This article has been around for a while and you may not have seen it. Excerpted from My Mistake: A Memoir, by Daniel Menaker (2013), it’s a humorous recap of Menaker’s rise and fall in the biz we all love. (Right? We love it, don’t we?)
Too much here to choose a telling excerpt so I chose this, which mentions three books I have read and loved, and demonstrates, perhaps, the insanity.
[My boss] takes me to lunch and lets me know that she would like me to step aside as editor-in-chief. Why? Numbers, evidently. Prizes—lack thereof. My high salary. It comes back to me that Harry Evans, when he hired me, said, “You have five years to fook oop.” I have barely finished four years.
[My boss] is a good publisher. She knows the numbers. And my numbers, insofar as they are mine, have been mediocre, at best. Later, the numerous prizes “my” authors win look to me like the work of an ironic deity—Elizabeth Strout wins the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, Colum McCann the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, and Siddhartha Mukherjee the Pulitzer in nonfiction for his book about cancer. In the meantime, I keep wondering if there are other, more personal factors at work in my being let go, but in the end, in such situations, it doesn’t matter, does it? When it comes to corporate life, especially at its higher altitudes, factors of all kinds tend to get tangled up with each other. And it’s impossible to untangle them, and pointless, and fruitless, to try.
There are a couple of side articles you might be interested in: here’s an interview with the Paris Review, and this review in the New York Times.
I think I’ll start my next edit. Because I do love this business.
Tweet: An excerpt from a #bookbiz memoir, My Mistake. Editorial comment? I think not.
Tweet: A humorous recap of a rise and fall in the biz we all love. (Right? We love it, don’t we?)
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