggle, and I know the way that things go, and I know the sort of rules, right, right, which is, if you're a woman, you don't write about relationships because of chick lit that was all happening. Do not write about sex and relationships. If you want to be a real writer and you want to play with the big boys, aka The New Yorker, The New York Times, you want to get reviewed as a real writer. Don't be too sexy. You don't work that angle. You'd be so interesting. And then you and you write fiction. So for a long time, I was working on this book as a series of stories. Then I realized the problem with individual stories is they go cold at the end as a short story, that they die, and then you start another one. And then that dies. And then you go again, up in the air again, and then the ball comes down.
06:06
And when you're trying to work with themes, and you're trying to get people to care about this family, you've really got to stay you've got to have a continuous story. You got to have one story. And so eventually, my agent, David McCormick, really great guy in New York at McCormick and Williams. Is that that was his old agency, and now it's McCormick literary, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was there briefly. Oh, you were, yeah. Okay. He's great. My joke about David is, if like, the Titanic was sinking, I'd be like, David the ship sinking, and he'd be like, don't worry. I talked to the captain. We're having lunch on Monday. He's very old school, but he was like, I think this needs to be a memoir. I think this is one story, right? And it was sort of like a letdown to have that realization, because I felt like I'd failed as a fiction writer. And then, of course, when we let go of our very fixed ideas, something new can happen. And it all started to work, right? And then I was pretty much done. I had written it, oh. And side note is that for two years, I'd been emailing This American Life, this guy, Alex, and saying,
07:15
because my friend was like, I had a story about my sister becoming a muslim. And he was like, I feel like I feel like this is great for this American life. And I was like, me too. I love this American life. Emailing them for two years, right? Like, every three or four months I check in, like, hey, just checking in. Nobody ever responded, yeah. And then, and
07:35
then finally, after two years, this guy, Alex Bloomberg, I think his name was, he was like, you're emailing the wrong person. You need to email Julie Snyder, who's the executive producer. I'm like, Okay, now I'm going to email her for two years, right? And the next day, she got back to me, and she was like, This is amazing. We want to use it. We're booking a studio in LA, you know, next week.
07:56
And off we went. And when that story about my sister becoming a muslim, which is not in my book, because she asked me to take it out.
08:06
Went on This American Life. It was like there were 910 publishers on that Monday trying to find me, trying to get who's my agent, who is this person? And Then There ended up being a big bidding war for my book, which was a dream come true, right? Sorry, I just have questions. Yes, a great story. Yeah. Did you have so you were already working with David MacCormack at this point, so you already had a big agent. I did have a very legit, big agent. And you're, you're playing around with this simultaneously, kind of unrelated to the book. You think this should be a good This American Life, so a piece of it would be really good. Before you were working on the book, you thought that, yeah, okay. And so then as this is happening, suddenly the floodgates open. It's on, yeah, it's on. And and the thing comes out, and there's an everybody's calling David McCormick, and be like, where's this book? After This American Life? Everybody's Yeah, and so at that point, really interestingly, what we did, which felt so weird, I had a book. It was in rough shape, but it was a full book. Yeah. David said, Okay, now what we're gonna do, now that we have all these people dying to read your manuscript, we're gonna write a proposal. And I went, Well, we have a book. Why would we write a proposal that's like, buying somebody a drink when they're in bed, in your bed naked. Why are we going back to the bar, you know? So he was like, that's what we're doing. And I was like, okay, and it was actually a great way, if anybody also finds this an interesting tidbit, which I certainly do when you have to write marketing material and you have to say what something is, because that happens a lot in Hollywood. I've done that a lot with log lines. It's very helpful, and sometimes it gets you to where you need to be in terms of sharpening the vision for the piece. And that's exactly what that did. And we gave everybody 100 pages of what we thought was the best stuff. So they got 100 page sample and a proposal.
10:00
Got it, and then that's when the sort of auction and the bidding war happened, which is, of course, exactly what you want, which will so what happened? So he sort of just walked me through, like, he's calling he's being like, Macmillan is offering. It was very exciting, because it was just, it was big numbers, and then it went up. And at the end of every day we bid us and not be like, Oh my god, this is insane. And I had a little baby. I had a three year old, or actually a two year old at that point.
10:28
So it was very exciting to have that kind of interest. And of course, it all, it all went great. It was a so then you take the best offer. What's interesting is I really wanted to be at Riverhead, okay?
10:43
And Jeff klosky, who runs Riverhead, and one of the reasons, of course, I love a lot of their writers, but also Jeff klosky Is the guy who found David Sedaris. He's also the guy who was trying to find me after this American life. And what I love about Jeff is that when he found David Sedaris, everybody was like, What a great new gay writer we found. And he said, we're not marketing him as a gay writer. This man is a humorist, and that's we're not leading with his sexuality. And then, of course, David Sedaris becomes a superstar. So I wanted to be like all those people like David Sedaris and Sarah Val and David Rakoff, who, by the way, also helped Simon Schuster find me, because he was on that episode with me on This American Life, and David ragoff was my absolute hero. That was very exciting.
11:31
So yeah, then and they offered the most money, and that's where I wanted to be, right? And what's interesting is that Sarah McGrath, who is my editor? Doesn't usually take on memoirs. She publishes really big people like Cheng Cheng Ray Lee, and she's a huge fiction editor. Her dad was the fiction editor at the New Yorker for 20 years. Her brother Ben still writes for The New Yorker, so she had a lot of
12:00
smarts, and she was, she just totally got it, and I was thrilled to work with her. And she was a great editor, really great editor. So you get all this money, yeah, but you know, it's, it's in dry, you know, you get it in chunks, four, yes, four chunks, yeah, agents taking 10, whatever's happening, and and then what happens? How long between the acquisition and the release? Well, see, that's the other thing is, it's really slow. And, yeah, books are still really slow. So they probably acquired it in, oh God, I want to say 2010 maybe it came out a year and a half later, okay, something like that. And probably they not like fast tracked it, but that's faster than normal, because they had invested a lot in it. They were very excited about it. Yeah, usually it's like two and a half three years. That's crazy that it'd be two and a half three years. And so this whole time you're thinking what, you're like, oh my god, this is what it this is what it's been working for. How great the world sees my value. And I mean, what's going through your super validating, super valid to be working on your own and just sort of again, like doing plays in Vermont and doing things in New York, and you're, you know, you have your friends, your friends, or your audience, right, right? And your champions, like my sister, Liz, people who are like, no, keep going. But then when you finally do get the tippy top of, I mean, Ira Glass is, you know, a very
13:22
sort of high mark, and then river head, and so it was. It felt fantastic. It felt like I was exactly where I needed to be. And that kind of also like before the book even came out, like HBO, Carolyn Strauss, who had then ran HBO, who had a production, she's like, sending her intern at my to my house at 10 o'clock at night to get a galley Right, right? You know what I mean, like people are, and I mean, a lot of people don't realize that, but Hollywood are, they're reading all the books before they come out, and buying them or not buying them. So then suddenly, it got acquired by HBO. Suddenly, I have an HBO option, option, and me writing the pilot, and you writing the pilot. So, like, sort of like taffy, ackner, burdesser kind of situation. Now, you are you too, you know, fancy to talk about numbers. You won't say, like, Well, I think I don't, yeah, I think it's a little in bed, yeah. Okay, so, but so the book comes out, what happens the New York Times did review it? New York Times reviewed it really well, really well. It's funny, though, because they got a lot of things wrong. Oh, really, just like janitors didn't have any friends growing up and her. And then they sort of said, like, the money came from my dad, that my dad had the money. And I'm like, Did you read my book? Wow, I thought it was a very badly written review. Who wrote it? Janet ma she did Wow. And I thought it was lazy, but also she doesn't do book. She was the film person, and then she became the book person. And I called up David, and I was like, do we, do we? Like, have them sort of print some, there's some factual error that was so nice. She loves nothing. And he goes, it's Janet Maslin.
15:00
Jeannie, you don't, you don't fuck with a good review from Janet Maslin, okay, yeah, but that's also, that was also a real learning experience. Oh, these people may have their interns read the book. Oh, these people may not read the whole book Right, right? Or get things wrong, right? I mean, we think these places are so, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, infallible. And they're not they. There's just human beings there and everywhere in this and that. And, you know, we could talk about that. But one of my things is, like, don't listen to anybody. Tell me more about that.
15:34
I mean, the first piece that I got in the New York Times, it was a column called True Life tales. John Hodgman was the editor, and the first one, he was like, Oh my god. Everybody, The New York Times loves this, but they think it's too mean. And I was like, oh shit. And he's like, please keep submitting. And then I said, And so David McCormick, nothing against David, but he's not always right either. Yeah. So whether it's your agent or your people in LA, those people, Janet, Mac, you're whoever it is. Yeah, don't listen to people. You got to do the work yourself. And you got to, like, you got to find a way. You know what I mean, it's like growing up in an alcoholic home. You got to find a way into your mom's purse to get your lunch money, right. You know what I mean, like, you got to do your own people, people,
16:23
they're, they're, they're sort of the good girl. They play the good girl too much. And so and so the book comes out, and what happened? What happened next? What happened next? So then I just launched into working on the HBO thing. So then suddenly, I mean, I got divorced in that time too.
16:41
And so suddenly I'm like, a single mom, and I'm embarking on, like, well, this seems like a pretty good way to make some money, which is Hollywood writing this pilot, and my agents. And then I got film agents
16:55
booked to film agents here in LA who were my agents for a bunch of years, and they were great. And they represented really big people too, like really fancy, you know, Rachel Kushner, like those kind of people.
17:08
And so,
17:11
I mean, if I was to sort of give you the overview, how did you feel?
17:16
I felt amazing. So the book, very nerve, very nervous. Every, every day, you'd wake up and I would, like, open my phone and like, whether it was the Chicago Tribune or Boston papers or there were, it was very widely reviewed, widely. Doesn't happen very much, no, and I was the end of the dream. Is really the dream died with you. There was a lot that died with me, the DARS death of dream. There really was, because also I forgot that, like Vogue magazine excerpted my book, right, right? So I in the week that my book came out, I had a book come out. I was at book court in Brooklyn, yeah, I had a full spread essay excerpt in vogue, right, with my son picture photo shoot. And I was on This American Life with a piece that they had knew the second time, yes, that they had commissioned, right? So that really doesn't happen a lot. I mean, the press alone is, like, bonkers. You couldn't really get that. So was there any fault, like, like, was there any disappointment if that didn't lead to whatever that is meant to lead to, like, being David Sedaris or whatever. I mean, I think you're funnier, right? I think I learned a lot, and I think,
18:29
you know, there's no way to know how things are gonna go, but I do think that part of it is when people tell you, especially when you're a woman, you can't do that. That's not the way it's done. You have to say, well, that's the way I'm doing it, and this is what I want you to do, and make the phone call, yeah? Make the fucking phone call. Yeah? Because agents, sorry to say this, everybody Yeah, they're secretaries. They're very smart secretaries. They can't do what you do. They're not thinking, yeah, they're not planning. And that doesn't mean there aren't people who are really working for your career. We can get to it, but there's a lot of things that have gone on in the last decade in this town where you go, that was what was happening. What do you mean? The writer strike, yeah, the campaign, yeah, for packaging, writers saying, Why doesn't anybody pay attention to me? Right at my agency, I'm thinking that I'm talking to my friends about that. You're probably talking to your friends about that. And then friends about that. And then you go, Oh, because they only give a shit about the show runners. Right? Then you're working for a show runner, because then we could talk about that, but I started, I got into the world of TV writing, okay? And then you realize you're talking to your show runner. Who's your friend? He's like, my agents make more than I do on this show because of packaging. Wait, explain this to people who don't understand, like, it's like they they're double dipping with like, studios and their clients, so they're really more working for the studio than the client. They used to be, just as we called them, like 10 percenters, right, right? With packaging, they're able to put together a deal that makes.
20:00
So they get directors from their agency and writers, right? They put this person on the show right package, the deal, and then there's back end stuff, right? So they're getting more paid three to four times. They're really making more money than the person who winds up in a mental institution, because show running is so hard, but so and so. How does one become one of the people that they want to package like a show runner? I well, I don't know. So, so you were at an agency. Are you still at this agency? No, because we during the campaign, I fired, I was at WME. I don't even think they noticed, or when I left W me, I never, I wrote a very nice email. Never even heard back. No, they don't. They don't really care. And so
20:42
but what I was gonna say is like you have to do your if you're waiting around for an agency or an agent or a friend, or whoever it is, whoever you think the gatekeepers are, you gotta stop doing that. Yep, you gotta stop doing that because they it's it's it's good 10 years will go by which I feel is like, what happened to me? Like, people said I wanted to get a job, honest, I wanted to be a staff writer. Uh huh. So somebody said to me, it takes three years to be a staff writer. It's pretty much what it took. I mean, it's like every phone call blabbity blue trying to get people very hard to get your first staff job. So, okay, so this was post book. Yeah, there's like, so you say this, all this happened. This is great, because really what I want is to get on staff at a time. I just thought great way to make a living and also write books. Okay, looking back on it, I don't know it's just so hard. What I think has happened in this town in the last year or two is that people like me have realized how hard what they're trying to do really is, yeah, because you've got the credits Right? Like I would meet with big show runners all the time. They loved my HBO script. I look you know, you did a deep Goog. I look good. Yes, you get in there. And what I often feel like is they don't want a superstar. That's not what they want. They want a helper. They want somebody who's gonna be like, I don't have anywhere to be at three in the morning, if you commit the TV world is like, there's show creators, and then there's like, you know, people who are helpers, people who are writers who know how to help, and there's nothing wrong with that, yeah, but they're there to help the show to serve, right? They're not necessarily even thinking about making their own show, right? So I came in at the top in the TV world because I was somebody who had an HBO deal off my book. That's absolutely how you want to come into the TV 100% but then I also wanted to be a staff writer, and then I'm down here, right? So I had this really weird experience. I had three staff jobs, and I think, I mean, I was story editor at the last one. I mean, it's like, okay, wait, so what happened? So you come in the HBO, the pilot, everybody loves it. What happened next? Oh, well, they didn't green light it. Well, for a couple of reasons. I think bored to death was just finishing, oh yeah, and I ended up writing for Jonathan on two shows, but that was at New York writer thing. And then girls was just about to go, yeah. So that was four girls. Mine was like four sisters, right? Literary world, the real problem is literary New York, right? With girls coming out, they weren't gonna do my show. I just re watched girls by the whole thing. Yeah, I never watched it because I can't relate to people being taken care of by their rich parents.
23:32
I would say that. And I just felt like, did any of them have any fun? Did anybody ever are we talking about the character or the people here who, yeah, um, yeah. It's just, it was just a thing, just to say, I just, I also felt like all they're just shit on by guys the whole time. I couldn't relate a little bit. I'm just gonna challenge you and say contempt prior to investigation, yeah, if you watched it, I don't know that you'd feel that way. However do you turn on right now? Do you think your feelings are because you feel like that kind of took away your big moment. Um, I don't know. I think I might have watched one no, because at the time I didn't really know you just thought, like, well, it didn't go right. I didn't really know why, but looking back on it, you're like, oh, okay, well, these things were happening. It was probably later that I realized, Oh, girls was coming out. I didn't know that that was happening. And so what's so interesting about like, your sort of Cinderella experience is it's funny, because when I did the deep Goog yesterday, in my head, this all, I didn't, I'm not a numbers gal, it all felt like something that would have happened in like, 2003
24:37
like, so when you just said two things, I was like, Oh, 2010
24:41
it was so 2011 Yeah, it was so
24:45
Cinderella. It was so old school publishing. It's not so you really were the last person it happened to, yeah. And also it was stuff like, I wanted, I wanted my book to be reviewed by the New Yorker, right? And it was, and it was, yeah, and it was like, holy shit.
25:00
It, but so it's a big deal, okay? And so then, and so then the show doesn't go but yeah, gets you have this sample of this pilot, yeah? And that pilot gets you represented at WME, yeah. And then they start submitting you to write on TV shows. Wm, you was later. It was this little boutique company called RW, SG, okay, but, and they start submitting me, and I'm meeting with show runners and and you get hired. I got hired, like, three years in by myself. So again, I'm just gonna say Not, not comment when you're the whole through line of this podcast is do it yourself. Yeah, do it anyway. Yeah. Like, my nickname on a couple of the shows that I was on was, like, doing it anyway, because there were all these like things that could possibly be really bad ideas. And people were like, don't do it, and I, and I'm doing it anyway, like, what, um, just whatever, like somebody to date, or, you know, just any, anything, right? But it, it's, there's a lot of, I think people who've done stuff know this. You really have to do it yourself. Yeah, you got to believe in yourself, you really do, and you have to just be like, blindly,
26:07
you know, yeah, believing in yourself blindly. And I don't, I'm not someone who says things like this, but like, behave like a white man. Just go and behave like a white man. I actually said that to people, pretend you're justified. Feel like you can, I mean, there's been studies in the publishing world where, when a magazine says we're gonna pass,
26:28
it takes women like eight months to resubmit again. It takes guys like three days. They're like, here's another one, here's another one, here's another one. You have to be that. I remember I had a friend who is actually an incredibly successful screenwriter now, who was had never written anything at that time. I wrote for Details magazine. He tells me about some like, he's like, oh, there's this thing going on and, like, it was in can and it was this and that. And he's like, You should pitch the details. I was like, I don't think that they would take that story. He goes, What's your editor's name? I tell him, literally, a week later, he has a business class ticket to go to can to cover, because he called the guy right and got the assignment. And I always think of that as, yeah, as just the kind of shit I'm scared to do. I'm a little brave behind the keyboard. I'm not so brave on the telephone, right? I'm not a cold call personally, yeah, nobody wants that, but I could relate to your like. My thing with details was your This American Life. I emailed them for three or four years. It's my everything. It's my day. Later today, I will go do 50 things that feel shitty or feel pointless, or the follow ups and this and that. It's just, it's you got to do it. So what do you guys so? So, so people should know that they should do it themselves, but, but what do you think are the misconceptions around traditional publishing and sort of having your dream come true? You had the dream, right? That that what surprised you? I mean, I think you really again, like, even when you've got the dream, you've got us keep working, because it can, it can all go away. I mean, there was a fair amount of just being like, Wait, what happened? Where's my big fat career, right? I mean, and there are days where I go, like, what happened? What happened? Like, I was staffed and doing my thing. Why did I give 10 years? I truthfully, it's like, Why did I give 10 years to Hollywood? Really? Yeah, a little bit because I should have been writing the books the whole time. I should have stayed with what I was doing. I should have come out with another book. I mean, I actually did write another book that didn't sell. Actually, are you kidding me? Yeah, it was called dad's trying to kill me. And it was about my dad's response to my book, which was terrible, but it was a fictionalized account of a father. The daughter is like writing on TV shows. He comes out to LA to kill her because he's like flying on prednisone and all these asthma medications, which my dad would also happen with my dad.
28:53
And so it's a real farce about a father trying to kill his daughter because she's more successful than he is a writer. And I think for a lot of people, they couldn't handle that. They wanted the moment at the end where they reunited, or whatever. And that doesn't entirely happen. So
29:12
that was, yeah, that was you wrote this book. And David MacCormick, yeah, I think that went out in 2018 when I was on this terrible ABC show called The Kids Are All Right, and it goes out and he just calls. He's like, Sorry, can't sell it. Couldn't sell it when. Oh, and, I mean, I collected all of the passes, all of the passes, because he would pass them on to me. I was like, does this person want to fuck me or not? I mean, they were the most complimentary rejections Anna that you've ever heard in your life, like I couldn't stop laughing, how incredibly smart, what a great writer, but we're gonna pass and so then you also realize, you know,
29:53
you you have to do whatever you're doing as well as you can do it like you cannot. You know, ride on.
30:00
In anything, right? The business is too hard, right? Don't send things out when they're not ready, right, hoping that someone's gonna get the idea, right? You know, don't trust other people to get the idea. Were you disappointed? Devastated? I was not devastated because I was writing on a TV show, so I had some income. Yeah, um, again, a lot of these things you don't realize until like, a year later, right? Oh, I could have done this or that. What, what should have happened is that we should have gone to a small press when the big people, yeah, said no, but big agents don't want to do that because their commission is low. David was like, Absolutely not, right, right? Right? Because we, I guess he just thought, like, you're not in a place where you need to do that. And meanwhile, I write in an office in Silver Lake called Sweet eight, with a ton of, oh, I worked there, yeah, one day I worked there. Really, it was one very depressing day. It was pandemic, and there was a, there was like a garbage problem. Anyway, it smelled terrible. I paid the rent. Paid the rent for one month, and I was like, I never saw you there. I went one day and never came back, and there was only that one. Oh, it's like, totally my little writing home. There's a lot of, but how long that was? I've been there for eight years, yeah, okay, we could have passed in the whole that one day I was there. Um, but then, you know, you you talk what? That's, what's great about having there's a lot of female writers there, but male writers too. But there's a lot of industry talk. There's a lot of this is what I got. This is what's being sold. People are buying this. Do you know? So and so there's a lot of help, right? That this community of writers that I'm part of give each other, and sometimes that's just being around other people slogging through, did it? What they said was, when I, when I would go over like other people's, you know, when I would tell people about my novel that didn't sell, they were like, I can't believe you didn't go to small presses, right? That's dumb. You could still. I could still. And do you? Are you still represented by David like so what's Yeah, okay, but you can have someone else. So and So, the misconceptions and what surprised you the most about putting out a book, yeah, about having the dream come true? What surprised me the most?
32:19
Well, I mean, if you get a big advance, you're not gonna it's really hard to go into royalties. Let's put it that way. Yeah, it's, it's like, it's a total trade off. And if you get a big advance, typically, you're not going on a book tour, right, unless you're a superstar. And the only people now who go on book tours are superstars, right, right, right. And really what they want are TV appearances. That's what people want. That's what publishing houses really want, because that's what sells books. I didn't know they so publishing houses, can you get on? Good Morning America? Can you get on? You know, is Jimmy Fallon gonna pick you for his book club, or right book thing or right? That's what TV doesn't really, I mean, really anything that sells books. Now the only one, Instagram, fresh air is the only sort of media that sells books and then and fresh air. Yes, Terry, gross, yes, you did you turn it? Did you turn Terry down? No, I didn't, but I did something
33:13
called God the forum, or something with Michael Krasny, which is sort of the West Coast. Terry, gross. Well, so, so, yeah, I don't think that books sell. I mean, who knows anymore? Yeah, I think that it's very much lightning in a bottle. I think it's always been this. I think that what it is is usually what publishing houses do is they, they put all their eggs in in one basket. Yours was a basket. Yeah, you know where they're putting their their eggs, because they show you with their dollar signs totally. But then they, then they, you know, I have a friend who had a book where she's like, the book comes out, it became a New York Times bestseller The week one, and they and her publisher calls her and they say, come in, we're gonna have a marketing meeting. And she goes, What do you mean? We've been having marketing meetings for months, and they said, no, no, we're gonna have a real marketing meeting. This is what happens once you're already successful, and it's a whole different thing. And it's not because they're terrible people, it's because they're business people, and they're like, we only want to bet on the horses that are already winning. I know it's really and so I think that what's what I always want people to understand is that it's you know. It's you know, you think the dream has come true because you've got the agent and you've got the book deal, and really it's just sort of the beginning of heartbreak. There's a lot of hustle. Yeah, there's a lot of hustle. And, you know, I didn't know things like that. Publishers buy places on tables, in books. I tell you that, I mean, but they did for you at first, I don't even remember, but they probably did, yeah, um, that was a little bit like, Oh, yeah. So what you just said, Yeah, you're, you're, you know, putting all your effort into books that may not need it, or 100
35:00
Just got the New York Times, the celebrities that get the free shit, exactly, the people who can, you know, most don't need the free shit get the free shit. Yeah, exactly. And, and it is really heartbreaking, and, and I think that at the same time, it's a business. So why we're only surprised because it's art, and art is, you know, shouldn't be heartbreaking, but, yeah, but okay, but I did also want to go back to. So was your dad hated your book. Oh, yeah. And what happened? Well, there's I actually wrote a Vogue piece about it Christmas, like 2016 I think
35:32
he okay. So my dad was a writer. He had a couple novels that didn't get published, but in the 70s he was a pretty big like, non fiction guy. I mean, he wrote for the nation. He wrote for The New York Times, Mac York Times Magazine. He wrote a ton of political stuff for Harper's, like, very prestigious, yeah, high brow stuff. And it's what also took me along, like my friends would be, like, he's jealous, right? Jealous, right? Published a book. Like my grandmother was a writer. She didn't publish a book, right? So, in some ways it's very difficult to be like, Oh, in some ways I am more successful than my dad, right? So I found that territory fascinating, fascinating because also we are now living in a world where girls women are going to out achieve their fathers much more often. It's going to be much more common, right? Why? To out earn, to out achieve? Because we have the tools. We are starting businesses where they you know, because women are so much more in the work world. I know there's still so much inequality, but like, we're so much more powerful, right? But Gen X was always told you'll never be as successful as your parents, right?
36:41
Yeah. So that was a big that was a big thing. And so he basically read my read the galley, and he called me up, and he was like, okay, also he was furious, because he did know how much money I got, so that made him really upset, yeah?
36:55
And he said, you know, you got a gene, Joe, you got a lot of things. He calls me Jean Joe. You got a lot of things wrong, but here's what I think we ought to do. I'm like, we okay. And he's like, here's what I think we ought to do. You'll be going along, telling your story of my childhood, right? Yeah. And then I'll come in in Ital, and say, Dad here. That's not how I saw things at all. And I'm like, Are you proposing dad that you come into my memoir in italics
37:23
during in the text, in the body of the book, I was like, number one, my publisher will have a shit fit, no. Number two, this is why you are such an amazing person. You're insane, right? I love you. That's so it's insane, but it's also incredibly funny, right? So that was his response that he and he just became obsessed with all the things that I got wrong, and we didn't speak during my book tour, which, again, was basically book court in Brooklyn, and it was a long period of him being furious at me. Is he still alive? Yeah, he is. He's 92
37:59
and
38:01
it was very difficult to admit that he was jealous. Did he ever? No, no, I got things wrong. And there were he didn't like the profanity. In my book, he didn't like the details. Do you have to say how there were mice droppings on your mother's bed in the West Village? Yes, I do, dad, because I'm trying to describe alcoholism, right, right? So yeah, I'm gonna say whatever the hell I want to say,
38:24
so,
38:27
and that became a really interesting that's why I started to write the novel. Dad's trying to kill me, because when your father is like, you don't deserve this. What are you doing? My father trained me to be a writer, you love literature, and then when I published a book, he turned on me. Yeah. I mean, I had the same thing happened in my family. She did. Yeah, it's pretty calm. I mean, it's not uncommon. It's pretty common for families when you write a memoir, to get some of them to get upset. But I mean, the sort of competitiveness, like I know you have a grown son, do you really see yourself being competitive with him. No, I don't think healthy evolved people, right, right. Have that response. I think if your son wrote a memoir, even if it didn't make you look perfect, you would be so proud of him. Yes. And also, it's art, do what you want, go for it, yeah. But okay, so we have to, we have to wrap up. Oh, my God, I know. Wait. Have you had fun? Yeah.
39:25
Do you regret disassociating when I asked you if you wanted to be my friend? Yes,
39:30
totally. Want to be your friend. What parting words do you have in regards to, you know, publishing your book, your experience, it's a fascinating experience, like, where you're going next. What? Well, I mean, I will just say this, that after a long time of like, you know what's going on in this town developing, and I've had great development deals, right, fantastic people, where I'm getting paid way too much money, right? That don't work out. And that just recently, I'm like, and the magazine world is in town.
40:00
Letters, yeah, and you just like Vogue. I wrote like, four essays for Vogue. They bought everything I ever pitched them right? And it was like, $4 a word. Like, great, really, great money, plus a trip to Beijing, all this shit that's over, over. So what I realized is, like, right now I'm working on a show. Because I was like, I could write this novel, or I could do a very sort of Spalding Gray monolog, because I have to be able to see a project through at just at this point to where I have an audience. Yeah, yes. My advice for anybody out there is, do whatever you can to have a complete work. It's that thing where somebody said, like, you don't learn anything from writing half a play. So try to write a whole play. Yep. Don't quit projects, even though, you know they suck, right? See them through, because you're gonna learn right what it means. And then the other thing is, honestly, this is so stupid, just like, do it yourself, put on a reading, put on a play, get your phone out and make the movie. I mean, of course, everybody says this, but
41:01
that's what you have to do. So you're going back to being the girl putting on shows. I'm going back to being the girl putting on shows for my parents and for anyone else. 100 people in Brooklyn, I'll buy a ticket. Yeah. Well, Jeannie, thank you so much. This was a delight. Thank you, Anna.
41:19
Okay, that's it. And then guess what? You didn't say the name of the podcast. Oh, I'll do you didn't say my name. I.