Oprah appeared on CBS Morning a short while ago with her new book club pick: a memoir (another) about addiction and recovery. And once again I lamented my misspent youth: reading books, living abroad, learning languages, witnessing history. In my defense, I couldn’t have known back then what would make for a marketable memoir in the 21st century.
Last February, when I learned that the Key West Literary Seminar for 2024 was going to have Florida as its theme, I immediately made plans to attend. Two months earlier the editor of The American Scholar had accepted my essay “Florida Man,” which was a defense of the state (for the most part) against the people outside it who continue to make fun of it and the writers inside it who insist on sensationalizing it. Some of the latter were listed as speakers.
I was concerned when the essay didn’t run in the summer issue. Were a massive hurricane to hit South Florida, it would render the essay meaningless. It didn’t make the autumn issue either, still leaving open the possibility of a disqualifying disaster. Finally, it appeared in the winter issue, right after Thanksgiving; the full essay went online at the end of December. I posted about it on social media, and was interviewed about it by Scott Simon on his podcast Open Book.
Last week I walked into the Key West Literary Seminar wondering if people would recognize my name, which was printed clearly on my nametag. No one did. Similarly, no one mentioned the essay in any of the sessions. My Florida Man was the Invisible Man.
Picking up the mail yesterday I discovered that the perfect antidote to the paucity of Christmas cards is a royalties check.
When your book is published in November you watch as the lists of the year’s best books – which you don’t expect to be on because yours came out too late – are quickly followed by lists of the new year’s most anticipated books.
My essay in the current issue of The American Scholar prompted one reader to write: "I never thought I'd enjoy reading about Florida." No comment could have been more successful in telling me that the essay did what I wanted it to do.
Cord Jefferson was just on CBS Morning talking about his new film American Fiction. In it, a Black writer has his latest novel rejected because, according to his editor, it’s not Black enough. So he writes another, full of all the worst Black stereotypes, and not only does his editor love it, but it becomes a bestseller.
The CBS Morning hosts discussed with the director the movie’s themes of racism, and stereotyping, but none of them mentioned what I see as one of its most important critiques: the pernicious greed of American publishing.
But then I would.