In retrospect, I could’ve handled the situation more professionally, but I’ve never claimed to be a good editorial assistant. My gasp must’ve come out louder than I intended because a crowd of colleagues assembled around my cubicle. They held the slides now scattered over my desk up to the light howling that the garden editor “isn’t a real redhead after all.”
It was at that exact moment that Editor in Chief walked by and set her Siberian husky–like eyes on me as if I were some game animal she wanted to mount to the wall of her Pelham colonial.
She tried to have me fired for being “indiscreet” and embarrassing the garden editor. Luckily, the managing editor took pity on me (or anticipated a workplace lawsuit) and talked the editor in chief out of it.
I needed the paycheck and the health insurance, but part of me wished she had fired me so I could’ve filed for unemployment. My roommate at the time had just landed a real writing gig at Variety after being laid off from his job at AOL’s Moviefone. (He’d imitated the languid voice that reads showtimes: “To file for unemployment, press 1. To clear out your cubicle, press 2 …”) I envisioned parlaying unemployment into writing an explosive tell-all in New York magazine or the New York Observer called “The Garden Editor’s Bush.”
I knew my time at House & Garden was up when James Truman, the Condé Nast editorial director who would soon resign to bum around Andalusia and continue his studies with Tibetan Buddhists, flipped through a rough copy of the May issue and instructed Editor in Chief to swap out the cover story for a tiny blurb I wrote on a Chelsea flower shop that stuffed carnations into discarded Café Bustelo cans. This so infuriated Editor in Chief that she sent around a note reminding the entire staff (cc’ing me) that editorial assistants should under no circumstances be allowed to write.
I printed out the email and tucked it in my battered copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, which sat on my new IKEA bookshelf along with two volumes of poetry by Elizabeth Bishop and Isaac Babel’s Complete Works, which I’d borrowed from Russ and never given back.
The dunces, all in confederacy against me …
I TOOK A pay cut to work for a fancy literary agent who wore black leather pants and was on a strict South Beach diet. She’d email two words, “Protein Run,” and off I’d go to buy her hard-boiled eggs or almonds.
Every Friday we had to print out all our email correspondence from the week, and she’d hand the pages back to us on Monday marked up in red ink where she’d fixed typos and stylistic errors. Or, in my case, she explained at length why it was inappropriate to ask the agency’s clients for career advice. She had a point, but the only reason that I wanted the job was because her roster of authors included some of my journalistic heroes.
“You can do that. I mean, we all do that, but don’t ever include it in the correspondence. Duh,” another assistant in the Park Avenue office told me. She knew about my screwup because in addition to Literary Agent editing our emails, her five or so other employees all had to read each other’s marked-up correspondence. This led to grammatical shaming in the break room.
“Can you believe he used the passive voice in a message to Knopf ?” this same assistant said as she showed me how to arrange a hamburger patty on a bed of lettuce as Literary Agent liked. “You’d never think he was a Rhodes scholar.”
Just when I was starting to appreciate this semantic sadism as a useful crash course in email writing, Literary Agent fired me. She thought I’d stolen office supplies, which wasn’t technically true. She asked me to order twelve of her preferred purple highlighters and instead I’d accidentally ordered twelve cases (each of which contained ten highlighters). Paranoid she’d see this Mount Everest of purple in the tiny supply closet and erupt, I took ten of the cases home and put them under the bed figuring I’d gradually restock the office supply with this stash. But as I tried to explain this, Literary Agent just put up her hand in a please-stop-talking position. Ten years later, I was still pulling purple highlighters from underneath my bed.
I applied for assistant positions at Cosmo, the Economist, the Nation, Redbook, InStyle, House Beautiful, and Martha Stewart Living. I interviewed to be Lloyd Grove’s research assistant for his gossip column at the Daily News. (I heard he preferred young female assistants.) But he took one look at me and could tell I didn’t know East Hampton from East Rutherford.
I waited and waited, clutching a faux-leather padfolio filled with clips from the Daily Texan, in the lobby of the old Times building. A political reporter whom my sister met through a mutual friend said she’d meet with me, but she never showed. After an hour, a security guard told me I had to leave.
I scrapped around for freelance writing jobs. I reviewed Greek restaurants in Queens and wrote a story for Time Out about things you can buy for a dollar in New York. I worked part-time out of some rich lady’s Upper East Side basement fact-checking a guidebook to interior decorators that she published for her friends. I applied to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism even though it would’ve taken me the rest of my adult life to pay for a single semester. I was wait-listed. I became an early adopter of Internet trolling, blasting the whores in corporate media in manifestos that my new boyfriend (the homeless Italian with the camcorder) published on his blog. If ya can’t join ’em, troll ’em. I considered starting a dog-walking business. You know it’s bad when scooping poop off sidewalks sounds promising.
Finally, in the dead of February when I was almost broke, I went to the Strand bookstore and bought a lightly used copy of LSAT for Dummies. That same night, over a dinner of yogurt and instant ramen, I got a call from John Bussey, the foreign editor at the Wall Street Journal.
What is this gypsy passion for separation, this readiness to rush off—when we’ve just met?
—MARINA TSVETAEVA
NEW YORK CITY → TOKYO → DES MOINES, 2004–2007
The legend went that on September 11, 2001, after the second plane hit the World Trade Center, across the street the Journal’s newsroom filled with smoke and debris. Security forced everyone to evacuate, concerned that if the Twin Towers collapsed westerly, they would take the Journal with them. John Bussey refused. As reporters and editors fled to safety, Bussey crawled under a desk to report, waded into the street to talk to people, and wrote a story.
I reread his lead every September 11. “If there’s only one sight I’ll remember from the destruction of the World Trade Center, it is the flight of desperation—a headlong leap from the topmost floors by those who chose a different death than choking smoke and flame.”
Four months later, Bussey flew to Karachi where he met Danny Pearl’s pregnant wife, Mariane, and tried to negotiate the release of Pearl, the Journal’s thirty-eight-year-old South Asia bureau chief who’d been kidnapped days earlier. Instead, Bussey ended up having to watch the video of Danny’s captors beheading him.
Bussey was based in Hong Kong when he called to interview me to be the Journal’s foreign news assistant, based in New York. I don’t remember exactly what he said on that first call, but he was manic and fast-talking and unimpressed with my unimpressive résumé. My name had only gotten to Bussey because of Blythe. I was a rover filling in as the assistant to Tom Wallace, the editor in chief at Condé Nast Traveler, until he found a permanent assistant. I’d, of course, applied for the job, but a senior editor who looked at my credentials shook her head and said, “Yeah,