What My Writing Needed Was Failure

By Diana Friedman

In 1971, my mother published her first book—a Dell Pocketbook guide to employment for female liberal arts graduates. I spent my childhood watching her hunch over her typewriter, pitch agents, celebrate acceptances, revel in the arrival of her galleys. When she was assigned a television script in my junior year of high school, I helped her write an episode of Knot’s Landing. I never once questioned that I, too, would become a writer.

But when my high school teacher slap...