I’ve been attending the Miami Book Fair for over 20 years, and every year I see something new. Saturday I had two novel experiences, both involving the same author (not a novelist).
I arrived to her session early and bought her book. Seeing her standing nearby, I held it up, and her face broke into an expression of delight. Approaching, I told her that we had met in the authors’ lounge a few years earlier. “Tell me your name again?” she said, warmly shaking my hand. Then she asked if she could borrow the book to read from during her panel, as she had forgotten to bring a copy.
After the session she returned the book and invited me to come outside to her table, where she would sign it. I waited till her fans had gone and then stepped up to the table. “Please make it out to Joyce,” I said, giving my sister-in-law’s name.
She opened to the title page and started to write.
“Oh, you’re also a lefty who writes in the over-the-top style,” I said.
But she didn’t hear. She was engaged in conversation with her co-panelist. The subject was New Yorker rejections. It irked me that she was ignoring me to talk to her colleague, and it annoyed me even more that the discussion was one in which I could have more than held my own. I have been receiving rejections from The New Yorker since 1979. I doubted that either of them has, hanging on the wall of her office, a framed letter from William Shawn, dated February 24, 1987, informing her that he is no longer the editor of the magazine, that the new editor is Robert Gottlieb, and that she “may wish to get in touch with Mr. Gottlieb.”
But I couldn’t enter into the discussion because I had become invisible: They were on the celebrated (if rejected) writer side of the table and I wasn’t. She handed the book back – the one I had lent her one hour earlier – without even looking at me.
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