As I drove in search of the office, which was nestled in the heart of lush, leafy, and very tony San Rafael, I tried to take my mind off my inadequacy by reviewing everything I knew about Lucy Fiamma and her agency.
Although I’d never met her, I’d heard enough about Lucy to feel like I knew her. Of course, I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Anyone who worked in any corner of the book business, from booksellers to aspiring writers, “knew” Lucy Fiamma in some fashion. At the very least, they knew her story.
Lucy had been a literary agent for a few years when she got the mother of all big breaks: the publication of Cold!, a memoir written by her client Karanuk, an Alaskan Inuit writer. Cold! described life in the dark frigidity of the Alaskan wilderness and went into detail about tribal customs and rituals. The emotional impact of the writing was intense, and Karanuk’s descriptions were strikingly vivid. It was all those adjectives that reviewers fling around when they love a book: evocative, brilliant, riveting, powerful. For me, though, it was simply a great read. You couldn’t help but feel the frost creep into your bones as you read through to the dramatic, chilling end. It was one of very few books I wanted to read again as soon as I finished it.
Karanuk and Cold! came out of nowhere (literally, in this case) and were a huge hit. There was nothing else out there like it. People who had never bought a book in their lives purchased a copy of Cold! At Blue Moon, I’d sell it to customers who claimed they hated reading, but just had to have this one. In addition to stirring up huge interest in the Inuit, Karanuk’s book was the front-runner in what soon became a memoir craze. So many great books out there never get the kind of attention that Cold! did, so its success said quite a bit about what could happen when talent combined with luck. Cold! hit at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. The hardcover was on the New York Times bestseller list for two full years until the paperback took its place in permanent residence.
Naturally, Cold! found its way to Hollywood as well. The movie version won several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Inevitably, a whole line of Cold!-inspired merchandise found its way to various outlets. There were Cold! dolls, Cold! fur hats, and even a Cold! line of frozen dinners. My personal favorite was the series of cruises around the Alaskan coast that promised glimpses of the scenery immortalized by the book. Cold! also became a required text in many university cultural studies classes.
But what made this appealing book even tastier was that the author was totally reclusive. He rarely gave interviews, and when he did, it was always to small, obscure newspapers or magazines. He almost never appeared in public, and the majority of his readers, myself included, had no idea what he looked like. The jacket photo on the original edition showed only a frigid landscape of snow, broken by a single stunted, leafless tree. There were no photos at all on subsequent editions. There was a big brouhaha at one point when Oprah picked Cold! for her famous book club and Karanuk turned down the invitation to appear on her show. Of course, unlike the other authors Oprah had selected, Karanuk hardly needed the sales or the publicity. The fact that he wouldn’t make an appearance only added to his mystique.
After the Oprah incident, the one thing everyone wanted to know was when Karanuk was going to write the next book. I answered the same question at least once a week at Blue Moon:
“Say, you know that Alaska guy, Canoe? Kanuk? The Cold! guy? When are you going to get his next book?”
“As soon as he writes it,” I always answered.
Lucy Fiamma was the woman behind Karanuk and his book. In various interviews, Lucy spun the tale of how she’d tirelessly shopped a partial manuscript of Cold! to disinterested publishers, meeting with a wall of rejections. “But I believed in it,” Lucy was often quoted as saying, “so I never gave up.” She’d finally convinced an associate editor at a small house to purchase the manuscript for “a song” with the promise that the finished book would be exquisitely written. A big publishing company bought the small house soon after and the associate editor was now one of its executive editors.
Unlike her author, Lucy Fiamma had no qualms about appearing in public. She accepted the ever-reclusive Karanuk’s literary awards (of which there were several) on his behalf, always telling the same story of how she discovered her “frozen diamond in the rough.”
After the huge success of Cold!, the Lucy Fiamma Literary Agency became one of the hottest spots for literary representation in the country, New York be damned. Despite the fact that her agency was located on the West Coast and not even in San Francisco proper, and that it wasn’t attached to a larger well-established agency, Lucy Fiamma represented big-name authors from around the globe. Karanuk enabled Lucy to pick her shots, and according to Publishers Weekly, her books usually sold with big price tags attached. None of her books matched the success of Cold! (how could they?), but there were several bestsellers in the bunch and most of them were very well written. Still, and I’d always found this a little odd, few of Lucy’s authors seemed to write more than one or two books before they faded from the literary landscape.
I’d gathered much of what I knew about Lucy Fiamma from Elise and from the various interviews I’d read, but also in a more personal way from Malcolm, who had submitted his manuscript to her agency several months earlier and was, for lack of a better word, a Lucy Fiamma groupie. He’d come over one night after work in a state of total agitation. Could I believe who had come in for dinner and sat at his table? he wanted to know. None other than Lucy Fiamma herself! They’d discussed writing, of course, because, well, he had to tell her he was a writer, didn’t he, and she seemed so nice anyway, he didn’t think it was a terrible imposition. She loved the title of his book, Malcolm stressed, and, could I believe it, she asked him to send it in.
I wasn’t as starry-eyed as Malcolm—I’m not a writer, after all—but his excitement was infectious. I helped him create the “perfect” cover letter for his submission, gather clips of all his previous publications in little literary magazines, and put them together for maximum effect. Then there were five empty weeks while we waited for a response. Although Malcolm was quiet about it, I knew he was spinning scenarios of literary glory. As the days crawled by, I watched, pained, as his excitement turned to something much bleaker. Finally, a form letter appeared in the mail, tucked into the self-addressed stamped envelope that Malcolm had provided.
Although your novel shows much creativity and hard work, the letter began, we regret that it does not meet our needs at this time and we are unable to accept it for representation….
At the bottom of the letter, there was a quickly scrawled line in blue ink.
Malcolm, it said, you have a wonderful feel for setting, but your characters are flat! Work on the first 50 pp., try to get your reader hooked! Then I’d consider taking a 2nd look! LF.
Malcolm held the letter in his hand for a long time, staring off into space while clouds of disappointment darkened his face. He was silent for so long, I started to get nervous and blurted out the first thing that came to mind.
“She uses a hell of a lot of exclamation points, doesn’t she?”
Malcolm looked at me, a shadow of condescension crossing his features as if I had clearly missed the point. “She’s right,” he said. “The characters are flat. Very flat. Flatter than flat. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. I’m going to rework it.” He folded the letter and placed it carefully in his pocket. “She read it herself,” he said with more than a hint of awe in his voice.
Malcolm hadn’t mentioned Lucy or her agency again until he cut out that want ad for me, but he’d been working on the manuscript like a demon. I knew none of its content aside from the title, Bridge of Lies. I was not allowed to read it until it was finished, Malcolm said, and I gladly went along because, although I hated to admit it, I was afraid. Afraid I would be disappointed. I’d read all of Malcolm’s short stories and I liked them. But if I was totally honest with myself, I had to say that they were just okay. I’d started helping Malcol
m with some of these stories, suggesting little revisions here and there, and he took well to my editorial comments. There was a lot of promise in Malcolm’s writing and I could see that he was getting better. So I had every reason to believe that his novel represented a major breakthrough. I had every reason to believe it was great.
Thinking about Malcolm’s novel gave me a twinge of doubt—the same twinge I’d felt when I’d first read the note he’d taped to the bathroom mirror. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Malcolm stood to gain by having me work for one of the best literary agents in the country. He’d admitted as much, but he’d also pointed out that I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to developing a career, and that this job was an ideal place to start. He wasn’t wrong about that—not by a long shot.
I forced my thoughts away from Malcolm and on to the road in front of me. I’d been driving for much longer than I should have been, considering the distance between my apartment and the office, and was starting to realize that Anna had given me plenty of unnecessary or incorrect information—the names of streets that were nowhere near where I needed to be, for example, and several left turns that should have been rights, or norths that should have been souths. If I had given myself only the half hour Anna told me it would take instead of the hour I’d neurotically opted for, I would definitely have been late. Finally, after doubling back at least twice, I found the famous Lucy Fiamma Literary Agency.
The office, as I’d been told, was an add-on to a spacious two-story home. About this, at least, Anna had been very clear. “Come around and park at the back entrance,” she’d said. “The front door is to Lucy’s house and you cannot go in there.”
I felt a little like Alice in Wonderland, standing in front of the small white door, rubbing my sweaty palms on the sides of my dress, and waiting as one, two, three knocks went unanswered. I experienced a moment of total confusion before I turned the handle and just let myself in.
I was immediately surprised by the large size of the office. From the outside, it was impossible to gauge this breadth of space. Directly in front of me was a desk piled with papers of all kinds that looked to be the repository of all office items that didn’t have a place. On my right, there were two more unattended desks in various states of disarray. One had the remnants of someone’s lunch scattered across the surface and I could detect the smell of peanut butter. The other had several folders spread unevenly across the top. The fourth desk, to my left, which was the only tidy one in the room, was occupied by a dark-haired girl on the telephone, who jumped as I walked in and then motioned with her hand for me to stay where I was. From floor to ceiling, one entire wall of the office was taken up with books, all of which I assumed were titles sold by Lucy Fiamma. The whole room had a strange half-moon shape caused by the protrusion of a semicircular wall in the back. There was a closed door in the middle of this wall which, I assumed, led to Lucy’s private office.
Frozen in place by the girl on the phone, I turned my attention to her end of the conversation.
“Yes, the first fifty pages,” she was saying. “No, we don’t need to see more than that.” There was a long pause. “Well, five hundred pages is too much for us to read all at once. We’ll be able to get an idea of the writing from the first fifty.” Another pause. “No, she’s not available at the moment, but I can tell you that she likes to have a look at the writing before she speaks to an author. No, we don’t take e-mail submissions. Why don’t you just send it in and—No, I’m sorry, she is not available.” In the final pause that followed, her head sank lower and lower until it was almost resting on the desk. I could tell that she was being upbraided in a most pointed manner. The tirade on the other end continued for some time until, finally, she said, “Thank you, we’ll look forward to reading it,” and hung up.
She looked up at me then, an expression of abject despair on her face. The words I hate my job might as well have been printed on her forehead.
“Can I help you?” she said as she pulled herself out of her chair and walked over to me. She was painfully thin and the paleness of her skin made a stark contrast to the sheets of straight black hair that hung below her shoulders.
“I’m Angel Robinson. I’m here for an interview. I spoke to Anna on the phone. I’m sorry, are you Anna?”
“No,” she said. Her wide gray eyes were too big for her face. Close up, they looked like windows onto a bleak, rainy day. I thought she might be older than I’d first guessed. Her skinny body was that of a little girl, but her face was lined and pinched.
“Anna’s in the bathroom. She should be out in a minute. Do you want to sit down?”
I took a quick scan of the room and saw that there was no chair available that didn’t belong to a desk. “I’m fine,” I told her, wondering if she was going to offer her name. “Thank you, uh…”
“My name is Kel—I mean, Nora. My name is Nora.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Nora.”
Kel-I-mean-Nora went back to her desk, where she busied herself pulling cards from three separate Rolodexes. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I stood there like a piece of driftwood for an uncomfortable minute or two until I heard a toilet flush somewhere out of sight and saw another young woman approach me.
“Hi, I’m Angel Robinson,” I said, extending my hand. “Anna?”
“Yes, hi, nice to meet you,” Anna said without taking my hand. Anna was the polar opposite of Nora. She was stocky and had bobbed blond hair tucked behind her ears and smallish, squinty blue eyes. Her cheeks seemed unnaturally flushed and she gasped a little, as if she were short of breath. She also had a rather unpleasant expression on her face that I put somewhere between petulance and condescension.
I noticed, with dismay, that both Anna and Nora were wearing jeans. Clearly, in spite of all that posturing in front of the mirror, I had overdressed.
“Lucy’s in a meeting with Craig at the moment,” Anna said, gesturing to the closed door in the middle of the round wall, “but she should be with you shortly. Why don’t you sit down?”
It felt more like an order than a suggestion, so I backed myself into the chair belonging to the desk piled with the stacks of manuscripts. Anna hoisted herself onto the desk in front of me, her ample backside irretrievably crumpling several sheets of paper beneath it. One wrong move, I thought, and the whole show would topple to the carpet.
“So how did you hear about us?” she asked me. Something subtly different crept into her voice as she spoke. It sounded nasal and squeezed at the same time, as if she were trying to speak while someone sat on her stomach. It was slightly disconcerting.
“I saw the ad in the paper,” I said. “But of course I’ve heard about Lucy Fiamma before. Who hasn’t, right?”
“So you have experience in publishing?” Now there was a note of officiousness in her tone. I didn’t like Anna already and I’d only known her for five minutes. Not a good sign, I told myself. I wasn’t in the mood for what was turning into a pre-interview, so I answered her question with one of my own.
“Have you been working here long?”
“Yes, I’ve been here awhile already. About four or five months.”
An intercom buzzed loudly on the desk and Anna leaned her entire body over the stacks of files to answer it, promptly knocking several piles to the floor.
“Yup,” she said into the phone.
“Anna, am I going to get that subsidiary rights list today? These magazines are closing for the summer, you know.” The voice sounded extremely unhappy. Anna’s cheeks flushed crimson.
“I’ve got calls in,” she said, “and I’m waiting for the copies to come back from Kinko’s on the George manuscript and—”
“I don’t want to hear excuses, Anna. Do I have to tell you how important subsidiary rights are? There’s a reason we keep serial and audio rights, Anna. Not to mention film. Will the list be done today or not?”
“I don’t think that’s possible, Lucy.”
“Then bring me what
you’ve got now.” The intercom disconnected with a loud click. Anna slid off the desk and stared down at the mess on the floor. She looked so miserable I jumped out of my seat and started gathering papers in an attempt to help her clean up.
“You don’t have to do that,” she snapped. “That was Lucy. I’ll go tell her you’re here.”
I looked over at Nora as Anna stalked into Lucy’s office, but she was steadfast in avoiding eye contact with me. Okay, I thought, so it’s not exactly the welcome wagon around here. But I wasn’t about to let it get me ruffled. They were obviously very busy and I was clearly an outsider. I heard the rise and dip of muffled voices coming from Lucy’s office and then, unexpectedly, the sound of giggling. Anna reappeared, smiling but still ruddy. “You can go in now,” she said.
Lucy Fiamma’s office was unlike any I’d seen before. The circular room looked as if it had been designed with a specific purpose in mind, but I couldn’t tell exactly what that purpose was. It was pristine, especially compared to the disarray of the outer office, without so much as a paper clip out of place. Adding to the overall effect of cleanliness and light was the fact that the entire room was done up in white, glass, and chrome. There was no window, but a generous amount of light streamed down from a large dome-shaped skylight cut out of the ceiling. The almost blinding whiteness of the wall, couch, chairs, and carpeting reminded me of something, an image just out of reach that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“Welcome, Angel Robinson.” Lucy Fiamma strode toward me and extended her hand. I noticed that her immaculately manicured fingernails were long, pointed, and ended with half moons of white polish. Her hand was small, soft, and very cold as I shook it. The rest of Lucy Fiamma was much more imposing. She was very tall, for one thing. I was five-four at last measure and Lucy towered over me by at least six inches. I had to look up to meet her smile. Her white-blond hair floated in a cloud around her face. It had the appearance of hair on which much time has been spent to create the impression of windblown effortlessness. She was wearing a peculiar combination of clothing: white capri pants, a lime green cable-knit sweater, and a red leather belt. The whole outfit was finished off with black leather flats. All the separate pieces were of very good quality, yet they were just wrong together. It was difficult for me to gauge Lucy’s age; she had smooth, unlined skin, but her face had a vaguely unhealthy pallor as if she had just recovered from a nasty bout with the flu. Her mouth was big—or generous, if one wanted to be flattering about it—and filled with teeth that were on the large side, but, like everything else in her office, spotlessly white. Her eyes were laser green, with glittering gold flecks. I had no doubt she could speak volumes with the hypnotic stare she was fixing on me. All put together, Lucy was a striking woman, but there was something both unconventional and overwhelming about her looks. Perhaps it was the palpable sense of power that emanated from her, washing over me so completely that for a moment, I felt as if I were drowning in her presence.
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