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Dinty The Ironies: An Interview with Bret Lott |
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Novelist and short story writer Bret Lott published an essay in Poets
and Writers titled “Mid-List Crisis: Coping with the Downside of Success.” The
January 1999 piece discusses the author’s disappointment and frustration four
years after having been dropped by his publisher for unspectacular sales
figures. Finding little or no interest in his fifth novel, Lott writes about
facing that “Big Question, the one every writer must face, a question of the
utmost importance and utmost mystery: Why was I writing when no one around
seemed at all interested in seeing it?” The same month that Lott’s essay reached the magazine racks, however,
his 1991 novel Jewel, five years
out of print, was chosen as an Oprah Book Club selection, and went on to sell
more than two million copies. Lott followed up with another essay, “Toward
Humility,” in Fourth Genre (eventually
reprinted in Utne Reader.) In this second essay, Lott
tells the story of the day Oprah called, of riding on a Lear Jet with his son
to a distant book signing, and of his own doubts about his writing and his
success. Lott, a native of Los Angeles, California, is the author of five
highly acclaimed novels, The Man Who Owned Vermont, A Stranger’s House, Jewel, Reed’s Beach, and The Hunt Club, as
well as two collections of widely anthologized short stories, A Dream of
Old Leaves and How to Get Home, and a memoir, Fathers, Sons, and
Brothers. He lives with his wife and
two sons near * In your January 1999 Poets and Writers essay, you wrote, “I had been seduced into believing I had a
publishing life, that I was secure. And this, of course, was my folly.” What
did you mean in saying that you were seduced? What I meant was that a certain
comfort and ease had become a part of my professional life — not in the
writing end of things, but in the publishing. My first novel, The Man Who Owned Vermont, was taken
by a publisher after thirteen rejections, which was a fairly long wait, but
by the time it reached the bookstores, I had a contract in hand for the next
two books. When the second of those two came out—a book of stories—I was
working on what would be my fourth book, Jewel.
All indications were that everything was going to be fine. I was not burning
up the sales charts, but the reviews were all good and consistent. My
publisher seemed happy. So you weren’t writing bestsellers, you weren’t burning up the
charts, but you were selling enough copies that you felt comfortable in
assuming that a publisher would be interested in your next book, and the one
after that? Right. So where did it go wrong? When did you begin to sense that this was
folly? When my agent sent Jewel to the publisher, they took
forever to respond, then made a very low offer. My
editor’s assistant at that time actually told me, “The fact is, you could
have just given us a ream of white paper and we would have offered this same
amount of money, because it’s based on your prior sales record.” That didn’t
make me very happy. My next book after Jewel was Reed’s Beach. My editor, Jane Rosenman,
the best editor I have ever had, by the way, bought that book and contracted
for two more, but then she left on maternity leave. While Jane was out, the
director of marketing assumed the role of publisher. She had never edited a
book before in her life. She saw the marketing results for Reed’s Beach, and said, basically, to
just cancel the next two books, though the advances had already been paid. In
a conversation later, Jane gave me that famous quote, “You’re a white male
and don’t make good copy for People
Magazine.” That’s an actual quote? Yes, yes, it’s an actual quote. Now
understand, Jane was not dismissing me, this was not her view of the world. She
was just giving me the reality that she was perceiving
from the top. So these unexpected turns were what led you to the questions you ask
in Poets and Writers: “Why was I
writing when no one around me seemed at all interested in seeing it? Why
finish the next scene? Why start a new story? Why write at all?” Yes, that was it. How did having those two book contracts cancelled out from under you
affect your writing life? Did you find yourself sitting at your desk thinking
that maybe you weren’t any good, maybe you couldn’t write anymore? Yes, because I had begun to bank
on the publishing as being the reward of the writing, and if no one was going
to be publishing me, then I couldn’t help but begin thinking that there was
some problem, that I was not that good of a writer. Thoughts like those don’t
do much for making you want to sit down and write. I’m sure they don’t. So after that Poets and Writers essay came out, what sort of reaction did
you get? It was wonderful because I
started getting mail. People would write to say, “Yeah, I know exactly what
you’re saying.” People would thank me, thank me for
saying what I said. There was even an article in the Sunday Boston Globe, about the article in Poets and Writers. All of a sudden I
was getting this really positive response about being a publishing failure,
you know, and coming to terms with that. So it was a really good feeling. It
was really very nice and very sweet. So sometime in ‘98, you wrote the essay that eventually is published
in Poets and Writers, an essay in
which you say you have discovered, or rediscovered, why you write. Well, did
the writing get better? Did the fact that you had found the answers you
discuss in your essay make you sit down at your writing desk with more ease? Not exactly. There was actually
about one year between the time I wrote that essay for Poets and Writers and when it actually appeared, and in that time
my novel The Hunt Club came out. This
was a very different book for me—a literary mystery. While I was waiting for
that book to come out, I started a new novel, a novel that I really wanted to
write. My working title was My Story,
My Song. You know that hymn? It’s actually a retelling of the biblical
story of Ruth. Then The Hunt Club
did really well, and started getting great reviews. We sold it in paperback,
and everyone was just really happy about this, and the publisher asked me to
write a sequel. Another literary mystery or did they mean the same characters? The same characters. And you
know, I was seduced by that. I thought, “OK, I can
do this,” and I put out a first chapter and a synopsis and sent them to my
agent. The publisher came back soon after and said, “Well actually we want
you to do two of them. Here’s the money we will give you for it.” I was like,
“Oh, okay!” So, did I learn my lesson?
Well, no, because here they were dangling the money in front of me… They’ll never seduce me again. Until next week. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, I
took this manuscript that I had started, the novel that I really wanted to
write, and set it aside. Then I spent the entirety of 1998 writing the sequel
to The Hunt Club. It started out
really well, and started out really well, and started out really well, and
then it became—well, I could just feel I was losing it. It was painful. I knew
that I was losing the flow of the book because I had agreed to do this for
the money involved. I had agreed to do it because the first one was a success.
I had agreed to do it for all the wrong reasons. I remember having a series of
agonizing days, thinking, “I don’t want to do this. I want to go write that
other one.” I got to the end of that
novel, and it just died. I tried to prop it up, tried everything to prop it
up, and eventually I went on and sent it to my agent. Shortly after, she
called and left a message at home with my wife Melanie saying that we needed
to set up a conversation about the book. I was sitting there, you know, with
my fingers crossed, thinking “Oh she likes it,” and I knew darn well it was
no good. That was So there I was: I had spent a
year out of my life, wasting my time, and wasting the editor’s and publisher’s
time. It felt like a novel had gone down the drain. I had the advance, had
spent it, and they were waiting for the manuscript. My agent and I were just
staring down the barrel at something together. You mention the date, January 7, of that
difficult phone call with your agent, because later that same day Oprah
called. How’s that for timing? The weird thing is that two
nights before, Chris Bohjalian had come to And then Oprah calls? That’s an irony, for sure. Once you caught your
breath, did it feel like a relief? Did you feel like there were doubts and
obstacles that dissolved away? No. On the one hand, there was
real guilt. There was real guilt about this novel that didn’t work. Prior to that phone call, I was staring at
months of trying to fix a book that I didn’t care about. But eventually I
realized, “I don’t have to do this book. The amount of money they gave me was
so small, I can give it back.” We all have to face the consequences of our bad decisions, except
sometimes Oprah calls, and we don’t. Yes, that’s exactly right. But I
felt real guilt about it, because I didn’t want to renege on anything. I didn’t
want to do that. But that other book, the retelling of Ruth, was what I had
really wanted to write all along. Well, there was an outside obstacle removed, certainly. How about the
internal obstacles? Did it feel when the smoke cleared from that Oprah phone
call as if the doubts that you talked about in your Poets and Writers essay had dissolved? Or were they still
there, and the only change was that Oprah had picked Jewel? Nothing disappears. It hasn’t
disappeared even now. In fact, let’s be totally honest—it’s even more
pronounced now. I knew I was an imposter before. Now I really am an imposter.
Now I’m a famous imposter. One of my favorite quotes is
from Steinbeck when he was writing the Grapes
of Wrath. Each day he kept a little journal, and he’d write about what
happened that day and then what he was hoping to get done. He says this is on
the 18th day of writing the Grapes
of Wrath: “If only I could do this book properly, it would be one of the
really fine books, and a truly American book, but I am assailed by my own
ignorance and inability.” Well that’s me, assailed by my own ignorance and
inability. To me, what is fascinating about the story of
what happened to you over the last couple of years are the many ironic twists.
The early success you had, ironically, led to your seduction by the world of
publishing, and then, when publishing became more of an iffy proposition, it
led you to doubt your worth and your motives for writing. These doubts took
you into the questions you asked in the Poets and Writers essay, but then, another irony, you allow
yourself to be seduced again even after writing the Poets and Writers essay. Boom. The irony after that, I think, is that the Poets and Writers essay finally comes out, an essay in
which you talk about the perils of publishing success and the frustrations of
being mid-listed, and you barely have time to put that Poets and Writers issue up on the shelf before Oprah calls.
You’re missing another irony
here. Between the time I wrote that essay and the time it was finally
published, I had sinned against the public by writing this book—the mystery
sequel—for money. By doing exactly what you had ended up in Poets and Writers saying you should not do. Right. And then the final irony. I know you feel sheepish talking about
this, but there’s a downside to this Oprah selection, isn’t there? I’m
guessing that a writer—someone whose job it is to shut out all distractions
and write every day and keep his head in the world of the book—must find it
brutally hard to concentrate after this big wonderful acknowledgment of your
work. Is that true? Oh, yeah. The concentration and
the focus have not come back even now. I mean it’s harder than ever in my
life to write. People think, “Whoa, the guy’s got it made. He can go sit on a
little island off I’m curious why you went on to write that second essay, “Toward Humility,”
for Fourth Genre. You acknowledge
early in that piece that much of what you say, and I quote you here, still “all
sounds like a complaint.” Well, you could have not written that piece. You
could have not published it. Why go public again with your doubts and open
yourself up to possible criticism? Maybe I just wanted to apologize
to everybody for, well, for success. Because I never meant to do this, you
know. What I realized, why I wrote that essay, is that even when you’re
riding on a Lear jet, when your kid thinks you’re the biggest thing that’s
ever happened in the world, it doesn’t mean you are a bigger person, that you’re
a better person, that you’re a better father or anything. I wrote that essay
because I was trying to understand for myself what had happened. Of course
the irony is, then I go and publish it. How is that humble? I guess that if you are truly humble, you
just shut up. You’ve achieved considerable success now, not just in the market but
in the praise and recognition your work has received in so many corners. I’m
sorry if this embarrasses you, but the truth is that many of us, your fellow
writers, are standing below you on some imagined ladder, thinking that you
have reached some higher rung or some rung very near the top. How does it
look up there? Are there always other rungs further up? Are you content now
sitting higher up the ladder than you thought you would ever reach, or are
you just looking up and seeing the writers ahead of you? Good question. You know what I
fear? What I really fear is that some people think I’ve stepped off their
ladder and I’m on another one. But it ain’t so. It ain’t so. I fear that my friends and people who have not
had this kind of success will think that I have abandoned their ladder, that
I’ve got bigger fish to fry. I don’t want anybody to think that. Those other
writers, the ones who haven’t maybe had this success, I’m right where they
are. I’m working on a book now, and it is hard. Just really hard. The more I
write, the harder it gets, because I realize what I can’t do. I realize what
my limitations are. I’m staring at this new novel trying to get it together. But is it the book you want to write? It’s the book that I started and
should have been writing all along. The Ruth book. That’s the other irony. I
started this book when nobody wanted my next book, when my agent and I were
experimenting with circulating the one book (The Hunt Club) under a pen name. And so the other irony is that
the book I started when nobody cared, I’m now able to write. I got paid a
whole lot of money too, for this thing I started when nobody wanted it. Now I get to write what I want,
but the other irony is that everybody in the world, in my world, is looking
at me waiting for that next book. And after all of this, I’m still sitting
there trying to figure out how to get this character into the car. That’s
where I am right now. Trying to get this character into the car to drive
where she’s got to go. It’s harder and harder. You know—I’m still on the same
ladder, and if anything, I’m slowing down. So, is there a lesson here? Do you see any lesson out of this Poets
and Writers piece and the timing of
Oprah’s phone call? Do you see any lesson, maybe, for writers who are where
you were back in 1984—teaching way too many classes of remedial English,
getting up at 5 in the morning to steal a few hours of writing, struggling to
finish one good book? What’s the lesson, if there is any? The lesson is that the fears and
doubts and insecurities about publishing are never going to leave. You have
to know that they are always going to be there, and not let them dictate the
success of your writing. You need to
take your joy out of the writing and not out of the accomplishment in the
world outside of the writing. I look back on those times, 1984, and I think
they were some of the greatest times of my life—sitting down in my basement,
nobody in the world knew who I was. I was sitting there wrestling with the
main character of my first novel, trying to figure out what was going to
happen to his wife, and it was great fun. That’s the lesson—make sure you
develop a life alone in the basement where no one knows who you are, and make
sure that you protect that time. Much of the story you have told has to do
with being seduced, and eventually, losing track of why you write, or writing
for the wrong reasons. What are the right reasons to write the next book? Any
book? Any book. Somebody’s finished a book, and
they’re going on to the next book. What are the right reasons to do that? That’s
a really good question. The right reasons are because you want to understand.
You want to understand what you see happening in front of you and you want to
understand how it feels. That’s how I began writing. My first novel, The Man Who Owned Vermont, was about a
guy whose wife left him. I wanted to understand what it would be like because
I love my wife. We’ve never split or anything. But, if that were to happen,
what would that be like? That is what I wanted to know. The reason to write
the next book is because you as a human being want to understand other
people. So you know, there’s
always those high-minded answers, but it’s really a selfish thing. The right reason to write is
that there’s nothing like getting up at 5 in the morning, when nobody else is
up, and sitting there with a cup of coffee at the computer. I mean this truly.
There’s nothing like getting up when it is still dark outside and the sun’s
coming up and you can sit there with these people, your characters. There’s
nothing like it. Nothing like the joy of being alone inside that story. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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