Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Next issue,” the agent continued, her brisk manner suggesting that she had many more important matters to attend to. “There are all of these sex scenes, where it’s the fat girl having sex. And I just . . . it’s all just kind of . . .” She did not speak the words “grossing me out,” but I heard them anyhow.

  “You know,” I said, in a tone just short of tart, “fat people have sex, too.” By then, I was bewildered. This woman had seen me. In person. She knew she wasn’t on the phone with Twiggy. Did she realize that I was a size sixteen? Didn’t she think that I’d be insulted at the dismissive, even derisive way she was talking about the impossibility of a fat girl having sex or a happy ending?

  There was more. “I’m not sure about the title,” the agent continued. “I’m not sure we should call it Good in Bed. What do you think about Big Girl ?”

  I’d been prowling up and down my hallway as we spoke. That comment—even more than the one about fat, even more than the one about fat sex—froze me in place. I had many thoughts about Big Girl. Most of them were some variation on the phrase “Hell, no.” I thought it was a terrible title, for many reasons. Good in Bed was fun and inviting, a little naughty, a little mysterious. Big Girl—its two syllables sounding, to my ears, like the twin thuds of heavy stones plummeting into a scummy pond—was not fun or inviting or naughty or mysterious. It was judgmental, unkind, even didactic—Big Girls Don’t Cry. Big Girls Do Go to Weight Watchers.

  In addition, this was the age before e-readers. There was no hiding your shame, no telling the world you were reading Anna Karenina when it was actually Fifty Shades of Grey. Would women pick up a book called Big Girl ? I wasn’t even sure that I, an actual big girl, would want to be seen carrying a book entitled Big Girl. Anyone who saw me would know! A book called Good in Bed would be a different story. That book I’d be proud to carry . . . because it made me sound sexy. And maybe there’d be pictures.

  In the space of a single phone call, I had gone from exhilarated joy to agonal misery and serious self-doubt. This was, after all, the only agent who’d shown any interest in representing me, and she had a client list packed with name-brand bestsellers and prizewinning literary luminaries. She was a very big deal; she clearly knew her business. But, still, the changes she’d suggested didn’t feel right to me. They felt like they’d make the book more generic, less specific, less authentic, less true to itself and to me. But what if she was right? What if I didn’t do what she’d told me to do and then nobody published my book?

  I spent a cocktail-punctuated weekend ruminating, changing my mind every twenty minutes. I’d think, Of course she’s right, I need to fix this, there’s a reason there’s never been a hit novel that had a genuinely plus-size woman as the heroine, unless she started out that way and lost weight. Judith Krantz never had a fat heroine. Then I’d think, I can’t change it. There need to be books out there where the big girl’s happy ending doesn’t depend on magical weight loss that she achieves by following a diet that exists only in fiction.

  After I’d finished Good in Bed, I’d read about another British book, a bestseller about an overweight newspaper reporter (hey!) who meets a guy online, seduces him with a fake picture, and then drops a hundred pounds in about ten minutes before they meet. As if. The book concluded with the journalist snagging a different hot guy, along with some tacked-on-sounding nonsense about how she had gained some of her weight back (but not all of it, because ew), and how she was living happily as a size eight (because happiness as a size eighteen would have been not just fiction, but science fiction). Those were the narratives available to me—the slightly overweight girl who believes she’s enormous, the genuinely plus-size woman who has to suffer, and change, before she can be the heroine of her own life story. Neither tale appealed. I could not, would not, put a book like that into the world, a book that told girls like me that only our fretting-over-fifteen-pounds sisters could play the heroine, that we were unacceptable, unlovable, unworthy unless we shed half of our body weight. I knew so many women who were not skinny and who had wonderful, happy, fulfilling lives, with great jobs and friends and family and partners. Why couldn’t I tell a story about one of those girls?

  I’d drift into dire fantasies about making the changes and having my protagonist being called a copycat. Then I’d sink into even more dire imaginings about not making the changes and having readers repeat what the agent had said—that they found Cannie repellent, unseemly, gross, that they didn’t care about her story, that she wasn’t the kind of character they wanted to spend a few hours with, and her happy ending was clearly a fantasy, because no girl who looked like that could hope to get a handsome man to love her.

  Back and forth and back and forth I went. I asked myself the central question, the one that had always helped steer me successfully through life: What would Billy Hunnenwell Winthrop Ikehorn Orsini Elliot do? But even that wasn’t much help. When Billy launched Scruples, her Beverly Hills boutique and passion project, it was an exact replica of Chanel in Paris, and nobody came, and it took Spider Elliot convincing her that California shoppers craved a different kind of experience—less reverential, more fun—before she redid the place and made it a success. Was the agent my Spider? Was the first draft of my book Billy’s first try at Scruples? Did I need to swallow my pride, take a seat, and listen to the experts? Was I dooming myself to humiliation and financial ruin—or at least relative obscurity—if I didn’t?

  I was getting confused, even as I impressed myself with my almost total recall of Judith Krantz’s oeuvre, so I asked a different question: Who did I write this book for? That one, I knew how to answer. I’d written it for me, and girls and young women like me. My girls: the ones who wouldn’t lose fifteen pounds and fit into a bikini, the ones who were always hearing You’ve got a great personality or You have such a pretty face. The purse-minders, the wallflowers; the ones the wingman who’d agreed to “take one for the team” took home from the bar. The ones who nod in sympathy when their friends talked about street harassment, but whose lived experience involved more shouts of “lose some weight” than cat calls and leers. The ones who hardly ever saw themselves—their physical selves—reflected in stories where the heroine got the guy, the job, the money, the power, the happy ending. Maybe there’d never been a bestseller with a girl like that as its star . . . but what if there had been? What difference could that have made in my life, the way I saw the world, and what I let myself hope for from it? If nobody had attempted to write the happy ending for girls like me, then why couldn’t I be the one to try?

  I had my answer, even if it wasn’t the answer I wanted, even if it meant I’d need to start my agent-hunt again. I wanted to publish the book I’d written, with the heroine I’d imagined, and the happiest of endings. I wanted to toss the book like a life buoy to those girls and women, and to the girl I’d been, and tell them, Hold on to this, and I promise you, it’ll be all right.

  If I made the changes the agent had asked for, the book wouldn’t feel like my book anymore. It would feel like a compromise, like a soup that too many cooks had tried to season. Maybe I’d never find an agent. Maybe my agent would never find a publisher. Maybe the book would be published and only twelve people would buy it and I’d be related to eight of them and I’d know the other four from Weight Watchers . . . but I was going to try my hardest to get it into the world the way I’d written it, for myself, and for all those girls like me.

  On Monday morning I wrote Famous Agent a letter. I thanked her for her time and her thoughtful comments, but I said that I believed we had different visions of the book. I went back to my guidebook, drawing up a list of another twenty-five agents to query. Then I called one of the young editors I’d met on that trip to California, a woman who did freelance work for Famous Agent, and with whom I’d chatted a few times on the phone. I told her that I didn’t think it was going to work out with her boss, and that I didn’t want to get her in trouble, but did she know any other agents? Preferably one with free t
ime and low standards.

  As it turned out, that editor, whose name was Liza Nelligan, did know someone. She’d worked with a young agent named Joanna Pulcini, who worked for Linda Chester, a big-deal agent in New York with her own lengthy list of bestsellers. “Joanna hasn’t sold a lot of fiction,” Liza cautioned me. “But I think she’d really respond to this book.”

  I sent the manuscript on a Thursday, with a letter explaining who I was and how I’d come to hear about her. On Monday morning I was sitting at my desk at the Inquirer when the phone rang.

  “I loved your book!” enthused a high-pitched voice that sounded like it belonged to an eight-year-old girl, or a dog’s squeaky toy. “It spoke to me!”

  I remember sitting there, the telephone pressed to my ear, as the newsroom buzzed and simmered around me, thinking, How?

  “That’s great!” I stammered . . . and we made plans to talk. I took the train in to the city and met Joanna, who was a year older than I was and who looked like a miniature version of Courteney Cox, shiny brown hair and enormous blue eyes, in an agent-y uniform of a chic navy-blue sheath dress and pointy-toed high-heeled shoes. Joanna took me to lunch at Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurant, Aquavit, and over herring sashimi and deconstructed Swedish meatballs, we talked. We talked about my book, about our lives, about her work as an agent and mine as a reporter. I remember she tried to tell me that one of the reasons Cannie spoke to her so specifically was that she’d had bad skin in high school, and how I smiled and said, “Not the same, but thanks for playing.” Years later, I learned that Joanna had heard all about what happened with me and the first agent, and had been worried that I wouldn’t want to work with her because she’s so tiny. Which is funny, insofar as some of my best friends are thin. I love small people! I don’t discriminate . . . but I do love to think about Joanna, the night before I came up to the city, pounding down high-calorie shakes and chanting, “Must . . . get . . . bigger!”

  Joanna and I had a lot in common. We’d both grown up in small towns, then moved to big cities, working our way up in our respective fields, currently trying to figure out if our new guys were the right guys, eager to get on with it, to be wives and mothers in addition to working girls. We hit it off immediately, even though she’s all sweet sincerity and I am more prone to sarcasm and dark moods; even though she’s a good Catholic girl and I’m Jewish; even though her vocabulary is pristine and mine is studded with vulgarities. As we started working together, I quickly discovered that Joanna was taken aback by anything more than the most vanilla sex scenes, and that she never curses, and so I made it my secret mission to shock her as much as I could.

  “Joanna,” I’d urge her, just for fun. “Say ‘blow job.’ ”

  “I won’t!” she’d say, giggling, covering her blushing face with her hands.

  “Just say it,” I’d wheedle.

  “I can’t!” she’d say, ducking.

  “Just once!”

  “Nooooo!”

  “Do it for me?”

  She’d part her fingers, open her mouth, and say, “blow job,” in a tiny, apologetic whisper.

  “Now say ‘cocksucker’!”IV

  • • •

  Joanna and I worked on the manuscript for months. We cut. We tightened. We shifted sections around, amplifying some scenes, trimming others back. Finally, Joanna decided that the book was ready to go out to publishers. By then she’d been laying the foundation, taking editors out for breakfast or lunch or drinks and saying, “I have three words for you! Good in Bed!” Then she’d refuse to tell them anything else, including whether the book was fiction or nonfiction or a memoir or what. By May, publishers were buzzing, eager to discover what Good in Bed was all about.

  Joanna sent the book out on a Thursday. By Tuesday, we had our first indication that a house wanted to buy the book. On Thursday night, I took the train up to New York, splurging on Amtrak instead of the more affordable New Jersey Transit and somehow losing one of my fancy new shoes on the trip. The next morning, my brother Jake ran to Nine West to buy me a pair of black slides with chunky heels while Joanna and I met to strategize over coffee. Joanna had set up a day’s worth of meetings with interested editors. We began making our rounds and, by ten that morning, the first editor we’d met with had made an official offer, which Joanna fielded in the backseat of the Town Car she’d hired for the day. “That’s not the number we had in mind,” she said crisply, before hanging up. When she told me what the number was, I lunged across the backseat, grabbing for her phone, saying, “Call them back! Call them back and tell them that’s plenty!”

  We ended up meeting with three different editors at three different imprints, and while I liked them all, it was clear that Greer Hendricks was the right fit. Age-wise and life-experience-wise, she was right where Joanna and I were. She got Cannie on a visceral level—her yearnings, her insecurities, her ambitions, her desire to build a happy life with the right person. She’d also, over a weekend’s time, convinced her entire team to read a four-hundred-page manuscript . . . so not only did we meet Greer, we met her marketing director, her publicity chief, and other members of the team who’d be instrumental in bringing the book into the world.

  The whole day was a blissed-out, sunny blur that I remember in bits and pieces. Someone told me she’d missed her subway stop because she’d been so wrapped up in Cannie’s story. Someone else asked if I was okay basically signing up as the public face of my plus-size heroine. (“Sure.” I shrugged. “It’s not like people who see me are going to think the only reason I’ve been to Lane Bryant was for research.”) I remember asking editors questions not just about this book but about the next one, and being instructed, “If anyone asks if you consider yourself a literary or a commercial writer, say commercial,” and not really understanding where, exactly, the division was, or why it was such a big deal. (FORESHADOWING!)

  Joanna gave the editors a “best bids” deadline, which meant they had until the end of the next day to make their best offers. All of them were very close, money-wise, so I got to pick the team with which I felt the most affinity, and I signed on with Greer and Atria for a two-book deal, of which Good in Bed would be the first book, for the staggering sum of $550,000.V Publication was set for twelve months hence, in May 2001. I’d wanted to sell a book by the time I turned thirty. I missed it by six weeks.

  People say that the happiest day of a writer’s life is when she gets to tell her parents—or, in my case, my mom—that someone is publishing her book. I drove to Connecticut to make my big announcement. “Hey, Fran,” I said. “Remember that novel you didn’t believe I was writing?”

  “Oh, yes,” my mother said, rolling her eyes. “Your novel.”

  “Well!” I said. “Simon and Schuster has acquired it as part of a two-book deal for more than half a million dollars, and foreign rights have already been sold in sixteen countries!”

  My mother stared at me, her eyes filling with tears. She hugged me, enfolding me in her arms and her signature scent of baby powder, chlorine, and the JCC’s complimentary shampoo. Then she started to cry. “I’m so proud!” she whispered. It was a beautiful moment.

  Then Fran pulled away and looked at me, beaming. “So what’s it called?” she asked.

  Shit.

  “Good in Bed,” I mumbled.

  “What was that?”

  “Good in Bed,” I said, a little louder.

  Fran’s brow furrowed. “Good and Bad ?” she asked.

  “No,” I said miserably. “No, it’s Good in Bed.”

  Fran pulled back, looking horrified. “Jenny,” she demanded, “how much research did you do!”

  The road to publication was not entirely without bumps. That weekend in Connecticut, I gave Fran the manuscript and explained that there was a character loosely based on her. I gave her the deal I’d extend to friends and family over the next fifteen years, telling her that of course, I didn’t want to cause her any pain or embarrassment, and that she should flag anything that gave her
pause, and that I would cut or change it. I then had to listen to her read what I’d written, sitting in the family room with a book of my own, hearing the sound of flipped pages punctuated by laughter, then cries of “Jenny, goddamnit!”

  Back in Philadelphia, I did not quit my day job, which meant that I stayed at the Inquirer for the year between the day the sale was announced and the day I left for my book tour. While most of my colleagues were supportive and kind, a handful seemed to decide it was their personal mission to make my work life as miserable as possible.VI One editor seemed to take a special delight in tormenting me. She’d send me on the absolute worst assignments—the more mundane and less glamorous, the better, and if she could send me somewhere mundane and unglamorous in the middle of the night, well, that was best of all! When the paper eventually did publish a profile of me, she edited the piece and made sure it included ugly gossip about my familyVII and criticism (“self-absorbed and ambitious”) from former colleagues who were allowed to take shots anonymously (and who considered “ambitious” an insult). It was not quite what I’d imagined, back when being the subject, instead of the author, was just a pleasant daydream.

  In spite of the work woes, the entire run-up to being an official, capital-A Author felt charmed, like someone had looked at the previous twenty-nine years of my life and said, Okay, now here comes your reward. With zero connections in the publishing world, I had to ask/beg writers I admired, but did not know, to give me those quotable endorsements called blurbs that appear on the book cover. I wasn’t optimistic, and hoped, at best, for two or three nice quotes. I ended up with six beautiful blurbs, one of them from Susan Isaacs, my role model and hero. Good in Bed got a starred review in Kirkus. (“It’s been so long since I’ve seen one of these that I almost forgot what they looked like!” my publicist said.) Then it got a starred review in Publishers Weekly. My publisher agreed to a sixteen-city tour (Greer now jokes that it was supposed to be only twelve cities, but Joanna accidentally-on-purpose misread a “2” as a “6”), and, as the cherry on top of the fantasy sundae, HBO optioned the film rights.