“It can be, but—”
“Literary nonfiction is played out, Pete. The market was simply glutted after Angela’s Ashes. Every dysfunctional European immigrant was writing his or her horrid memoirs. You aren’t Irish, are you?”
“English and Dutch, mostly.” That makes me Dunglish or Englutch, an American mutt.
“Did your Da leave you?”
No, and that in itself is a tragedy. “No.”
“Then you’re not dysfunctional enough.”
“My mother did.” And that was a miracle.
“Yeah? When?”
“Back in seventy-five.”
“Hmm. Liberated herself before the Bicentennial.” He shakes his head and sighs, cutting the air with my synopsis. “I get the ‘seasons of my life’ thing, Pete, and I’m sure there will be a flood of seventies books coming out, but this just isn’t something Desiree Holland would write and you know it.”
The fact is, Desiree Holland—my pen name—hasn’t published a book in more than five years. The hands behind her career have been playing solitaire, hearts, spades, and gin rummy on his computer while living on whiskey sours instead of writing anything of substance.
“Desiree Holland won’t be writing it, Henry.”
“She won’t?”
“I don’t want to be Desiree Holland anymore. In fact, I never wanted to be Desiree Holland in the first place.”
“You know why we had to do it that way.”
I know, but it still pisses me off. Ten years ago, the marketing department thought my novels, each with an African-American female narrator, would be taken more seriously if they were “written” by a woman with an ethnic-sounding name.
“You’re still one of America’s best-kept secrets.”
I’m not a secret—I’m nonexistent and unrecognizable. I’m tired of being a puppet and a plaything of the publishing gods at Olympus. “I want to write as Peter Rudolph Underhill from now on.”
“Too many letters, won’t fit on the cover,” he says with a laugh. “P. R. Underhill maybe. Peter R. Underhill? No, makes you sound too much like the author of a textbook. P. Rudolph Underhill? Too literary. What does Eliot say about all this?”
Eliot Eckleburg was my agent back in the halcyon days. “Nothing. We parted ways.” About five years ago. Henry is completely out of touch.
Henry frowns. “Eliot didn’t tell me about this. He’s looking great, you know. Got that laser eye surgery done—no more Coke-bottle glasses. We just had lunch last week.”
That’s one of the problems with using a pseudonym or pen name. No one knows if you’re living or dead, everyone knows little or nothing about you, the marketing department creates this monstrous lie, and you’re left outside the spotlight in the silence while your agent and editor plan your pseudonym’s career. My original contract with Olympus stated that I was Desiree Holland, writer of multicultural women’s fiction. My real name appeared nowhere on the contract until my signature at the end. No picture on the book flap, no bio, no interviews, no signings, no appearances. Yet “Desiree” has a Web site, complete with a female model posing as Desiree, and Desiree even “answers” fan mail. I am a secret with a Web site. I am the white guy writing African-American fiction using a false name the marketing department thought up over a few margaritas.
“You can’t just drop Desiree like a bad habit, Pete. Desiree has a following.”
“Five years ago maybe.”
“No, no. Her books are still selling steadily on our backlist.”
Her books. Imagine you’re a writer who can tell no one that you’re published. “What do you do for a living?” I teach high school English, and I write. “Have you ever been published?” Yes. “What have you written?” I use a pen name, so I can’t tell you. “Oh.” Then I get raised eyebrows, and the subject changes. People don’t believe you’re a published author when you tell them you have a pen name.
“We get letters all the time from people who are wondering when her next book is coming out.” He stares again at the synopsis, his red pencil dancing above the paper. “You have to write this new one from Ebony’s point of view. You’re so good at that.”
Both my narrators so far have been Ebony, and I could probably use her voice for many more years. It’s not that I hear voices when I write; they just won’t leave once I’ve let them into the conversation I’m having with the reader.
I sigh. “But, Henry, I’d really rather use my own voice this time.”
Henry blinks. “You would?”
That’s what I said, Henry. Get the ponytail out of your ears. He probably has ear wax stuck inside him older than me. “Yes.”
“You want to write a piece of African-American fiction…from a white man’s point of view.”
“In essence, yes.”
“That would be a mistake.”
“How so?”
“We’re the enemy, Pete.”
“Didn’t Updike write—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, but it was set in South America, and it’s John Updike. The man could write out his grocery list and it would be a best-seller.” He shakes his head. “No. We’ll stick with the tried and true.”
“But I don’t want—”
“Hear me out first, Pete. I think if we make some adjustments to your synopsis, we might have a Desiree Holland novel here.” He scans my synopsis, marking and circling. “Let’s see…if we have Ebony fall in love with an Italian named…Johnny…you always did like writing about Italians, and you’re not even Italian…and if we change father to mother…oh, and if we delete all this religious nonsense…romantic comedies don’t have religion in them, Pete…if we do all this, we may have another Desiree Holland original here.” He turns the synopsis around to me. “See what you think.”
I groan inwardly as I read the outline for a romantic comedy starring yet another sassy, educated, free-spirited African-American woman who loses then gains her mother’s approval in search of Mr. White who she will end up marrying on the final pages. I’d be writing the same story for the third time. Original, my ass.
I notice Henry has left the last line intact: “I have to find the best part of me that I left behind.” Sad but true. I don’t feel alive anymore. I don’t feel the rapture that I occasionally felt as a child. My outer and inner lives have no meaning. I have to go back to when I was thirteen, to the time and place where my life really had meaning and promise.
“You didn’t do anything to the last line, Henry.”
Henry smiles. “The marketing department will love that line, Pete. They’ll probably put it on the cover in big, bold, fluorescent yellow type.”
At the mention of the word “cover,” I cringe. Desiree’s first two covers were neon assaults on the human eye, book jackets that screamed in hot pinks and searing oranges at people as they entered bookstores. And the covers didn’t match the content of the pages inside. “They rarely do,” Eliot once told me. “Ninety percent of all book covers are eye candy to get the reader to pick up the book.” But is eye candy supposed to blind you?
“And we’ll have lots of nice reviews of Desiree’s work to give the new novel a critical boost,” Henry says as he opens a drawer. “Something we can’t do for the unknown P. Rudolph Underhill, right?” He pulls out a dangerously thin folder and spreads the contents in front of him.
“You could put my