“Do you believe in eternal recurrence?” I asked.
Although I knew the answer. I knew of David’s interest in simultaneity and in the infinite.
“Of course,” David said. “This is why you can never be an asshole to anyone. No one ever really goes away.”
AFTER HE SENT HIMSELF OUT INTO ETERNITY, I SPENT YEARS TRYING TO make him go away. I hated him. I wished I’d never met him. I got rid of his books. I couldn’t look at his name. I couldn’t stand being around writers, or editors, or critics, and I had to make sure I was never in a situation in which he might casually be mentioned. If he, or his final act, did come up in conversation, I stayed silent. It was a grief so hard to speak of. I had to protect myself and build a castle and live inside it. The world of competition and comparison seemed, finally, lethal, and I reached the conclusion that I needed to be free of the place that judges and, in judgment, declares victory. (What I really wanted to do was write manifestos, organize opposition parties, pick fights, scream obscenities into a bullhorn. I wanted to destroy everything and rebuild it better.) When you get thrown into yourself, you’d better have something there. But at least you could say that I found out what I was made of.
Did I even know him at all? I’m quite sure I didn’t. You know how it is—as soon as you believe you’ve declared victory and gotten something solved, that thing collapses and dissolves out of sight, vanishing like a dream. “We are mysteries to each other,” I said to him once. “We never get too deep into anyone else.” “It’s true,” he said, “we don’t. But we’ve got to try.” All we ever have of other people are their shadows. Their truth—who they are—is merely glanced at, groped at. No one ever comes into clear focus.
When I was a little kid, I kept a microscope and a telescope in my bedroom. In the microscope I mostly looked at strands of my hair, blades of grass, or leaves, but when I was feeling ambitious, I’d collect a cup of rainwater from a puddle out in our yard. I’d put a few water drops on a microscope slide and watch the tiny alien life-forms twisting around on the glass, struggling, in this inhospitable new world, for existence. The telescope was trickier, and I had no idea what I was even supposed to be looking for with it. Everything in the sky—the ghost of the moon, the planets, the stars, the satellites, the light left behind by impressions of psychic energy from the dead—always looked the same to me: blackness, and some undifferentiated bits of light. But I did know one thing. When you gaze up into the sky, you’re looking into the past. You see the planets and the stars as they were when the light left them thousands—or millions—of years before. I used to think about this a lot, about how time isn’t absolute.
The microscope and the telescope, the worlds of the very small and the very large, helped explain something to me early on: the true nature of reality is hidden from us and just out of view.
And so maybe it is true. Maybe all times and events really are happening simultaneously and maybe the past is just as real as the present and the future. Maybe the death of all things is not the ultimate reality, and everything really is happening all at once: all possibilities and realities exist in unison. When you think about it, it makes a lot more sense than any other idea we’ve ever been able to come up with. Sometimes we’ll get a glimpse of this greater reality—that’s all we get, though, a glimpse—and then the place again withdraws, out of reach and scattering like fog.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Denise Oswald, Dan Halpern, Dominique Lear, and the rest of the fabulous team at Ecco. Also to Joe Veltre, Hayley Nusbaum, Joshua, and my parents. My gratitude to Vogue, which published an essay about this time in my life, and to Taylor Antrim.
I’m indebted to Carol Polsgrove’s excellent history of Harold Hayes’s Esquire, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, but Didn’t We Have Fun?: Esquire in the Sixties.
And my love to Dean, our joy.
About the Author
ADRIENNE MILLER was the literary and fiction editor of Esquire from 1997 to 2006, and she is the author of the novel The Coast of Akron (FSG). She lives in New York City with her husband, son, and Italian greyhound.
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Also by Adrienne Miller
FICTION
THE COAST OF AKRON
Copyright
Some of the peripheral characters have been given fictional names.
IN THE LAND OF MEN. Copyright © 2020 by Adrienne Miller. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph © Jean Bérard/Gallery Stock
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller, Adrienne, author.
Title: In the land of men : a memoir / Adrienne Miller.
Description: First edition. | New York : Ecco, 2020. | Summary: “At twenty-two, a naïve Midwesterner, Adrienne Miller got a lucky break when she was hired as an editorial assistant at GQ. The mid-nineties were still the golden age of print journalism, and a publication like GQ then seemed the red-hot center of the literary world, even if their sensibilities were manifestly mid-century-the martinis, the male egos, and the unquestioned authority of kings. Still, Adrienne learned to hold her own in a man’s world, and three years later she forged her own path, becoming the first woman to hold the role of literary editor at Esquire. She was at Esquire during a unique moment in history that simultaneously saw the last days of the old guard of literary titans, and the rise of a new movement, as exemplified by David Foster Wallace, who would become her closest friend, confidant—and antagonist. Here is the untold story of an intellectual and artistic exchange that grew into a highly charged relationship, and Miller presents a candid portrait of the mercurial man behind the spotlight. It is also an account of the guarded literary world, which asks the question: How does a young woman fit into this culture and at what cost? With wit and deep intelligence, Miller presents a moving portrayal of a young woman’s education in a land of men”—Provided by publisher.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2019028856 (print) | LCCN 2019028857 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062682413 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062682420 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780062682437 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Miller, Adrienne. | Periodical editors—United States—Biography. | Women periodical editors—United States—Biography. | Esquire.
Classification: LCC PN149.9.M44 A3 2020 (print) | LCC PN149.9.M44 (ebook) | DDC 070.5/1092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028856
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028857
* * *
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-268243-7
Version 01032020
Print ISBN 978-0-06-268241-3
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