by Annie Scholl
As a little girl, Betsy Lerner brought a blanket, pillows, and a lamp and set up in a crawl space beneath the stairs where she could write in her diaries.
“I felt alienated by my own family. The impulse was to cope with feelings of loneliness and confusion,” said Lerner, an agent and author whose novel, Shred Sisters, was published October 1 this year by Grove Press. “Writing for me has always been just a coping mechanism.”
Lerner, who grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, was four when her two-year-old sister died.
“At the time, there were no grief groups and no public awareness of how important it was to grieve. I think my parents thought they were doing the best thing by taking away all of her pictures and never talking about it again,” she said. “We kept that family secret, and it wound up being really toxic.”
Throughout it all, including her tumultuous teen years, she wrote — even winning a prize for her poetry while in high school. “I probably always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t connect that somebody from my family could become a published author. To me, the Grand Canyon was between those two things. They were that far apart.”
She graduated college with a degree in English but couldn’t type fast enough to pass the typing tests needed to get a job in publishing. She worked for two years at an investment bank and then got accepted into a poetry workshop taught by celebrated poet, Jorie Graham. “She was a very generous and brilliant teacher,” Lerner said. “I began putting my little poetry fragments together, with her help, into long, full-length poems.”
Lerner was thrilled when she was accepted into Columbia University’s MFA in poetry program. “I thought my future was set. Unbeknownst to me that was far from the truth.”
During graduate school, she struggled with profound depression and was hospitalized for six months. When she went back to school to finish her degree, she got a part-time job in a literary agency. That’s when she saw a career path open for her. “I fell in love with the environment,” she said. “There were book jackets tacked up all over the walls, and the file cabinets were overflowing with correspondence to writers. I found it so exciting. I knew that that was something I hoped to be able to do with my life.”
Out of graduate school, Lerner won an internship with Simon and Schuster — a guaranteed job for a year where she would rotate into the different departments. “It was a fantastic education about how the publishing process works,” she said. Lerner climbed the editorial ladder. She worked as an editor for 15 years including at Houghton Mifflin, Ballantine, and Doubleday before becoming an agent. She’s now a partner with Dunow, Carlson and Lerner Literary Agency.
And she accomplished her dream of becoming a writer many times over. Lerner is the author of The Bridge Ladies, The Forest for the Trees and Food and Loathing. She also co-authored (with Temple Grandin) the New York Times bestseller Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions. Her debut novel, Shred Sisters, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Earlier this month, she talked to The Sunlight Press about her journey as a writer and editor.
What inspired you to write this novel?
When I started to write the novel, I had no plan to do it. I just started and it took off for me. I started writing one hour, two hours, up to four or five hours a day for seven months. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it except my husband (John Donatich, director of Yale University Press). I put no pressure on myself to complete it. I’ve always said that writing was my imaginary friend, and I had a new imaginary friend, and I was happy. I loved working on it.
I’d also just come off a very big, complicated nonfiction book with a lot of papers and facts and footnotes, and it was a very heavy lift. I found writing the fiction to just be so liberating because I didn’t have to look anything up. I just could write whatever I could make up, and it just was all inside me. Even though I hadn’t written fiction before, I had written seven screenplays — none of them produced — but I taught myself how to write plot. I also kept a blog for over 10 years, and that helped me develop a voice. Editing books for 30 years taught me a lot about writing and structure. All that work, all those pages, it all came together for me. Sometimes people hear I wrote it in seven months, but I like to say, yeah, 40 years in seven months.
Shred Sisters was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It’s also received other accolades, such as New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. What’s that like for you as a writer? Do you care about the accolades?
Yeah. I always used to say to my writers, do you want to be a prize winner or a bestseller? Obviously, you want to be both, but it’s very hard as a literary writer to become a bestseller. I would always choose bestseller because I want to reach as many people as possible. It’s always great to have encouragement, whatever form it comes in — one reader telling you they cried or one fan letter, one email. It’s just connecting.
I’ve also dealt with a lot of rejection. It’s almost much more important how you deal with rejection because it stops a lot of people in their tracks. I’ve never let it stop me. I’ve certainly licked my wounds and had months where I didn’t write very much. But at the end of the day, if you have to write, you have to write, and you do, and that’s what you do.
Tell me about your writing practice.
I’m not at all precious about writing, and I don’t need a special time or a special room or a special moment. I just like to do it. I’m happiest when I’m writing. I get up at five and I write until nine. That’s my best day. If I can have a stretch of those days, then I’m really happy. Sometimes at night I’ll look over what I did and make little edits, but I can also write on a train, and I can write in the afternoon if the morning gets shot. I also work a full-time job, so I am writing around my day job. But I give myself the first hours of the day, and that’s been the best thing for me before anybody else gets in my head, before anything throws me off my game.
What advice would you give to writers seeking an agent for the first time?
The most important thing is that the work is ready, that it’s the best evolution of whatever manuscript you’re working on that it can possibly be. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is submitting their book before it’s good enough. You can’t really ask your loved ones to read your work. They’re never going to be honest, and they’re not particularly skilled. So, you want to get into a writer’s group or a class and get feedback and find out what’s working and what’s not working, and be willing to write many, many drafts and be willing to put something aside and keep going. The test of the metal of any writer is how much work they are willing to put in.
At 64, what’s left that you want to conquer?
I’m working on another book. I still hope to adapt something I write one day as a screenplay. That’s still my dream. I got kicked out of film school my freshman year, and I became an English major, but I’ve never stopped wanting that. I want to keep going. I feel like I’m just getting started.
Any other messages for writers?
What really matters is that you have to write. A lot of people want to write, and a lot of people make stabs at it, which is fine. I don’t want to use the word ‘calling’ — that to me is a little highfalutin — but it’s something you have to do. One of my pet peeves is when people say, ‘I have to make myself write.’ I’ve never had to make myself write. I sometimes think that writer’s block is a good thing. Maybe you’re just going internal for a while, or maybe you’re simply not ready to write what you really need to write.
Image: “Vintage Typewriter” by Memphis CVB via Flickr
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