Agent: Tell me why I hate your book.

I’m reading Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature by Charles Baxter, and finding it fascinating.

It’s a series of essays on writing and the writers life. So far, the first two are important discussions of two mechanics of writing, the third on lushness I didn’t find all that compelling, but then the next three essays on the writer’s life are great.

In particular, there’s the following gem where he sends his first novel to an agent he has somehow connected with (he doesn’t say other than it was convoluted). And, as we all have experienced, he is waiting for her reply. When he doesn’t hear from her, he calls:

I heard her taking a breath. “I hate it,” she said, with what seemed to be an odd satisfaction expressed with deadening calm.

“You hate it?” My mouth had turned instantly to cotton.

“Yes, I hate it. Isn’t that puzzling? I can’t figure it out. How strange. Tell me why I hate it.”

“What?”

“Tell me why I hate your novel.”

“Julie,” I said, trying to hold my head up while the room started to spin, “I have no idea why you hate my novel.”

“Of course you do. Oh, sure, you must. You wrote it. Tell me why I hate it.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh, you must. Please. Give it a try. Help me out here. Tell me why I hate your novel. Is it the characters? Is it the plot? I just don’t get it. I don’t get any of it. So,” she said, cheerfully, “is that it? The whole thing? Is that why I hate your novel?”

That, almost word for word, is what she said to me up to that point, but I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, except for the news that naturally she no longer wanted to represent me.

A few moments later:

I mailed a copy of the manuscript to a literary-minded friend on the West Coast—he’s now a book reviewer there—who said to me over the phone a couple of weeks later, “Charlie, maybe your imagination is poisoned right at the source.”

The condition into which I fell seemed to have no bottom layer. I just kept falling. I believed that I knew what I wanted to do with my life. However, I would not be allowed to do it in the way that I had imagined.

People seemed to dislike what I produced and could not be persuaded to like it. I carried around within me stories that had, I thought, an aura to them. But these stories struck no chords in anyone else. No one heard the chords, and no one saw the aura. I thought I was reasonably smart. At least: smart enough. And reasonably talented. But none of it was working. I felt as if my nerves had moved out to the surface of my skin; I felt humiliated and exposed. At this point in my life, only my wife and my child and my job kept me anchored to the world of the living.

I believe that we have all felt this way. I also believe we’ve had an asshole in the publishing world treat us with emotionless cruelty believing they were doing us a favor. Maybe they were. Puncturing the lies we tell ourselves—especially that our early work is brilliant—is probably valuable. However, it could be done with a bit more sensitivity and less delight in the utter cruelty of, “Tell me why I hate your novel.”

The point, then, of this post is to show that as writers we don’t at first understand the loneliness of writing. It isn’t giving up a social life to sit alone for hours on end writing. It’s that when we send the product of that work, hope, and personal vulnerability and the world either does not respond or responds with cruelty, we must face it alone.