Pretend I'm Not Here
Page 10
And so my dreams of being “the Jewish Amy Tan” dissolved, and I was still just the Jewish Barbara Feinman. Discouraged, I tabled the manuscript and told myself I would focus on Ben’s book and finish getting my master’s degree.
Around this time, in the late summer of 1992, the Georgetown English Department needed a journalist to teach undergraduates a section of Introduction to Journalism. At the last minute, the scheduled instructor, a Post reporter, had been awarded a Fulbright that would take her to Slovenia. Georgetown didn’t have a journalism department or even a program, only one or two journalism courses each semester that were English electives. I had wanted to try my hand at teaching, and this was the perfect opportunity, so I signed on.
I also decided I wasn’t ready to give up on getting Miss Fortune published, and so I found a new agent, this time a woman named Flip Brophy. She worked at Sterling Lord Literistic, a well-respected New York agency housed in a funky suite of offices across from Madison Square Park in the Flatiron District. When I visited for the first time, I was drawn to its lively, hip atmosphere. Books lined the crowded shelves and spilled out on any and all available flat surfaces.
Everyone who worked there, from the front desk receptionist to the rarely seen eponymous head of the agency, seemed impossibly cool. Washington media types, except for broadcast news on-air talent, didn’t pay attention to the way they dressed, for the most part, and, as a motley tribe, they weren’t very style conscious. New Yorkers seemed neurotically edgy and artsy whereas Washingtonians were coldly ambitious and myopically wonky. This literary agency, and New York City, gave me a sense of an alternative future.
Flip set to work shopping around my manuscript to several publishing houses. She was a fixture in the New York publishing scene and editors took her calls. She represented mostly journalists and politicians, counting among her clients Senator Gary Hart, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer, writer James McBride, and a host of others, known, unknown, and those teetering between the two. Everyone loved Flip and she seemed to love everyone, thriving in the frenetic hothouse atmospheres of Washington media and New York literati. She had that rare quality of making you feel like you were a great secret she was about to share with the world.
The responses began to pour in. Editors liked the characters and the writing but, echoing the first agent’s assessment, felt the plot didn’t deliver. After a few weeks, it was clear that no one was going to make an offer. Crushed, I thanked Flip for her considerable efforts and retreated into a mental fetal position while the old internal audiotape of writerly doom played itself in my head: Was I kidding myself? How would I know when it was time to give up? Was it time to give up? I didn’t want to be a quitter. Besides, writing was a compulsion. I always seemed to drift back to it even if I resolved to move on.
I took out a wrinkled, folded-up note from one of my writing professors at Berkeley. He was Leonard Michaels, whose first novel, The Men’s Club, was published in 1981, a year before I was in his class. He had written my recommendation letter to the Washington Post ten years before. Attached to a copy of the letter on official university stationery, he had stapled a scrawled note from a memo pad. “Barbara, You’re a good writer. A real one. Stay with it, become your own teacher soon . . . LM.”
In the past his words had comforted me, but this time I wondered if he was just being nice, if it was a stock message worded to placate anxious student writers. He wasn’t the type to be gratuitously kind, I countered. My memory of his style during writing workshop sessions was that he didn’t suffer fools.
I had a new thought: Maybe he wasn’t being kind; maybe he was just wrong. And what exactly did he mean by, “become your own teacher”? The advice was as cryptic as a fortune cookie message. I folded up the note and put it back in my box of keepsakes. And once again, I stowed away the manuscript in a file cabinet.
Though Flip couldn’t sell Miss Fortune, she didn’t give up on me. Not long after the rejections poured in, she phoned. “Don’t worry about the novel. We’ll go back to it at some point,” she said, trotting out her brisk New York businesswoman tone that she slipped into when she was discussing something unpleasant and was impatient to move on to a new topic. “How would you like to ghostwrite a book for a congresswoman?”
By this point, in early 1993, I had worked with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and I was still helping Ben. In addition, I had done research or editing on a handful of other books on a more limited basis. As I listened to Flip’s description of the potential gig, I recognized a whole new level of editorial involvement. I would have about six months to write an entire book for a newly elected Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky.
The 1992 elections had ushered in more freshmen women to Congress than ever before. This congresswoman, Flip explained, had a deal with Crown to chronicle her first eight months in the House of Representatives during what was billed as the “Year of the Woman.” Not only would I interview the congresswoman so I could tell her story, in her voice, but I would also talk to her female colleagues, as well as a few of the men, to include their perspectives.
It was a tempting offer. And it was new territory for me—I would be in the driver’s seat, writing an entire book, even if it wasn’t under my own name. But it would mean I would have to leave Ben. I had now been working with him going on three years. While we had gotten much of the first book done, we were moving slowly, and there was little mention of the second book. I didn’t want to abandon Ben, but I also couldn’t keep my professional life on hold indefinitely. I was still feeling restless, perhaps more so than ever.
The words of Harriet Fier, the formidable Style assignment editor, rang in my ears: Don’t let yourself get too fat and happy. It was scary to think about leaving Ben and even scarier to sign on to write an entire book. My heart sank as I admitted that the fear was proof I should do it.
I summoned up my nerve and went to see Ben one morning. He was doing a crossword puzzle, and when I told him I had something to tell him, he peered at me over his reading glasses and put the folded newspaper down on his desk. I launched into a long explanation about my unsold novel and said that even though this wasn’t fiction, it was an opportunity to actually write a book rather than merely research and edit one.
“Look,” he said, “you need to do what you think is best. We’ve gotten a lot of this thing done. Just find me someone who can take over. And you will still be around. Sally won’t let you escape,” he said, laughing, picking up his crossword.
Relieved, I assured him I would find a replacement to take over the remaining research and get that person up to speed before I left. I enlisted the aid of a young friend at the Post, for whom this would be a great opportunity, and the transition was made smoothly. I hoped we would stay close, but it was time for me to move on.
Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky was a former Philadelphia NBC news reporter who had covered Congress. She understood the media better than most and knew how to take full advantage of this knowledge. A petite, energetic dynamo, she knew that a book about herself and her female colleagues as they came to power would position her as a sort of political pioneer. She had already become a public figure in her high-profile broadcast job but also as the wife of an Iowa Democratic congressman, Ed Mezvinsky, whom she had met on the job and who had lost his reelection bid after serving two terms.
Before her marriage Marjorie had also attracted a lot of attention as the first single American woman to adopt a child from another country; she testified before Congress in 1976 in a successful effort to influence legislation on adoption and immigration practices.
Her desire to tell the story of this particular group of women had a lot of potential, particularly because it spoke loudly to the largest book-buying demographic: middle-aged women. And Marjorie and I had much in common as we shared the same religion, politics, social class, and even our small stature. It was not that much of a stretch for me to appropriate her voice.
Say what you will about politicians, but the ones I have known keep grueling schedules and are run ragged between committee meetings and votes, constituent obligations, and fund-raising for the omnipresent next election—not to mention having to divide their time between Washington and their home state. It’s a rare member of Congress who would be able to research, organize, and write a book while still in office, even if he or she had literary inclinations. The ones who are also parents are particularly challenged. Marjorie was the mother of a blended brood of eleven children (two adopted daughters, three adopted sons, two biological sons, and four stepdaughters). This role left her no time for book writing.
As it had with Ben, working for Marjorie entailed doing a lot of background research on events and issues to inform the interview sessions with her as well as with her colleagues and other people in her universe, transcribing the raw material, organizing it, and then shaping it all into a narrative. Interviewing dozens of members of Congress was a primer in both politics and American civics. Though I had been to the Hill on many occasions, it had been mostly for Style reporting. Now I would be getting a behind-the-scenes look at the legislative and political process.
Nearly all the women in Congress we approached for an interview agreed to participate. I was doing the work under Marjorie’s auspices, and that gave me a level of access that reporters can only dream of, but what would ultimately make it into the book was completely Marjorie’s decision. I had to remind myself time and again that I was on the inside of the rope line as an invitee, a ghost, and not as a reporter. I was excited to have inside access to such an impressive group of professional women. I wanted to get a sense of who they really were and what motivated them. My earlier jobs had let me observe up close extremely successful men, but this was an opportunity to study people more like me. Because I was representing Marjorie and her book project rather than my own article for a newspaper or magazine, I hoped my subjects would be more forthcoming than they might otherwise be, that I could glean something beyond what they had revealed publicly.
Unfortunately, my hopes were quickly dashed. As I went from interview to interview, I had the growing suspicion that everything they were saying to me and my tape recorder they had already said before in stump speeches and press interviews. The members’ responses were carefully crafted and stripped of anything that could be used against them in future campaign ads.
This was pre-Internet and pre-Google so I had the time-consuming task of going back through the archives to see what each of them had said in the past and to whom. When I did, my worst fears were confirmed, that much of the material I was getting during the interviews was recycled pablum. I would have to ask better questions if I wanted usable material. Hearing that they were fighting for their constituents and that they had come to Washington to make a difference was admirable but predictable and uninteresting.
In addition to how guarded these professional politicians had been trained to be, they were usually more comfortable talking about policies than telling stories. Because they were professional problem solvers, their milieu was polling data and number-crunching. Narrative arc was a foreign concept. Answers to questions fell into two categories: safe, generic bromides or mind-numbing wonk-speak.
After one particularly eyes-glazing-over transcribing session, I came up with what I hoped would be some more compelling questions. One, in particular, proved effective. “If your life as a congresswoman were a movie, what’s the defining moment?” Because I was asking them to imagine something, it played to a more relaxed and candid response. It was almost like a game. When I got any traction, I kept going. Sometimes they would stop themselves just as they began to say something interesting, becoming self-conscious. “Pretend I’m not here,” I would say gently, prodding them to keep going.
Usually they would need more direction: “What’s the opening scene of this movie that would introduce the point you want to make about this place and yourself?” Then I would move in for the specific, defining moment. Sometimes it wasn’t a moment but a fact or a detail. In journalism this is called getting “the name of the dog,” as in getting the name of the dog/horse/turtle of the porn star/embezzler/tech start-up CEO you’re profiling.
“I want the positive moment and the negative moment,” I would instruct. This approach helped knock loose some memories and anecdotes, and it helped me figure out which women wanted to be more open but either needed help in how to communicate in that way or wanted to size me up a bit more before revealing themselves. While some, no matter how I asked, nudged, or cajoled, would not give up anything beyond what you could find in their official bios, others did open up, one woman even explaining in depth the context of her suicide attempt, another talking about personal experiences informing a stance on abortion.
A book by a sitting congresswoman was not going to have the sort of revelations you would find in a political biography written by a historian or journalist. But getting these women to open up a bit to humanize them in my own mind enabled me to portray them as three-dimensional.
Around this time, as I made my way through the interview list, I began asking Marjorie to consider putting my name on the cover as a “with.” In the parlance of publishing, whether you call yourself a writer, a collaborator, a book doctor, a midwife, or a ghost doesn’t much matter in the scheme of things. What does matter is getting your name on the cover. By matter I don’t mean it necessarily helps you get more work. These gigs are gotten mainly by word of mouth, in editor and agent publishing circles. It matters because it gives you more street cred with people outside of the business.
In the publishing world, it’s a rarity when a “name” actually pens his own book; everyone from the receptionist to the CEO at every publishing house and literary agency knows that if you want to figure out who wrote the book, look no further than the sea of names on the acknowledgment page. So I made the case to Marjorie that it would help my career and it wouldn’t hurt hers. It would be perceived as an act of generosity, one woman helping another. She readily agreed and instructed Crown to give me a “with.” I don’t know why she did it, but I was glad she did.
I spent that spring and summer researching, reporting, transcribing, and writing. The book was coming together, and Marjorie squeezed me into her schedule when she could, though sometimes it meant literally chasing after her in the halls of Congress or accompanying her on the train ride back to Philly or even on the private Capitol Hill underground subway system as she and her colleagues scurried to and from votes. The days were mostly filled with the tedium of the legislative process, congressional life not nearly as entertaining as House of Cards or Veep or The West Wing has portrayed.
But on August 5, 1993, a true drama played out on the floor of the House of Representatives, and Marjorie was a key player, though certainly not by choice. President Clinton found himself a single vote short to get his economic plan, his first budget, through the House. He had promised to take on the challenge of the country’s deficit, and his strategy was to reprioritize the budget and introduce a stimulus package.
Marjorie had been the only freshman Democrat to vote against both facets of his plan in earlier iterations. Her district was the most Republican leaning of any Democrat’s in Congress and she knew that if she changed her no vote to a yes in this next round, she would surely be voted out of office.
Jake Tapper, now of CNN, was then her press secretary. On that August day, he told her the president was on the line. Marjorie heard the president ask her what would it take? They talked for another minute or two, and then she agreed to switch her vote, supporting the president’s plan. This was considered by some to be an act o
f political suicide and by others as one of party fealty. Seventeen years later, political reporter Karen Tumulty, writing for Time, would reflect on this moment, characterizing it as “one of the most extraordinary spectacles I have ever witnessed in the House Chamber. . . . The other side of the Chamber seemed to explode. Republicans pulled out their hankies and started waving them at her, chanting: ‘Bye-bye, Margie.’”
This made for a lively scene in the book: though no one was physically pushed onto the subway tracks, Marjorie must have felt she had been thrown under the bus by the Democratic Party. It was obvious to all that she would lose her reelection campaign. Before that happened, she had a book to finish and some political favors to collect on.
Two months to the day after the historic vote that effectively ended Marjorie’s congressional career, First Lady Hillary Clinton sat down with us to be interviewed for the book. While she wasn’t a member of Congress, the First Lady had spent a lot of time dealing with Congress during her tenure as the head of the Clinton administration task force to overhaul health-care reform. Her policy role was unprecedented for a First Lady. Her participation in the book was obviously something the marketing department could promote in publicity materials. This was a good start, but I wondered what else the president and First Lady would do to repay Marjorie for the vote that everyone knew was going to cost her her seat. Marjorie, in the interim, had been traveling around her district and hearing from angry constituents.
I was along to assist Marjorie while Mrs. Clinton had one of her aides present. An official White House photo shows me wearing an ill-fitting suit, one I had bought specifically for that meeting, and my unruly hair was pulled back in a ponytail in a semisuccessful attempt to tame it. We had spent a lot of time preparing for the interview and had a list of questions prepared. I was awestruck by the White House. I had been there on several occasions in my role as freelance party reporter for the Style section, but I had never participated in a private meeting.