How Not to be Bitter
Rebecca Johnson
Word Count 1281
No teacher ever encouraged me to write. I once turned in a short story to my college professor, the writer Lydia Davis, about a father who yelled at his daughter in front of the Plaza hotel after she complained about the blisters on her feet. “No!!” Davis wrote in the margin. “Cliché.” But it was based on a true story! I was crushed but also offended—were the exclamation points really necessary?
My senior year, I decided to write a paper on Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock in heroic couplet, just as Pope did in his poems. It took forever to line up the rhymes and I was certain my professor, who had always given me A’s, would approve. I got my worst grade ever—a B. “I was surprised by how flat the images were,” he wrote.
Cliched. Flat. The universe was not saying “Be a writer.” But when I considered all the other professions available to the kind of person who has a 300 point spread between her math and English score on the SAT, “Writer” glowed like a Vacancy sign in a snow storm.
I read fiction because I don’t understand the world. I can’t tell if someone is a villain or a hero. If they are a hero, I resent their perfection; if they’re a villain, I am loathe to judge. In a novel, people are not confusing. Or, rather, they are confusing but the author makes the ambiguity bearable, even pleasurable. This is especially true in English novels of the 19th century where everything is neatly laid out, right down to the expected income of a vicar. God I love Jane Austen.
I knew I couldn’t make a living as a novelist, so I gravitated toward other kinds of writing. Investigative journalist sounded good on paper and back then we were all in thrall to Woodward and Bernstein but I don’t have the personality. I’d get half way through my reporting and start to feel sorry for the subject. Magazines, which were all about selling a “lifestyle” (dreadful word) were an ideal fit. The gig was easy--I’d meet famous people, take note of their idiosyncrasies, ask about their childhood, insert an occasional personal aside, get a few quotes from people who had worked with the subject (the more famous, the better. Though there was a rub—the more famous, the less likely they are to say anything interesting) and the check was in the mail.
When I told my father I was going into journalism, he quoted Winston Churchill --“If you are a journalist, you can be anything… as long as you get out of it early enough.” I have never been able to find a source for the quote, but I understood the truth of it (as well as my father’s passive aggression). As I got older and wiser; the celebrities got younger and dumber. I thought about going back to school to become a therapist, but the debt was as daunting as the prospect of listening to people make the same mistake over and over without the ability to scream, “Snap out of it, you idiot!”
Eventually, I did write a novel. It was about a family who lost a teenager in a motorcycle accident and was very loosely based on my own experience of giving birth to a baby who died soon after. I saw how sadness could remake a person. I sent it to my agent, a woman who had contacted me after reading my magazine work. She had a terrible laugh but had come to my wedding. She declined to represent it.
The author’s novel
The frightening thing about rejection is that you never know if they’re right. Of course that novel sucked, what was I thinking? But how can you live that way? To have ambition of any kind, you must have a hide of leather. So I swallowed my fear and my singed pride and sent the book out to a new round of agents. I heard a heap of stupid shit. One agent told me it was literally impossible to sell a book like mine in the current marketplace. Another said I would never sell that book because it lacked “a hook.” A book with no hook! What the fook?
I found a new agent, a steely blond equestrian who terrifies me to this day. I have only had one panic attack in my life and it occurred while I was on the subway going to meet her for lunch. In fairness, I am not frightened of her as much as I am scared of what she represents, i.e. an industry built on the utterly subjective whims of a group of individuals who have the power to crush you. But there is a reason she has a reputation as the reigning badass in the business— she found a publisher willing to pay me $350,000, a massive amount of money for a first novel. In most businesses, the tyro gets little for their first efforts and gradually works her way towards profitability. But in publishing, where nobody knows anything, your first novel is your most commercial because anything could happen. A lack of record is actually a strength.
My novel sold like most first novels sell. Badly. The Modern Language Association called it one of the ten best first novels of the year but USA Today called it “irredeemably depressing.” (My publicist was horrified but I took it as a badge of honor.) The publisher threw a lunch at the Museum of Modern Art for me and took out a large ad in the New York Times. I have no idea why they wasted their money in these ways.
A year ago, I was at a book party for a friend where I ran into a magazine editor acquaintance. He introduced me to the man he was talking to, an amiable fellow whose face turned white when he heard my name. Turns out, he was my publisher. He actually apologized to me for my book’s fate, which made me feel terrible. I felt like telling him, “Don’t worry. You paid me six figures for my book and you were the only offer.”
I wrote two more novels. I got a few meetings with ambivalent editors but once you publish a book, anyone can look up your sales. Since mine were so anemic, it was easy to say no. (And probably those novels sucked too!) I threw myself into parenting, took up painting, got cancer, got treated, went to graduate school in Urban Studies, served on the board of my local neighborhood foundation, raised two children, looked after my sick mother, took over the responsibilities of running the family farm in the panhandle of Texas, played a lot of tennis, survived Covid, co-founded this publication. All that time, I thought I should be writing another book but the rejections had worn me down. At least with a painting, you can hang it on the wall or give it away. What can you do with an unsold novel but let it sit in your computer, taking up storage? I thought about writing a self-help book called, “How Not to Be Bitter,” but what would I know about that?
I decided to take a break from writing. At first, I felt an enormous sense of freedom. What joy not to feel constantly guilty about one’s lack of productivity! In fact, I seem to have a talent for sitting on the couch without a single thought in my head. In time, however, I came to miss it. Woody Allen said masturbation is sex with someone you love. Writing is conversation with someone you think you know really well. But they can surprise you. Joan Didion said she wrote to learn what she thought. I write to know how I feel. It’s hell, frankly. The stench of self delusion and loathing still rises from the keyboard like gas from the primordial swamp. But afterwards, I feel like three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including (alphabetically) Elle, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Salon, Vogue (contributing editor 1999-2020), among others. Johnson is the author of the novel And Sometimes Why. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.
