Jillian Medoff at Greenlight Bookstore

Last night, as part of the author/blogger series I curate at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, I invited Jillian Medoff to come talk about her new novel, I Couldn’t Love You More. As I mentioned in my introduction to the audience, this novel has one of the most deeply embedded “fakeouts” I’ve seen in a long while. You spend half the novel thinking that the story is going to follow one path, and suddenly something happens that sends it caroming off in a completely different direction (although there’s still plenty of aftershocks from that first setup. And then you realize, over time, that scenes you thought were peripheral to the story you thought Jillian was telling you are actually integral to the real narrative.

When I was looking for Jillian’s conversational partner, the first and only person I invited was my friend Gretl Claggett, who’s recently published a poetry collection (Monsoon Solo) but whom I also know as a blogger for SheWrites.com and as a frequent guest contributor at Head Butler. In fact, they did a preview of the bookstore event on Head Butler with a Q&A that digs into some of the book’s themes—and the ways in which readers have reacted to them:

“This is a novel, not a memoir, and it’s certainly not a novel or a memoir about these readers’ lives. The question isn’t whether a reader would or wouldn’t act a certain way; the question is whether or not Eliot is behaving in a way that’s true to, or consistent with, her character… I’m just surprised, I guess, by how virulent people have been about it. On the other hand, I love that readers are having such visceral reactions. It means I’ve done my job.”

Here’s another part of the conversation, in which Jillian explains why she steers clear of much of the argument surrounding the amount of coverage women, especially those writing commercial fiction, get in the book sections of American newspapers and magazines. For her, it’s about a choice to focus on making herself a better writer…

(Sorry about the handheld shakiness in spots…)

17 July 2012 | events |

The Story Behind Penelope Trunk’s Last Book Deal

When I learned about Penelope Trunk’s bitter farewell to traditional publishing, there were several key aspects to her story that contradicted my own experience of the publishing industry, but one element seemed particularly suspect. Here’s how Trunk described her book deal:

“So I sold my book to a mainstream publisher and they sucked. I am going to go into extreme detail about how much they sucked, so I’m not going to tell you the name of the publisher because I got a lot of money from them. I’m just going to tell you that the mainstream publisher is huge, and if you have any respect left for print publishing, you respect this publisher.”

Trunk adds that she sold the book two years ago—and, if you’ll recall, the upshot of her story was that she found the marketing department at this publishing company so incompetent that they essentially cut her loose three months before the scheduled publication date rather than put up with any more of her criticism. Here’s what didn’t make sense to me about that: When you’re 90 days away from publication date, a competent trade publisher will have already been sending out advance reading copies to the media—particularly to monthly magazines with deadlines well in advance of the cover date. And Trunk’s track record as an author of books like Brazen Careerist(well, okay, as the author of Brazen Careerist) would certainly suggest that a smart publisher would be sending her new book out to both monthly and weekly business magazines, and Trunk’s “Internet famous” status would suggest that some of those magazines would be interested in her new book—interested enough that the news that it had been scrapped just months before it was supposed to come out would be, well, newsworthy.

But the first we were hearing of any of this was on Trunk’s blog.

My initial reaction was that it was simply not possible that a book deal for a well-known Internet expert with a major publisher could blow up like this and nobody would say anything about it for nearly two years. (Keep in mind, too, that if Trunk were as good as online promotion as she gives herself credit for being, at T-minus 90 days, she should have been promoting the heck out of an upcoming book whatever her publisher was doing wrong, so we could reasonably have expected attention to have been paid when the publication date came and went without any book showing up.) Coupled with some of the more outrageous details of her characterization of this publisher’s marketing department, it made me—along with more than a few other people—whether there had even been a book deal.

It turns out there was—but perhaps it’s not quite as prestigious as Trunk made it out to be.

(more…)

16 July 2012 | theory |