V A L E R I E   A N N   L E F F

            Let's call them TOLA and EAMPH—acronyms for Television-Obsessed Literary Agent and Editor At Major Publishing House. They’re not bad people; really, they’re both lovely, intelligent women. They’re just coping with the pressures of the industry. The phrase comes with a knowing glance, a shrug, even over the phone.
     I don’t live in New York, so the industry isn’t a big part of my daily life, and it rarely enters my consciousness, especially when I’m writing. I live in Mill Valley, California, in a cramped house with no view that’s probably worth more than the gnp of a small Caribbean nation. I live with my husband, Brent, our three-year-old daughter, Samantha, and Brent’s kids (of whom he has full custody, because—amazingly—his ex-wife is even more useless than he is). The kids are blond, twins, a boy and a girl. Let’s call them Buffy and Jody.
     From what I can tell, the book business is a lot like Hollywood, except there’s no money in it and the people aren’t beautiful. I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I had my first novel published by a major press two years ago as part of a six-figure, two-book deal. The lowest six figures available, mind you, minus, of course, 15 percent to TOLA’s agency, fifteen grand to the outside publicist, traveling expenses for the book tour I put myself on, book-tour wardrobe, makeup, okay, okay, I admit it, a couple of shots of book-tour Botox. Actually, if I tally up the expenses, subtract them from the advance, divide that by the amount of time I put into writing the first book, it works out to like three dollars and fourteen cents an hour— π. My hourly wage has been π. For a writer, that’s a success story, and I realize Dave Eggers made similar calculations and came out reeking of gratitude, but he had youth and male gender on his side—needed neither the clothes nor the injections—and, shit, I’ve got three kids living in my house, orthodontia looming. On the bright side, TOLA’s been talking to a producer about a dramatic rights option. Some person is actually thinking about making a television series out of my book, a collection of literary stories that my publisher released as a novel. I wrote about a community of women on the board of a Beverly Hills charity, and this producer thinks it could work as one of those primetime dramas. Please don’t think I wrote about Beverly Hills because I’m drawn to the place. I wrote about it because I grew up there. I fled the minute I could, but writers often need to purge the story of their hometown in their first book. The book did okay, got some nice reviews, and though it didn’t earn out its advance, I was grateful to be published at all. TOLA and EAMPH were reasonably satisfied. The problem is the second book. Well, that and my family.
     Stop! Don’t even think that. Don’t say I’m bitching too much—here I am pursuing my creative dream, while my hardworking husband is out all day running a hedge fund or developing a luxury subdivision in Healdsburg. Brent does not work, says he’s permanently injured from his last job as an it specialist, the job he lost just about as soon as we married, though his injury doesn’t seem to affect his windsurfing when we go up to Lake Tahoe or his skiing in the winter. Mostly he lies around the house all day, watching obscure sports on espn2, dabbling with a disability claim. He says, “Disability would be passive income, you know? Like my version of a dramatic rights deal.”
     “Passive, sure,” I tell him. “But where’s the income?” So far it’s all been bills for the legal counsel.
     “You give me a lot of shit, but I’ve got this ache in my neck and shoulders about 60 to 75 percent of the time.”
     “It’s your burden of guilt!” He walks out of the room before I can tell him about the pain in my ass 100 percent of the time. I wouldn’t mind so much the fact that I’m hemorrhaging money—it’s having Brent underfoot all day that drives me nuts. Even Samantha goes to preschool, but my husband is like The Thing In The Basement, and if he’s got any legitimate illness, it’s male depression, non-covert. Anyway, the person who supports us is Mel, my stepfather, who maxed out the gift tax applicable exclusion when I bought my house and who sends both Brent and me checks for twenty-four thousand dollars each year and pays private-school tuition for Buffy, Jody, and Samantha. Mel keeps us afloat, though the arrangement also keeps me feeling ashamed, illegitimate.

In New York, I meet TOLA and EAMPH in a minimalist restaurant with black plates and napkins that match TOLA’s black sweater and knit skirt and her narrow, black plastic eyeglasses. She is exceptionally neat and moves briskly, though always with intention. She made a lot of money this year co-authoring a book about ridding oneself of clutter.
     EAMPH is a whole different thing from TOLA. She’s a blond, fluffy, languid sort of person who commutes to her job from Far Hills, New Jersey. I imagine a slogan embossed in brass-colored letters on her vintage, saddle-leather Filofax: I’D RATHER BE RIDING MY HORSE. She has four children, all either in prep school or a fine Northeastern college; her work for the press is a day job. Not that she isn’t highly literate, doesn’t love to read. I just suppose she likes to read the same kind of books I do—classics, nineteenth-century novels—an activity entirely divorced from her work for the publishing house. I know she was drawn to my book for its old-fashioned comedy-of-manners style and managed to get it by her publisher because it was set in Beverly Hills. The press had just made a fortune on a book called The Beverly Hills Botox Club, a trashy, gossipy piece of shit written by a twenty-three-year-old who worked as a personal assistant to a big producer’s wife, and no, I am not a hypocrite—it’s one thing to take a couple of shots for public appearances, another to write a whole book about the stuff. Anyway, EAMPH thought maybe my book would ride the wake of the Botox Club’s publicity. Unfortunately for the press, though personally I have very mixed feelings here, my book was mostly read on its own terms and praised for what was genuinely good about it—non-newsworthy things like craft and voice—so it didn’t hit any bestseller lists. At least EAMPH never seems bothered by the fact that her company lost money on me—though I find it a source of constant self-torment—she has a kind of dreamy, Oh well, next time, attitude and surely never thinks about anything related to her office when she’s home in Far Hills. The three of us sit in the well-designed restaurant, eating thinly pounded veal cutlets, spring-like with chopped arugula and tomatoes on top. We talk about the trip EAMPH and her husband are planning this summer to cruise the Norwegian fjords. In the last minutes of our meeting, EAMPH mentions my next novel. She and TOLA speak of it as if it’s already written, really exists, with no doubt at all about my ability actually to produce something that will be acceptable to her publisher. I go along with the fantasy; no point in getting EAMPH concerned I might not make deadline. As if she’d lose sleep anyway.
     After lunch, TOLA and I go around the corner to Starbucks. No word yet on a dramatic rights deal, though TOLA says she’s hopeful. She pushes her glasses up on her glossy black hair and leans her chin on the heel of her hand. “So tell me more about the new property.” In TOLA-speak, property means book.
     I try. I really try. I believe I’m writing something beautiful, something completely different from the first book, set on a remote island in the South Pacific. “I feel like I’m following in the tradition of Somerset Maugham, his colonial stories and faraway books like The Painted Veil or The Moon and Sixpence. Especially The Moon and Sixpence, because it’s the story of an artist who hates domesticity—you know, I’ve always interpreted Maugham’s misogyny as a hatred of domesticity rather than women—but my book is contemporary, too, since the protagonist is a woman, and aside from answering her artistic calling, she’s following her true sexual impulses and desires, not those imposed upon her by society . . .”
     TOLA’s heard enough; her eyes look opaque. She carefully stirs her latte, waits for the foam to settle, and slips her glasses back on. “I think you could get away with an island setting if you do something like Survivor meets Sex in the City.”
     “Sex in the City! I’ve never even seen it.”
     “It’s a good show. You should watch it.”

Before my book contract, I had the pleasure of a slow, step-by-step path into a writing career. Early on, I was lucky enough to place a few short stories in small magazines. My mother happened to be up in Mill Valley visiting Brent and me—well, me; Brent was there—the day I opened my mail and whooped in excitement at an acceptance letter from a well-known, more prestigious literary journal.
     My mother asked, “What story is that, darling?”
     Oops. It was that one written in the third person, so clearly about myself, the one that had that line: She isn’t the kind of person who dreams about snakes and water holes. If she needs to dream about giving her stepfather a blow job, she goes right ahead and dreams it. “Let’s just make it a surprise,” I told my mother.
     Three months later, when the story was published, my mother called to congratulate me.
     I asked, “What did Mel say?”
     “Oh, well. For once, he didn’t say much. I suppose he was flattered.” My mother giggled. “I suppose one could say he was blown away by it.”
     My minor literary successes gradually increased. Writing was a pleasure, an indulgence; it garnered some small material rewards, like free copies and three-figure checks, but more important, it made me feel good about myself. People were actually paying me to hear what I had to say. I was used to paying to talk to someone, at least one hundred and fifty dollars an hour. Now, I had a valid inner life, valued, even, by a few others. Surely, though, it wasn’t a job. Then, I got successful: two-book contract, book tour, reviews, interviews, the deadline on the next book. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. On top of Samantha.

EAMPH has had the manuscript six weeks before she replies. I already know it’s trouble—she’s sent the initial e-mail to TOLA about wanting to take time with her response and put it in writing. So I’m not shocked when her e-mail finally comes, with the diplomatic first few sentences about how, as always, I’ve created wonderful, believable characters and artful descriptions of the island setting. Then there’s the but clause: but I think readers might find it hard to identify with a protagonist who has bisexual desires and an affair with her friend’s husband. Also, the leading man is a sort of distasteful character—deceitful, hard to warm up to.
     Now I am shocked. Shocked! EAMPH, presumably, is looking for commercial women’s fiction. And it’s not okay to have a protagonist who sleeps with her friend’s husband. Doesn’t she watch television? Well, I hope not—I don’t either. But isn’t that all over television, on the soap operas, Desperate Housewives? I’ve never seen Desperate Housewives, who knows what they’re up to, but it’s naughty, adulterous, treacherous, no? What about Paris Hilton? Britney Spears?
     What about that E. L. Doctorow book, where the guy burns the girl’s buttocks with a car cigarette lighter? What about all that wife swapping John Irving wrote? What about Lolita? I happen to be in the middle of Lolita right now, and I hate to admit this, but I’m reading Lolita for the first time. I’m not even reading it because I have an intellectual yearning to explore Nabokov beyond the passing glance I gave to Pale Fire in a contemporary lit class at Santa Cruz twenty years ago. I’m actually reading Lolita because I bought a copy of the bestseller, Reading Lolita in Teheran, and, I mean, I should have read Lolita first, right? Yes, this is embarrassing, I’m so ill-read, but I’m trying, trying to catch up, so I’m reading Lolita, reading Lolita under book contract, and my editor thinks my own adulterous protagonist is smutty and disgusting, and her lover is smutty and disgusting, and, hell, I probably am too.
     Anyway, I now have the answer I’ve been dreading and another shocking piece of information I forgot to mention. EAMPH does not want to cancel my contract. I may be smutty and disgusting, but they are not throwing me out. I suggest you propose new characters in a new situation for the next novel. For the sake of your career, your second book needs to do very well, both with reviewers and in terms of sales. Let’s talk next week and bat about some other ideas.
     So . . . So, I’m just supposed to throw away these two hundred pages I’ve slaved over, trying to make deadline, and come up with another book I can “bat about” next week! Is she kidding? No! She’s not kidding! She’s serious. I need to come up with an idea for a commercial and critical hit book by next week. Or a few ideas preferably—more to bat! Sure. A few books by next week. Of course. No problem. I always come up with hit books over the average weekend—always!
     And the sick thing is, I actually do it. I mean, I try. I rack my brains all weekend, even as I’m standing at the side of the field at Jody and Buffy’s Saturday morning soccer game, trying to keep Samantha from tearing off the leg of my jeans. I think and think, as I’m pretending to watch CNN with Brent that night—the British hostages in Iran—who can worry about a standoff with Iran, I need a critically and commercially successful second novel. I know what EAMPH wants. The first book was about Beverly Hills, so obviously—obviously!—the second one should take on Hollywood: the film industry or rock ’n’ roll. The glamour element, that’s what she wants, that’s what the press can sell, and that’s just exactly what I fled from when I left Southern California forever the day after I graduated high school. It’s exactly what I cannot write, sorry, no knowledge whatsoever of any glamorous world after 1982—they’ve met me—can’t they tell by the way I dress?
     Maybe they’d settle for a book that isn’t a novel. Isn’t non-fiction doing better these days? Maybe I could write one of those writing books for people who want to be writers. Why would anyone want to be a writer? I think as I’m shaking dust and dried grass off Buffy and Jody’s long, stinky soccer socks, dropping their still-damp team uniforms into the cold wash. I could write a book about not living out one’s crazy stories in real life but getting them down on paper instead—Put Your Drama On The Page! That sounds like a seller, I’m sure EAMPH would take it, though what can I say in it beyond the premise of the title? Maybe there’s not enough material here for a hit book. Maybe there’s just a chapter, maybe only an article for Poets and Writers magazine. Fuck, maybe it’s only a bumper sticker.
     Self-help. Why do people even read self-help books? People don’t want to help themselves; they may say they do, but to quote Mel, “Just watch their feet.” No one wants to get better—look at my husband, look at me. Even neo-Buddhist gurus and female pop stars preach about loving what is, what you have, and we all know that sucks. Why not just face the total self-destruction we’re about, individually, culturally, as a species? I’ll write the first self-hurt book—it’ll sell millions. How To Fuck Up Your Life. Big red letters on a canary yellow cover, a few well placed asterisks: F**K. This is a book with traction. I can do a chapter outline in one weekend. Chapter One: Nutrition. Face it, there’s little more than carbs between you and a nervous breakdown. Chapter Two: Relationships. Forget the soul mate. Write a personal ad for the relationship you’re now in, have a history of, will always have . . .

     Mel calls every Sunday night without fail. Tonight, I’m hysterical, while Brent and the kids are downstairs watching The Simpsons on fox. I snivel, “He’s just so lazy and over-entitled . . . I hate him, consistently, every single day . . .”
     “Okay, you’ve had enough. Call it quits. We’ll buy him out of the house.”
     “But the gift tax!”
     “So we pay a little gift tax.”
     “I feel like a failure.”
     “You’re not a failure, Pussycat. Everyone blows the prenup in their first marriage. I made the same mistake. It cost me three million dollars to unload Shirley and marry your mother and you, and believe me, in those days three million dollars was a lot of money. But those were the best three million dollars I ever spent.”
     I love Mel.
     “Forget about Brent. You’ve got a little girl. A career. Go finish that Great American Novel!”
     Ugh. Double failure. Triple failure. Failure squared.

VALERIE ANN LEFF's fiction has been published in The Antioch Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Chelsea, Lilith, Other Voices, The Sun, The Seattle Review, and many other journals. Her first novel, Better Homes and Husbands, was published in 2004 by St. Martin’s Press and has been optioned by NBC-Universal for development as a television series.