I have much in common with Julia Child.
We are both from Southern California.
We both attended Smith College.
She and I were/are very tall.
She had a shorter, bald, very devoted husband named Paul, and I have a shorter, bald, very devoted soon-to-be-husband named Tim.
One thing that she has that I do not have is a permanent exhibition in the Smithsonian. (A girl can dream!) But I have been to that exhibition many times. The last time I was in DC (which was, wow, for AWP in 2017!) I made my pilgrimage. It is noted that when they moved into their home in Cambridge, Paul raised the countertops in the kitchen. Paul building Julia a tall girl kitchen seemed like the most romantic, loving gesture to me, as a person who is vertically enhanced.
I mentioned my dream of having my own tall girl kitchen to my mother. She’s only 4’11” (Marfan Syndrome makes me the giant in my very short Armenian family), so has spent zero time contemplating the world from my lofty perspective. She freaked out on me over this. “Don’t do that to your kitchen! You’ll have trouble selling the house!”
The idea that a house I own doesn’t actually belong to me but to the next owners, and that I should anticipate their needs over meeting my own irked me. I don’t know these people, they aren’t real to me yet, yet I must indulge what we assume are their pedestrian, average, middling house requirements.
I mean, the next owner of my house might be a Marfanoid giantess. You never know.
I think about this as I’ve starting a new novel, which will be dictated by what I see at the store day after day, which is readers asking for the same books over and over again, which are not like the one novel I successfully wrote and published. I know myself well enough that I’m never going to write a comp to Lessons in Chemistry, or a book with Paris in the title. There are lots of variations of Paris titles. We’re running out of nouns to pair with Paris. Why Paris and not Rome? Rome has a certain European spirit, and you can buy pizza cut with scissors there.
People sure do love Paris. Julia Child had a hand in that!
I write novels with tall girl kitchens. Lovingly built for a small number of people who really need it.
I did come up with what I consider to be the most salable novel concept. It has everything I need to sell it in a single sentence.
Wait for it.
Catcher in the Rye, but set on September 12, 2001.
I’ll even give you a title for free: The Scratcher in the Eye. (LOL, okay, don’t use that.)
People love comparisons! They inherently get what that means. There are other Catcher derivatives, but they don’t always present that way (Less than Zero, for example). September 12th? If you were around that day, you know what that feels like. A snotty prep school kid trying to get to Manhattan that day has all sorts of built-in challenges. There was a novel from some years back that was almost a page-for-page rewrite of The Group by Mary McCarthy, except it was set in the 1990s and 2000s, and was about a group of friends from Oberlin and was coed. (A Fortunate Age by Joanna Rakoff) This is a thing!
Let the auction begin!
I actually started 9/12 novel myself, as a personal exercise. Here’s the first paragraph:
Everyone is going to ask me about that day for the rest of my life. That stupid September morning that Sean Liebers put his hand through my cheap-ass pressboard dorm room door at Amesbury. Liebers was a tall, beefy guy and some kind of boxer back home in Philly, and he sort of apologized for messing up the door, but not really because he was freaking out and sounding quite insane. At first, Liebers wouldn’t admit to what he did, which was entirely stupid because he and I were the only guys on the dorm and none of those patchouli-scented hippie girls could have done that. Let me tell you about these fake-ass crunchy vegan leftists at Amesbury: they love telling people what to do. I was sleeping—my God-given right as an American, because I had been up until five in the morning and because I didn’t have class until ten thirty--and I assumed the intruder was this girl from my floor pulling her surrogate mom shit, trying to get me to drink a hemp milk smoothie she made in her room with a blender she shoplifted from Target.
I was about to tell him to fuck off but then Liebers yelled through the hole he’d made with his fist, “Doesn’t your dad work at the World Trade Center?”
I felt dirty writing that. Obviously parroting another author. I feel like I’ve already read this novel. I kept going for a few pages and then decided to return to my wheelhouse, which is sad middle-aged indie kids reflecting on their life’s failures. Repeating yourself doesn’t feel bad at all! What business do I have writing about prep school and New York? I’m a Californian and I went to public high school and I was in Austin on 9/11.
So feel free to run with this idea, and credit me in the acknowledgements if you land a six figure deal.
The truth is, most of the time I’m asked for a recommendation, it’s by someone who wants a book like The Paris Paris, something that “reads easy,” that reminds them of what they just finished reading.
And, because I will never not want to write novels and see them published, I spend a lot of time wondering how to aim for that middle while still writing something that is within my wheelhouse.
I did start something that is, essentially, a rip-off of Every Anxious Wave. There’s a guy around my age who comes in the store with his kids, and he told me once he bought copies of my novel for all of his bandmates. ALL OF HIS BANDMATES?!?!? I loved hearing this! This made my damn week! This is who I write for! Middle-aged dads with bands! WITH BANDS!
Now reading: Better by Far by Hazel Hayes