Roy Miller's Blog, page 274
February 13, 2017
The Time I Blasted My Father’s Ashes Into the Sky
I was 27 when my father got sick. He’d been complaining about severe back pain and his chiropractor had recommended cortisone shots. When the shots didn’t help, they sent him for a CAT scan. The scan revealed lesions on his spine and suddenly, my brothers and our mother and I were being given the news that he had multiple myeloma—a cancer of the plasma cells in the blood.
I’d never had to prepare for anyone’s death before. It’s a hard thing to live with the knowledge that someone you love is dying. As it turned out, he had seven years. In hindsight, those seven years feel both excruciatingly long and unbearably short. The truth, of course, is I would never have been ready to say goodbye.
*
In his sickness, my father’s emotions grew unwieldy. He had never been a good patient to begin with, but confronted with his own mortality, he became panicked. He was both petrified of dying and resigned to his fate. His lack of hope angered me, but perhaps that’s more a reflection of my own naiveté. I convinced myself that with a positive attitude, the right medical care, and a little luck, he’d survive.
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He made me promise I would be there when he died. “Please be with me,” he asked. I said of course, of course I’ll be there, but you aren’t dying today so can we please not talk about this right now?
*
He died in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. I was in Brooklyn, hunkered down in my apartment, unable to go anywhere because the subways had been closed indefinitely. The metaphor was beyond obvious: the storm pulverized the city and took my father with it.
I spoke with my mother on the phone the night before the storm set in. My father’s doctors had recommended he go for dialysis and chemo treatments early, in case of power outages. (He had been receiving dialysis three times a week at that point; the loss of function in his kidneys being one of the more grueling side effects of his illness.)
The storm tore its way up the coast and after the rain and wind stopped I walked the streets of Greenpoint, surveying the damage. McGuinness Boulevard was completely submerged. The East River had surged. Trees were down. As I walked, my cell phone rang. It was my mother; my father was gone. He’d had a “cardiac episode”—a kind of “minor” heart attack (he’d been having a lot of them)—and they’d been unable to revive him.
I had not been there as I’d promised I would be. I drove to the hospital in New Rochelle where he was waiting for me, the last time I would see him. I remember gripping the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles went white. I remember when I got there and they took me into the room where his body was, he only had one sock on. The other was on the floor next to the bed. This detail is ingrained in my memory.
*
My father left behind a letter detailing his last wishes. He was specific in his requests. He wanted a memorial—a “party”—in his honor. He wanted Stolichnaya vodka on hand. In one of his many notebooks he’d written out an extensive playlist of hundreds of songs that I was instructed to download onto an iPod and play on repeat. This memorial, he stipulated, would be held somewhere quiet and would not involve church or a mass. It would not be a “sad” gathering. It would be joyful.
So my brothers and I, along with our mother and grandmother and my father’s brother and sister and lots of friends, did our best to honor these wishes.
*
My father was a pilot. He flew airplanes for nearly his entire life, although ironically, he hated traveling. When he was home with us, he complained that my two brothers and I drove him crazy, that our mother was “too much to handle.” When he was away, he called every night to tell us he missed us. It was only that in between phase, the limbo of flight—the going—where he was at peace.
I still don’t know who exactly was responsible for coming up with the rocket idea. It felt preordained. I tried attributing credit to my middle brother, Chase, who spoke often of his memories building and launching Estes model rockets with our father. But Chase was under the impression the idea had been mine. All I know is at some point during the memorial planning, Chase went online and ordered a rocket. When it arrived he sanded, glued and painted it and made sure the plastic payload compartment was secure enough to carry its crucial cargo: my father’s ashes.
The sky was fittingly overcast the day we sent him on his way. A full blanket of clouds—bad visibility for flying, but just right for launching a model rocket. It wasn’t too cold, despite being late November, but we were the only people down at the water that day. My grandmother had a stack of paper cups and my youngest brother, Tom, poured whiskey so that we could make a toast. Chase’s two children were in the grass playing. Four generations of our extended family.
We set the launch pad up. Tom threaded the eyelets of the rocket through the mounting rod and there the rocket sat, with the gray ashes of our dad in the payload compartment. Uncle John, his brother, gave a toast, and those who had cups raised them. Chase connected the cord to the battery. He pressed the button and, at first, nothing happened. Everyone was unsure what to do. Had we wired it wrong? Was something amiss with the engine? Chase started toward the launch pad, to figure out what the problem was, and just as he did, the engine ignited and the rocket blasted off so quickly it took everyone by complete surprise. The kids screamed with delight. My grandmother gasped. Even I couldn’t help letting out a shout of approval.
It was the last thing we did to say goodbye. It seemed more than appropriate for the man who was most comfortable in the cockpit of an airplane. Maybe it was our version of a “burial at sea,” aviation-style. My father was definitely someone who appreciated a good bit of comedy—one of his favorite films was The Big Lebowski. He always quoted from it and he thought the scene where John Goodman tries to scatter Steve Buscemi’s ashes out over the Pacific, only to have the wind blow them right back into Jeff Bridge’s face, was particularly hilarious. So we liked to think he would have approved of our little tribute.
I think it’s a hard task trying to bring a sense of closure to the void left when someone you love passes away. And yet for us—my brothers and I, our mother and those closest to my father—there was a sense of peace that came in that moment as the rocket reached its apex and we saw its parachute deploy, of knowing that we had delivered him, even if only briefly, back to a place where he had truly known peace.
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S&S Nabs Hillary Clinton’s Personal Essays
Former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton has sold a yet-to-be-titled new book of quotations and personal essays to Simon & Schuster. The book, which is expected to publish under the S&S trade imprint in fall 2017, will tell stories from Clinton's life, including her experiences during the 2016 presidential election. It will also feature a collection of inspirational quotations.
“These are the words I live by,” Clinton said, according to a press release. “These quotes have helped me celebrate the good times, laugh at the absurd times, persevere during the hard times and deepen my appreciation of all life has to offer.”
President and CEO of Simon & Schuster Carolyn Reidy bought world rights in all formats to the book from Robert B. Barnett of Williams & Connolly. President and publisher Jonathan Karp and v-p & executive editor Priscilla Painton will serve as editors. In addition to publishing in the U.S., the book will also be published by Simon & Schuster’s international companies in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom, and as an audiobook by Simon & Schuster Audio.
In a second deal brokered between Reidy, Barnett, and Jon Anderson of the Children's Publishing Division, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers will publish Clinton’s bestselling It Takes a Village for the first time as a picture book in fall 2017. The book will be illustrated by two-time Caldecott Honor winner Marla Frazee. Steven Malk at Writers House represented the illustrator. Paula Wiseman will be the editor. It Takes a Village will also be published by Simon & Schuster’s international companies in Australia, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom.
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Paperback Row – The New York Times
Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
BETTER LIVING THROUGH CRITICISM: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, by A.O. Scott. (Penguin, $17.) The author, a co-chief film critic for The New York Times, reconsiders the relationship between criticism and the art it assesses; rather than art’s antithesis, such evaluations are part and parcel of the creative process. “Criticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood,” Scott writes.
DREAM CITIES: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World, by Wade Graham. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) Graham chronicles the familiar institutions around which the world’s cities are organized — including shopping malls, monuments and suburbs — and profiles the designers and planners who imagined them. Cities, in his view, are best seen as “expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live.”
A MOTHER’S RECKONING: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, by Sue Klebold. (Broadway, $16.) Klebold, the mother of one of the teenagers who killed 13 other people and themselves at Columbine High School in 1999, approaches her book gingerly: Aware that the project could draw ire or claims of insensitivity, she uses it to warn about mental illness and consider what could have been done to prevent the tragedy.
THE BRICKS THAT BUILT THE HOUSES, by Kate Tempest. (Bloomsbury, $16.) Tempest, a spoken-word poet and a rapper, reprises characters from earlier work in this, her debut novel. Harry is socking away money for the future by dealing cocaine to the wealthy, while Becky, an aspiring dancer, works as a masseuse. Tempest turns her ear for language to their love story, as well as the characters that surround them. “The cumulative effect is deeply affecting: cinematic in scope; touching in its empathic humanity,” our reviewer, Sam Byers, wrote.
ALL THINGS CEASE TO APPEAR, by Elizabeth Brundage. (Vintage, $15.95.) How much tragedy can one farmhouse hold? When Catherine Clare, a college professor’s wife in small-town New York, is murdered in her bed, it recalls an earlier trauma at the house: an incident that left three brothers orphaned. Brundage unspools stories of the Clares’ marriage and their home in this masterly thriller.
ONLY THE ANIMALS: Stories, by Ceridwen Dovey. (Picador, $18.) Dovey’s narrators are the souls of animals linked to artists and writers, including a dolphin with an affinity for Ted Hughes. In these “tragic but knowing” tales, “the wronged do not howl at their executioners as much as hold their actions in the light, and accept their place in history,” our reviewer, Megan Mayhew Bergman, wrote.
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February 12, 2017
PRH Employees Unite for Company Week
In what may have been the biggest team-building program ever in publishing, more than 1,400 Penguin Random House employees took part in PRH’s first Company Week (January 9–13) at the publisher’s two New York City offices as well as at sites around the city.
The event featured dozens of presentations from company employees that highlighted either some aspect of the publisher’s business or an area of personal interest. Jeff Weber, v-p and director of online and digital sales, for instance, gave a well-attended talk on what Amazon may have in mind for its bookstores.
Authors were also on hand to elaborate on the topics of their books. For example, at Brooklyn’s Museum of Food and Drink (MoFaD), Deb Perelman, author of Smitten Kitchen, gave a one-hour cooking demonstration and Ballantine author Jenny Rosenstrach signed copies of her cookbook How to Celebrate Everything after her presentation.
Company Week was first conceived by executive v-p of corporate communications Claire Von Schilling, who quickly got the support of CEO Markus Dohle. A team drawn from Dohle’s office, corporate communications, and human resources put together the program, which also featured a company-wide party at Pier 60 on January 12. January 13 was a day of service in which PRH employees were encouraged to volunteer to help out with a project of their choosing or to sign up for a PRH-organized project.
“For me, this Penguin Random House Company Week was a terrific opportunity for us to bring our company even closer together, to build even more and deeper relationships among colleagues, and to recognize and celebrate all the talent under our roof,” Dohle told PW. Von Schilling said that, due to the amount of positive feedback she received, PRH is committed to holding the event again sometime in 2018.
A version of this article appeared in the 02/13/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: PRH Employees Unite for Company Week
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Worst Page Turner (Quarterfinal 2-Last Chance to Vote)
What is the most terrible book that you just couldn't stop reading?
I know the quarterfinal turnaround is fast (and the posts are clogging up our regularly scheduled programming) but it is already almost time to take down quarterfinal number two, post results, and put up number three.
All of this will happen tomorrow.
So today is your last chance to vote on which of our titles will go on to the semifinal round. Don't forget you get three (3) votes, but that there is no ranking, so using as few votes as possible is better.
The poll itself is in the lower left at the bottom of the side menus.
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Neil Gaiman on His ‘Norse Mythology,’ in Which Odin Wants a Wall
It’s of a piece with what Mr. Gaiman likes to do: find something he thinks is interesting and see where it leads him. His work reflects his restless spirit, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, children’s books, adult books, comic books, screenplays, short stories, essays and poetry. His best-known books include “Neverwhere,” an urban fantasy about a place beneath London for those who fall through the cracks of the regular city; and the deliciously creepy “Coraline,” a children’s book about a girl who stumbles upon what seems to be, but is not, an ideal alternative family.
Why these particular myths and not, say, Greek ones? Mr. Gaiman, who was introduced to the Norse tales through Marvel’s Mighty Thor comic books as a child in England in the 1960s, was attracted, partly, by their flawed protagonists and satisfyingly dark worldview.
“Greek myths are full of sex and peacocks,” he told the audience. “There’s lots of sitting outside and falling in love with your own reflection. No one’s doing that in Norse mythology. You sit outside in the winter, you’re dead.”
His new book starts with the beginning of the world and ends with its destruction by ice and fire and darkness before hope is restored, gingerly and tentatively, with the beginnings of a new earth from the ruins of the old one. Its message seems relevant just now.
“If there’s anything that a study of history tells us, it’s that things get can get worse, and also that when people thought they were in end times, they weren’t,” Mr. Gaiman said in an interview this winter. Dressed in black, the only color he ever wears, he had stopped in his publisher’s office in New York in the middle of some dizzying, multicontinental logistical arrangements ending with, “and then we’re going to Australia for a few months.”
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Mr. Gaiman, 56, said he approached the myths as a musician might do if recording cover versions of 1950s folk songs, or as the comedians do with the central joke in the movie “The Aristocrats.” The basic story is there, but how you manage the details is up to you.
So he included emotions, motivations, snappy dialogue, sly Gaimanian flourishes. He spruced up the roles of the goddesses, who are traditionally poorly treated by the sexist gods but who stand up for themselves in his telling. (“What kind of person do you think I am?” the goddess Freya asks, when she hears about a dubious deal to marry her off to an ogre.)
“I’m trying to write a book that a Norse scholar is not going to go, ‘He’s got it so completely wrong,’” Mr. Gaiman said. “But I’m not telling it for a Norse scholar. What I want to do is tell you the story and make it work as a story.”
He has a great many things going on. He has a young son with his wife, the American singer Amanda Palmer, who matches him for antic subversion. He recently finished writing the scripts for “Good Omens,” a six-part series based on the novel he wrote with Terry Pratchett; the series is to appear on Amazon Prime and the BBC next year. There’s also the eagerly awaited series based on his best-selling book “American Gods,” for which Mr. Gaiman serves as executive producer and which will be broadcast on Starz this year.
His novel-in-progress is a sequel to “Neverwhere.” Just as that book was a “way of talking about homelessness and mental illness and the dispossessed without really talking about them,” he said in the interview, the new work will partly be about the plight of refugees in a city struggling to adjust at a bewildering moment.
“London post-Brexit, and the world, are in a horrible, messy state,” he said, referring to Britain’s vote to exit the European Union. “I can take all the anger that I feel and put it into a book.”
At the Town Hall appearance, Mr. Gaiman treated fans to the official trailer from “American Gods,” as well as to the trailer for a forthcoming movie based on an old short story he wrote called “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” (“It’s the finest Romeo and Juliet story with punks and aliens set in 1977 in Croydon that has ever been made,” he declared.)
The crowd, hundreds of people clutching old books for the author to sign afterward, loved those things, and they loved Mr. Gaiman’s Q. and A. with questions submitted by the audience.
And so he talked about Ragnarok, or the end of the world, as portrayed in the Norse myths. He talked about his great friend Mr. Pratchett, who wrote the “Discworld” novels and died in 2015.
He talked about his first book, a rock biography of Duran Duran. And then someone asked him what he wanted for his epitaph.
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He thought about that for a moment. “We don’t know if he’s actually under here,” he said.
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March’ Trilogy Powers Diamond Book Distributors to a Strong Year
Although 2016 wasn’t the best year ever at Diamond Book Distributors, which distributes graphic novels, books, and pop culture merchandise to the book trade, it came pretty close. “It’s wasn’t our best year,” said Kuo-yu Liang, v-p of sales and marketing at DBD. “That was 2013. But 2016 was just a hair short of that year [and] it was our best year ever in the U.K. market.”
DBD distributes the graphic novels of 40–50 publishers—among them Dynamite Entertainment, Oni Press, Valiant, and Z2 Comics—in North America. DBD is also the exclusive U.K. distributor of Boom Studios, DC Entertainment, Fantagraphics, and other houses.
Last year at this time, Liang predicted that the third and final volume of March (Top Shelf), Rep. John Lewis’s graphic memoir of the civil rights movement, would be “the biggest book of the year,” and it turned out to be “even bigger than I thought it would be.” Not only was it a bestseller but it won the comics industry’s Eisner Award (for the second volume), the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (for the third), and an unprecedented four literary awards at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Atlanta. The series nearly sold out after President Donald Trump criticized Lewis, prompting many people to get it to show their support of the civil rights icon.
Other graphic novels that did well in 2016 included Monstress by Marjorie Liu and artist Sana Takeda (Image), a steampunk fantasy about a teenage girl with mysterious psychic power. “It’s been out a year and sales are climbing,” Liang said. He also cited Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s Paper Girls (Image), a time-traveling sci-fi adventure “whose sales numbers are phenomenal, driven by word of mouth.” Backlist bestsellers last year, Liang said, included the Walking Dead graphic novels (Image), Brian K. Vaughan’s Saga (Image), and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (DC).
The most exciting development in 2016 was acceptance of graphic novel by independent booksellers, retailers who have generally been cautious, if not skeptical, in embracing graphic novels and manga, unlike national bookstore chains. After “10 years of missionary work to convince indie retailers to sell graphic novels and manga,” Liang said, the category has reached an informal milestone. After attending this year’s ABA Winter Institute, Liang reported that “graphic novels have officially reached acceptance by independent booksellers.” He explained: “There were more than 600 booksellers at the Winter Institute, and all of them said they were selling graphic novels of some kind—either superhero comics, graphic memoirs, or something. Now we get questions about how to sell them better.”
Another area of growth in 2016 was DBD’s international business, which Liang said had a “big year.” He noted: “The main challenges are problems with the currency exchange or civil wars.” Sales, he said, were good in Latin America, specifically Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico. Eastern Europe, he said, “is a bright spot,” with Romania and Poland doing well, in addition to markets in the Australia, India, Turkey, and the U.K. that “are growing fast.”
Looking ahead, Liang cited several graphic novels he expects to do well: Afar (Image), a fantasy series by Leila del Duca and Kit Seaton; Jo Kelly and Ilya’s Kid Savage (Image), a sci-fi adventure; Princess Princess Ever After by Katie O’Neill (Oni), an alternative fairy tale in which a dark-skinned princess with a Mohawk comes to the aid of a grateful white princess; and Snotgirl by Bryan Lee O’Malley and Leslie Hung (Image), the story of a fashion blogger with terrible allergies.
And though Liang was “disappointed” that the New York Times announced it would drop its graphic books bestseller lists in January, he said that retailers at the Winter Institute “didn’t care about the Times bestseller lists.” He added: “They said having knowledgeable staff was more important, and praised services like Indie Next [the indie bestseller list] and Edelweiss [the online book catalogue service], which let booksellers see what other stores are saying about graphic novels. They were far more interested in reviews and old-school publicity than the Times lists.”
A version of this article appeared in the 02/13/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: It Was the Year of March at Diamond Book Distributors
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Worst Page Turner (Results- Quarterfinals 1)
The "top" four titles will go on to our semifinal round. While I was personally shocked to see Catcher in the Rye do so well (I can understand people not liking it or not being able to put it down, but not both), I admit to being relieved that it missed the cut off.
Stay tuned! The third quarterfinal will be going up just a little later today.
Results in text form below
50 Shades of Grey-E.L. James 72 41.86%
The Fault in Our Stars-J. Green 37 21.51%
Sookie Stackhouse Series- C. Harris 22 12.79%
Gone Girl-G Flynn 16 9.3%
Catcher in the Rye J.Salinger 10 5.81%
American Psycho-B.E. Ellis 8 4.65%
Stranger in a Strange Land-R. Heinlein 7 4.07%
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In This Novel, the Twin Towers Reappear in the Badlands
Credit
Erik Carter
SHADOWBAHN
By Steve Erickson
300 pp. Blue Rider Press. $27.
It’s hard to know where to begin. Steve Erickson’s 10th (10th!) novel is: compassionate, weird, unpredictable, jaunty. It’s sad, and it’s droll and sometimes it’s gorgeous. Some readers will be confused by its “plot” until realizing there’s little point trying to figure out what exactly is going on. Others will find their footing in Erickson’s supremely engaging interest in the landscape of American music. I wouldn’t be surprised if people reading only the flap copy are put off by its synopsis: The twin towers reappear intact in the Dakota badlands 20 years after their fall, inhabited only by Elvis Presley’s stillborn twin brother, now an adult, who is traumatized for being the one who survived. This is too bad, since “Shadowbahn” is 9,000 times less hokey and more gratifying — more provocative and challenging — than this summary suggests. It’s really not a novel in which (snore) A and B do X, Y, Z. It’s more like a polyphonic dirge for an America that has perhaps never lived anywhere but in the imagination of those of us who keep fighting for it anyway.
More on that in a second. But first, an admission that contravenes my sense that there is no such thing as an ideal reader: I am probably not the ideal reader for this novel. My knowledge of American music is dilettante, which feels like a handicap when confronting the novel’s multiple allusions — some overt, some oblique — to the American songscape. Throughout, we are offered snippets of lyrics, song titles and biographies of musicians who are never named. If “Shadowbahn” reads like a playlist of American experience in the aftermath of Sept. 11, it also offers up, literally, a playlist of songs curated by one of the novel’s more arresting figures. (Let’s call him the D.J.) He organizes his music according to a logic of his own, then tells us about it in passages that are often astonishingly sad and elegant. Here, about John Coltrane’s “Naima”:
It is “a song of both morning and mourning, . . . beginning with a saxophone’s outburst that settles into prayer before the piano’s benediction. The tension lies not in whether brass or ivory will dominate the other but which will succeed in achieving oblivion — a song about what and who will be the last left standing not in victory but bleeding abandonment, envying the vanquished.”
Lovely, right? Even if you don’t know “Naima,” though much more rewarding if you do. Which is why “Shadowbahn,” which should have taken me about a week to read, actually took two months. Because of course I had to track down every song and listen to it and rethink its action and place in the archive of song — the towers of song, as Erickson would have it — that chronicles our growing up as a country. Personally, I found this journey through decades of music almost as much fun as reading the novel, which means I might be its ideal reader after all.
There are twinnings all over “Shadowbahn.” Twin towers, twin brothers, twin playlists and twin realities — ours and the one Erickson develops for us: an alt-history that redefines the trajectory of American music and the country. In this version of things, there is no Elvis (thus no Beatles). Paul dies instead of John. Kennedy does not win the presidency. Thus, perhaps, no attack on the twin towers 40 years later. Here, history is about timing and chance. One hundred feet to the left and the world’s a different place — for better or worse.
What is less alt and more depressingly plausible is what Erickson envisions for our future: There is no country anymore. There is Union and Disunion. There is no music. As the D.J. finds out in the wake of Sept. 11, “there wasn’t a single song worthy of the event or undiminished by it, or that didn’t diminish the event in return.” Why? Because the 21st century is about oblivion — a subject about which the United States is ill prepared to sing. Instead, there are factions petitioning to patent “America.” And there are siblings, one white, one black, who cross the country listening to their father’s playlist. Parker and Zema, 23 and 15, who have decided to make the long drive across a ruptured nation to see their mother. The trip is scary — they are frequently lost — but mostly it is moving for the way it allows them to reckon with each other and themselves. As Zema’s saxophone teacher once put it: “Confusion is the future. Embrace the confusion.” And so she does, though her attitude can do nothing to mitigate the cultural bias levied against her. For being interracial siblings, Parker and Zema are both a lightning rod for the country’s racism and a last vestige of its music. By turns, they represent the end of an America that values diversity and multiculturalism.
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And so, everything is on the run. Our music, our ideals, even our daylight. Especially in “that America which claims to be most American by desecrating everything America is supposed to be.” In this novel, Erickson has mobilized so much of what feels pressing and urgent about the fractured state of the country in a way that feels fresh and not entirely hopeless, if only because the exercise of art in opposition to complacent thought can never be hopeless. Even so, “Shadowbahn,” written well before the 2016 election, feels alarmingly prescient. And sad. From the playlist:
“Tracks 22 and 23: ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ and ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.’ The first because any national discography that excludes it invalidates itself, and the second because when the singer sings, As I walk this land of broken dreams, it becomes clear that the thing breaking his heart is the very land itself that he walks.”
Toward the end of the novel, the D.J. fixates on a lyric from (it turns out) Laurie Anderson’s 1981 hit “O Superman”: “Here come the planes, so you better — ” He can’t remember what comes next, which all but demands those of us unfamiliar with the song to go find out. Today, “O Superman” feels like eight and a half minutes of despair regarding where we are as a country. It’s impossible to hear “Here come the planes, so you better get ready, ready to go” without thinking about Sept. 11. It’s impossible to hear “They’re American planes. Made in America. Smoking, or nonsmoking?” without feeling a little sick to your stomach. More devastating, one of the voices in “O Superman” might well be the voice of America leaving its message: “This is the hand, the hand that takes”; meantime, in the background: ha ha ha ha ha. A ha that never stops until the song is over. The mockery, longing and disillusionment of this music are splashed all over “Shadowbahn.” More than 30 years later, “O Superman” still feels apt. The same can be said of this novel. In 2017, it reads like an answer to and sanctuary from the American Century to come.
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Knopf to Publish Memoir of a Father’s Loss
On May 17, 2015, Jayson Greene was the loving father of a two-year-old daughter, Greta. The next day, after a piece of a windowsill in disrepair fell on her head from eight stories above, Greta was dead. The accident made the New York Times.
Greene, a senior editor at the digital music magazine Pitchfork, was 33 at the time. He and his wife, Stacy, were shattered. To go on, he did the only thing he could to try to process his loss: write.
“I was writing thoughts down in the days immediately following her accident,” Greene said. “I’m a person of words. They’re the way I process everything. Writing was a way not to be blinded by grief, and to maintain a connection with Greta as my wife and I went about our lives. I honestly believe it kept me alive.”
The journal he kept, Greene said, was never meant to become a book—although his mother suggested the idea to him after he shared his writing with her. But he did publish an op-ed in the New York Times, entitled “Children Don’t Always Live,” in October 2016. When agent Anna Sproul-Latimer of the Ross Yoon agency read it, she knew she had to help it become a book.
“It was some of the best writing I’ve seen about grief,” Sproul-Latimer said, adding that she represents “a lot of writing in this space,” including that of an organization dedicated to confronting and normalizing loss and mortality called the Order of the Good Death. “There was something about the particularity and the energy and the humor in his writing that shouldn’t work but did. It really arrested me.”
As a result, Sproul-Latimer took a trip from Washington, D.C., to New York specifically to meet with Greene, using a classic cover. “I did the little ‘I happened to be in the neighborhood’ thing,” she said. “We talked about how we both thought there wasn’t enough space in the zeitgeist for people interested in talking about grief.”
Determined to make that space, Greene began work on writing a manuscript called Once More We Saw Stars, while Sproul-Latimer sold world rights to Knopf editor Jordan Pavlin. (The manuscript has since been picked up by Spectrum in Holland and Hodder in the U.K.) The book is tentatively due to release in March 2019.
In her cover letter pitching the book, Sproul-Latimer compared Greene to a handful of creative heavyweights, noting that the book combined “Paul Kalanithi’s intellect with John Green’s curiosity, Louis CK’s rueful melancholy with Jim Henson’s sweetness.”
Pavlin saw something similar. “I cried my eyes out reading his proposal, and yet came away from it uplifted and changed,” she said. “I think that is how I expect that other readers will respond to this work. You walk away from not only the story but the particular way in which Jayson tells it—which is partly the result of his gift as a writer and of his gifts as a human being—with a heightened awareness of the fragility of life but also the unconquerable power of love. That is a remarkable literary feat, and an existential feat.”
Greene—whose second child with Stacy, a son, is less than a year old—is halfway through the manuscript for Stars, which, when finished, should total around 70,000 words. Greene hopes to share his experiences with others in similar circumstances, he said, in order to help them feel a little bit less alone in the universe.
“It wasn’t just for me to live in privacy and silence—I wanted it to mean something in the world,” Greene said. “And I wanted it very badly not to be a book about anguish. Anguish is in it, but it’s not about anguish. I wrote this book in some ways because my family survived. Greta is gone, but she’s still with us. I want the book to be life-affirming and hopeful, because I’m alive to write it. And I think that’s important.”
CORRECTION: This article initially used an early version of the manuscript's name, and mistakenly attributed foreign rights. We regret the error.
A version of this article appeared in the 02/13/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Knopf to Publish Memoir of a Father’s Loss
The post Knopf to Publish Memoir of a Father’s Loss appeared first on Art of Conversation.
