I knew that Cannie Shapiro’s story was going to share its broad outlines with mine. I also knew that heartbreak, while exquisitely painful, is fairly common. In order to make her story compelling, I knew I’d need to raise the stakes, to make her agony more vivid and palpable than that of the average dumped girl. Luckily, my life provided plenty of raw material. A few years before I’d met the guy who’d broken my heart, I’d gone out on a few dates with a writer in Philadelphia. There weren’t any fireworks—I remember his kisses as being distressingly wet—and we’d had a perfectly typical parting (I thought he’d call, he didn’t; I was sad for a few days, then I moved on). Then, a few years later, I came home from work, opened up one of the lady magazines to which I subscribed, and found his byline on top of a story about sex. Specifically, about good sex, and how to have it. The title was something like “Ten Tongue Tricks That Will Make Him Beg for More” . . . and I remember thinking, This guy? This guy is passing himself off as an expert? This guy is giving good-in-bed advice?
The memory lodged somewhere in my mind . . . and years later, when I started to think about Cannie, my subconscious obligingly kicked it to my forebrain, and I had my first big what-if. What if you’re dating a journalist and you break up and he gets a gig writing sex advice for one of the big women’s magazines? What if his columns are all about you and your body? What if he basically outs you as the fat girl to the entire reading universe and uses your insecurities as fodder for his columns, so you’re not only alone and heartbroken, but ashamed and exposed?
I imagined a girl who works at a newspaper, a girl who has broken up with a guy, but thinks she’s going to be all right—there are, as they say, other fish in the sea, a lid for every pot, and somewhere out there is her fish, her lid. Then her phone rings and it’s her best friend saying, “You need to go look at this magazine right this very minute,” and she goes bouncing down to the newsstand and opens it and sees her devastation.
I’ve always loved the place writing can take you, when you’re so deep in the narrative that it feels almost like the pages are writing themselves . . . like there’s a story out there, somewhere, already in existence from beginning to end, and all you’re doing is transcribing it, or carving away the obscuring rock to reveal the art underneath. Writing Good in Bed felt like that. Every weekday I would go to my job and report my little heart out, writing about movies and books and politics and celebrities. Every night, after a home-cooked dinner that was always ten Weight Watchers points or less, I’d return to my bedroom, sit in the folding chair, and fall back into the story: where I was invisible, where happy endings were possible, where my heroine always had the perfect zingy comeback at the moment it was required, instead of thinking of it three days later when no one cared. In the world of the story, I could forget about the loneliness of my real life, the fear that I’d never find my fish, my lid.
I’m not sure any writer who’s lucky enough to publish more than one book ever gets to write with the fearlessness and the freedom that you feel when you’re working on the first draft of your first novel, when you don’t have an agent or a publisher, when you haven’t told a soul. My spare bedroom, in my Philadelphia neighborhood, was only an hour and twenty minutes away from Manhattan, but as far as the publishing world was concerned, I might as well have been in Nebraska or North Dakota or on the moon. I didn’t have an agent or an editor. I didn’t have connections or names to drop. I wasn’t living in Brooklyn, where every third person on the subway platform in Park Slope seemed to be toting a manuscript. I think I told maybe three people what I was doing, and one of them was my mother, who didn’t believe me. “Oh, yes, the novel,” she’d say when I brought it up, draping her hand across her forehead in an affected fashion.
I remember getting stuck on a plot point, where Cannie’s been to see Bruce at his father’s funeral and he’s made it clear he has no interest in getting back together. What happens next? I wondered. Does she meet a new guy? Have a breakdown and move back in with her mom and her mother’s new girlfriend? Quit her job and go live in a vegetarian ashram so she can attain spiritual enlightenment and finally wear a single-digit size?
I fell asleep with possibilities arrayed in my mind and woke up with my answer, as clear as if someone had written it down on a legal pad while I was sleeping. They have sex. She gets pregnant. (“Oh, Cannie,” I heard Susan asking in my head, in a line I’d eventually give to the fictitious BFF in Good in Bed, “what did I tell you about sex with the bereaved?”) Cannie tells Bruce, who wants nothing to do with her and nothing to do with the baby. What does she do then?
All day the story would churn in the back of my mind, so that by the time I returned to my desk at night, I’d have the next few pages right there waiting. It felt sometimes like a Möbius strip, because I knew that Cannie’s salvation—like mine, I hoped—was going to come through writing. She would realize that her parents had done the best they could, had given her what they had to give her, and that her job was to take it and grieve what she’d lost and then move on. I wanted her to find love . . . because it was a story I was telling myself, and because, even as a staunch feminist, that was what I wanted; a guy who’d promise to love me forever, who’d give me a ring, who’d stand up in front of his family and mine and the whole entire world and say, I choose Jennifer.
But I also wanted my girl to find peace within herself, to find her own resilience, to know that she was strong enough to save herself and save her baby and fight her way toward her hard-earned happily-ever-after. I wanted her to know that, even if her happy ending did not include a man, she would be fine.
Some of the scenes were ripped straight from the headlines of my own life. My mother’s romance with her much-younger girlfriend became Cannie’s mom’s affair with the gruff, raspy-voiced, self-help-book-loving Tanya. The awful colleague who torments Cannie was a composite of a few of my less supportive coworkers. The too-cool-for-school New York City publicist who denies Cannie an audience with the movie star Maxi Ryder was a not-even-thinly-veiled version of the publicist who wouldn’t let me chat with Minnie Driver; Bruce became a version of my lost love, albeit an obnoxious, cartoonish, self-righteous, and frequently stoned version. It was not the most charitable portrait. But I was twenty-eight, and I’d just wasted three years of prime fertility and six months of tears on this guy, who had then ghosted me so thoroughly that it felt like he was trying to pretend that the relationship had never even happened. I was not in the most charitable mood.
I remember the moment when I decided to name Cannie’s ex Bruce Guberman. A plastic surgeon with the last name Guberman had billboards lining I-95, advertising his skill as a liposuctionist. I took his last name, added Bruce (for the rhyme and for Springsteen), and felt my mouth moving into an unfamiliar shape that it took me a little while to recognize was a smile. Then I followed Salon columnist and Bird by Bird author Anne Lamott’s advice to women writers using their exes in fiction, and I gave him a tiny little penis—because, as Lamott wrote, no man will ever cop to being the inspiration for a character who is hung like a grape.I
As natural and joyful as most of the writing felt, there were times when it was harrowing. When I had to write the scene that I was dreading—Cannie’s reckoning with her father, her memory of him throwing silver dollars in the water, telling her to jump, reassuring her that she could do it, that she could swim, that she already knew how, that she’d always known—I dipped into my savings and rented a cabin advertised as a “writer’s shack” called Lis Sur Mer on the Outer Cape for a week in September. My plan was to go home for Yom Kippur, break the fast with Fran and her book-club buddies, then go to Cape Cod and write for a week. The little cottage was perched on top of a bluff in Truro, overlooking Cape Cod Bay, and it was everything the website had promised. The single room held a spool bed and a little desk in front of a window, which had panes made of wavy old glass. There was an outdoor shower enclosed in a cedar fence, with a mermaid painted on the wall. The beach was down a long flig
ht of splintery wood stairs. When the tide went out, the water left loops of drying seaweed, like layered necklaces on the sand, and when I slept I kept the windows open and I could hear the waves all night long.
Each morning of my makeshift writer’s retreat, I’d go for a long walk along the water. Then I’d write. I ran an extension cord from the inside of the cottage out to the picnic table, where I’d set up my Mac. (This was 1999, and not everyone had laptops.) I’d work for a few hours, then have lunch, then write some more and go for a swim. It was September, but summer was still holding on; the temperature was in the seventies every day and the water was almost as warm. I’d always loved swimming, the sensation of weightlessness, the way my boyfriends could carry me in the water the way they never could on land, how my body wasn’t an embarrassment or a shame, but was purely functional, even graceful, with my arms stroking smoothly, my hair fanning out behind me. I’d think of Kurt Vonnegut, describing his ungainly body in the introduction to Welcome to the Monkey House, writing, “I am six foot two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.”II The bay was so clear I could sometimes catch glimpses of fish, and feel their silvery scales brush against me, and see crabs scuttling sideways, balanced on their legs, pincers held pugilistically aloft, hurrying out of my way. Wendell would act as my lifeguard, pacing along the shore, watching me, occasionally doing a desperate, tooth-clenched dog paddle, swimming out to make sure I was okay before he’d turn and let the waves carry him back to the sand.
My rental ran from Sunday to Sunday. On my last Saturday night I sat inside the cottage and yanked the window closed. The wind was whipping up the waves and Wendell was napping uneasily on the bed, opening his eyes whenever a gust shook the cabin. Before the weather had turned, I’d been outside, in the sun, and I’d gotten through the hard scene about the father, how he’d loved his daughter in spite of what he’d said and done to her. I was inside, warm and safe, when I wrote the very last paragraphs and typed the words THE END. By Sunday morning, the temperature had dropped twenty degrees and the wind was screaming, churning the water into froth, bending the pine trees toward the ground. I inched home on Route 6, creeping along the two-lane highway, through what had become one of the worst storms of the year, with my lights on and my wipers flailing at the rain. Wendell was trembling in his carrying case on the passenger’s seat. My Mac was in the backseat, seat-belted in place, and I remember thinking that the most important things I had on Harvest Hill Road were right there with me in the car.
I stopped in Connecticut, halfway between Truro and Philadelphia. “I finished my novel,” I told my mom. “Oh, yes, the novel,” she said, and rolled her eyes. She was getting ready to sell the house by then, and all of my stuff—my books and bookcase, my bed and my clothes—was either gone, boxed up in the basement, or in my apartment in Philadelphia. I guess I don’t live here anymore, I thought. But that was okay. In that moment, I felt entirely adult, certain that I could take care of myself and be fine.
Back in Philadelphia, I printed out what I’d written, put it in a box, and set it aside, on top of the little table in my office. A few weeks later, I took it out, imagining it was something I’d picked up at the bookstore or from the “New Fiction” shelf in the library, trying to figure out whether what I’d written would appeal to anyone besides me. At that point, I’d read enough fiction to have some objective sense of whether what I’d done was any good . . . and I wasn’t sure, but I thought I had something.
Thus I began the next stage in my march toward publication—finding an agent. My goal was to sell the book before I turned thirty. I had six months and a number of obstacles. The Internet was still a brand-new thing. If you wanted to learn about literary agents, you went through the back door, reading the dedications and the acknowledgments of the books you loved, trying to see if an agent was named and thanked (99 percent of the time, one was). Then, instead of zipping over to an agency’s website to see if they were accepting submissions, you went to a reference book that listed literary agencies. You prayed the book was up-to-date and that you weren’t writing to an agent who was retired or, God forbid, dead. You looked up the address and their submission guidelines, and you sent a query letter, a chunk of your work, if they were amenable, and a self-addressed stamped envelope so that if they rejected it—it, not you, I reminded myself—they could send it back for free.
I came up with a list of twenty-five agents, including one dream agent, a woman who’d represented half a dozen of my favorite books, including one of the hottest among the young-woman-in-the-big-city books that New York magazine had recently praised. I knew that we’d be a perfect fit; that as soon as she read my proposal she’d be delighted to take me on as a client; and that we’d work together over many books, for many happy years. In fact, I was pretty confident that most, if not all, of the agents I was asking would want to work with me. Princeton degree? Studied with Toni Morrison? Fiction in Seventeen and Redbook? Worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer? What agent wouldn’t be interested?
The answer came, with swift brutality: almost all of them. Out of the twenty-five letters I sent, I got twenty-four rejections.III
My Dream Agent wrote me a lovely letter, saying that while I was “obviously a writer,” she was “failing to connect with my characters at this point in my life.” “What does ‘at this point in my life’ mean? Menopause?” I wailed to the new boyfriend I’d acquired during the six weeks when the novel was sitting in its box, aging like fine wine. At twenty-nine, I couldn’t imagine being menopausal . . . and, of course, I thought that anyone should have been able to connect with my lovingly crafted and brilliantly realized characters.
Sadly, that was one of the more helpful rejections I got. A few more agents’ letters actually gave me a few words of encouragement or a reason for their decision—this is good, someone will want it, but it’s not right for me—but most didn’t bother. They sent form letters or, in some cases, form postcards, the better to pack in maximum pain for minimal expense. Sorry, not taking new clients. Not interested in new fiction. Not interested in new women’s fiction. Not interested in new young women’s fiction. Not interested in you.
Three weeks after sending my first batch of twenty-five query letters, I’d gotten only a single request to see the manuscript. I sent it along and was preparing another round of queries as 1999 was turning into 2000. “Take a break,” Adam, my new beau, urged, and we planned a trip to Las Vegas, where I’d never been. On our last day away, I called my answering machine, which I was doing, by that point, three or four times a day, hoping that I’d gotten a phone call saying “yes” instead of another letter or postcard saying “no.”
“Hi, my name is Famous Agent,” the message began. “I’ve read your manuscript, and I’d like to offer you representation.”
Adam and I booked a table at Picasso, one of the celebrity-chef-run spots I’d dreamed of patronizing, where even without wines, a meal could cost more than a hundred dollars. I spent my last night in Las Vegas too excited to sleep, thinking that this could actually be happening, that my story could become a book. I changed my plane ticket, called my boss to arrange for a few more days’ worth of vacation, and flew to California to meet Famous Agent in person.
She was a tiny, energetic older woman with a no-nonsense manner, whose airy, light-filled, white-walled office was lined with framed covers from the books written by the authors—over a hundred in all—that she represented. I was so excited that I was practically levitating. Remember this, I told myself as she showed me around and introduced me to her staff—her assistants and interns and editors, almost all of them young and female—and I thanked her, over and over again, while I tried to remember names, remember book titles, remember everything.
When she said, “I loved your book, but we need to think about some changes,” I agreed immediately. After years as a reporter, and everything I’d learned from John McP
hee, I was perfectly willing to make changes, and believed that even a good manuscript can always be made better. The truth is, at that point, she could have told me that the change required was a sex change, and I would have flown immediately to Sweden to collect my new penis. I was that thrilled with the idea that this woman, with her star-studded roster and decades in the business, was going to be my agent, and that with any luck, my book was going to be a book.
I flew home in a state of joyous disbelief and floated around Philadelphia, working the phrase “my agent” into every conversation, thinking about how I’d pose for my author photo, and how I’d tell the story of finding my agent to the inevitable reporters who’d be writing profiles of me when the book came out.
A few days after I got home, Famous Agent called. It was seven o’clock my time, four in the afternoon for her. I’d gotten home from work, changed into my uniform of leggings and a loose T-shirt and was walking around barefoot, awaiting instruction. She did her business via speakerphone, and I paced my apartment with the phone tucked under my chin and a reporter’s notebook in my hand, scribbling notes during her static-spiked pronouncements. “The heroine of this book is fat,” she began, her voice rising in disgust on the word “fat.” “I talked to a film agent I work with, and we both think that no one wants to see a movie about a lonely, pathetic fat girl.”
It was the first pinprick in my bliss balloon. Lonely, pathetic fat girl? Sure, Cannie was lonely, but I didn’t think she was pathetic. I thought she was resilient! A survivor! And size sixteen wasn’t that fat . . . was it? And who was talking about a movie, anyhow? Of course I’d love it if the book became a movie, but, for starters, I just wanted the book to become a book.
“Maybe she could be, you know, like, fifteen pounds overweight,” the agent suggested. “Like, normal fat.”
If she’s fifteen pounds overweight, I thought, then she’s Bridget Jones with a bat mitzvah. And as much as I’d loved Bridget, I’d found her obsessing over a relatively minor weight issue grating. A hundred and thirty-five pounds? Feh. Call me when the first number’s a two—or even a three—then we can talk. And what’s all this about normal fat? What does that make me, and my mom, and my editor at the paper, and my favorite college professor, and a bunch of my friends? Freakish fat? Stop-and-stare-at-the-fat-lady-fat? When half the women in America wear a size fourteen or larger, how can a size sixteen be that unacceptable? And if she was so disgusted by my fictional doppelgänger, what had she thought about me?
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