Women Writers Get Together

By Patricia Henley

At an Indian restaurant one spring night, novelist Andre Dubus III told me this joke. 

A writer comes home late at night and sees his house on fire. It’s surrounded by cops and firefighters. He goes up to the first person in uniform and says, “My God, what happened?” The cop says, “Do you live here?” “Yes!” the writer says. “Tell me what happened!” The cop says, “Your agent came to your house, killed everyone in your family, and set your house on fire.” And the writer says incredulously, “My agent came to my house?”

This joke never fails to elicit a rueful laugh from writers. For we shamefacedly suspect that we are sharecroppers for our agents. They work for us, but we can’t shake the feeling that they’re in charge. They are the people who intercede with the gods of the lit biz, persuasively pitching our stories, overseeing bidding wars, and fine-tuning the language of contracts. Without agents we are relegated to slush-pile purgatory. A manuscript might languish for months – years – before being turned down by a wet-behind-the-ears intern who would prefer to be working at Glamour.

So how do writers find agents? At writers’ conferences, this question always comes up. As if a little voodoo is required, or a secret rite.

It’s not like finding a real estate broker; it’s more like falling in love. You have to kiss your share of frogs before you find your prince or princess. And you have to prove yourself first. I’ve heard next to no rumor of an agent taking on a writer with no publications. At minimum, you publish a few stories in magazines and that attracts an agent’s attention. Those magazine acceptances might have been hard-won, taking years. Then you receive an e-mail or a telephone call from an agent. A nibble. It’s akin to a call generated by a personal ad. Maybe this’ll be The One. After flying solo, “writing in the cold,” as editor Ted Solotaroff calls it, you might soon have someone with whom to share the vicissitudes of the writing life. Eudora Welty wrote that the writing life is unremittingly lonely. A good agent is balm to that sting. If you’re a tough-minded and independent writer, that loneliness shape-shifts into solitude. But even in solitude, it’s nice to know there’s someone at the end of the day to offer you a cocktail and asks how your day went.

If the agent who calls wants to read more of your work, you fret over whether priority mail will make you look too eager. As if the agent doesn’t get how eager you are.

There might be a trip to New York, if you’re not already in New York. Two Midwestern gals, Jane Hamilton and I once commiserated about going up to the offices of agents and editors in Manhattan. Jane laughed and said, “I always wonder if I have a stain on my coat.” That was before Jane made Oprah’s A-team. I doubt she feels that way now. I saw her at the Vintage 50^th Anniversary party in Chicago, and she wore the sheen of fame and wore it well. God bless Oprah.

The agent in Manhattan takes you to lunch. You warm to your topic: a novel you’re working on. Your front-stage self must entice and seduce. It’s that first-date clammy-palm syndrome. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself babbling, draining all the energy from the story. I have never been able to eat while in the presence of a potential agent or editor. I twirl my pasta on the fork and wonder why I ordered linguine.

My first agent came to me by way of a writer-acquaintance. I was recommended to Amanda Urban, Red Hot Center of an illustrated Literary Galaxy spread in Esquire. Graywolf Press had published my first collection of stories, Friday Night at Silver Star, and it had been reviewed in The New York Times and it had won the Montana First Book Award. I was forty years old when my life took this fortuitous turn, and I wondered whether my good luck would abate or flow like honey. Poet Jerry Stern told me not to worry. “You’re skiing downhill,” he said. And twenty years later, as I experience what I think of as the perennial setbacks of my vocation, I remember his comforting words. In spite of the small-scale success of Friday Night at Silver Star, Amanda Urban thought that it would take too much work to get me where she’d want me. My horse was too dark for her. She did me the favor of introducing me to a protégé who sold one of my stories to Mike Curtis at The Atlantic. Then she sold a story to The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. With the money, I went to Chicago and bought a lithograph by Dagmar Mezricky. This was a heady time. I was living alone and writing day and night. When “The Secret of Cartwheels” came out in The Atlantic, I sneaked champagne into my evening graduate class and we drank it from Dixie cups.

I had a novel manuscript, set in Montana, but when Agent #1 sent it around, it was rejected. That took the luster off our relationship. Like infertility. Then I was led by intuition to Guatemala, where I began what would become my first published novel, Hummingbird House. When I sent Agent #1 those initial 100 pages, she wrote back that she didn’t like my central character, Kate Banner, forty-something midwife who was in a bad relationship with a puppeteer/gunrunner. That moment was like a lover telling you he didn’t like your best girlfriend. Obviously you are not going to relinquish your best girlfriend. When love dies, you know it in your gut. He says something that unmistakably lets you know it’s over. Agent #1’s distaste for Kate Banner was like that.

So I floated for a few years, agent-free, traveling to Central America, writing a first draft. Then another writer introduced me to Agent #2. She tried to talk me out of writing Hummingbird House, saying over another uneaten meal, “People aren’t interested in Central America.” But she could not dissuade me and agreed to represent me.

John Gardner posited that “writing a novel is a sustained psychological battle with yourself. “ I was general and foot soldier in that battle for eight years and finally finished Hummingbird House while on sabbatical in New Mexico. Agent #2 dutifully sent it to the New York publishing houses, where it was resoundingly rejected. After a year and half, I retrieved the manuscript and sent it out myself to small presses. It found a home at MacMurray & Beck in Denver, where Fred Ramey, gifted editor, worked with me to make the changes the novel needed, and it eventually became a National Book Award finalist. A happy ending. I never heard from Agent #2 again. Well, she had told me at the end of that lunch in Manhattan that she didn’t like to talk on the phone. And that was before the era of e-mail. Were we supposed to use telepathy?

In spite of the acclaim for my first novel, I went through another agent-free period. An up-and-coming agent had contacted me, but I thought that I might always publish in the small press world, where little money changes hands. What did I need with an agent? I went to England to teach for the summer and in Blackwell’s, bookstore haunt of Bill Clinton’s during his Oxford days, I saw three of the other 1999 National Book Award finalist titles, published by UK houses. But not Hummingbird House. What a wake-up call. I telephoned that up-and-coming agent and we have worked together ever since.

She wasn’t working with me because she thought I might eventually have a break-out book, although I’m sure she longs for that as much as I do. Break-out books pay the bills. But she was deciding to become my agent because she loved my work. I like to imagine that her feeling for it is almost inexpressible, the way I loved particular books as a child. Our relationship has been replete with goodwill and grace and patience that I had not found with those first two agents.

This mix of commerce and the intuitive characterizes much that I have found difficult to navigate in the lit biz. You want an agent who feels that connection to your work, who can sell you, and you need a break-out book, rave reviews, and high sales. For what? So that you can hoard time to sit before your computer and wage that exhilarating psychological battle with yourself, telling lies about imaginary people. What a strange job. Storyteller Isak Dinesen once said: “I write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”

This is my mantra; you will see it in other essays and hear it in other talks I’ve given. Best words to live by.