Adventures in the Power of No
Bad agents, Paloma Media, pie and more pie
Above, a completely gratuitous photo, taken on the train tracks in Portland, and which I wanted to use as my author photo but the publishers went with something more authorly. The photo was taken by my daughter and the styling, such as it was (“Mom, fix your boob”) was done by daughter’s sweet sweet friend Robin, who before shooting smoothed my face with her fingertips, maybe also with oils and make-up but really, it was her touch, so light, and her speaking so softly that made me glow. Love makes you glow, remember that.
But we are here today to talk about the awesome power of no! Specifically, people telling you no, or you telling yourself no, and then everything getting all mixed up until you feel like you want to chew tin cans. I had this happen with several agents after I floated the idea of writing To the Bridge. The first one told me how much she loved my work, really, it was Didionesque, but she could not think of anyone wanting to read about a mother throwing her children from a bridge. I did not at that time bring up Susan Gates or Diane Downs or Casey Anthony, who’d been on the cover of People magazine five times that year. Instead, I thought I’d work with a different agent. He didn’t like the idea, either; he thought I should writing about sex, and after I said no to that, sent me an extremely long and complicated email in the middle of the night, a missive that started with 1970s movies references and rambled until he came to the point, which was that he had the book for me, the one he knew only I could write, and that book was, The History of Public Hair…
“Well, at least you know that door’s closed forever,” my daughter said, reading the email over my shoulder.
(I wound up working with no agent, no book deal. I had faith [if not always!] that if I did the work right, the book would see the light of day, which it did.)
The above no’s [look, I know the comma is wrong but both nos and noes look worse so] are at least straightforward and let you move on quick. Not so the passive no’s you sometimes encounter, and especially in Los Angeles, a place where no one wants to tell you no because, well, you never know. One of my first big features for the LA Weekly garnered a lot of attention and people wanting to option it. I went with a guy who was funny and kind of bro-ish, a Boston dude who’d played hockey in college. He gave me $500 in option money and said, in a month (or whatever) we’d get going on the project. A month turned into two, then five, and I finally bugged him enough that he had me come to his spanking new production company in Venice, whoo doggie, it was sweet, lots of parabolic curves and white laminate. Yeah, he’s telling me, things are really moving, really hot. Cool cool cool, and my project? Well, he said, that’s not going to happen. When I asked him why he hadn’t just told me as much on the phone instead of having me drive out, he said he figured when he hadn’t called me back the first few times, I’d understand, it was no. He went on to be a big success, btw. Not so much the would-be producer who said he was passing on my script suggestion and then tried to market it as his own, and who would later get an ignominious write-up in the NYT for, among other things, hiring a fake rabbi to perform his wedding. Listen, I have a whole book of LA essays coming to you soon, in various forms, and which I just now see I recorded the intro to a few years back, I miss my old office.
The new recording-and-in-various forms will take place in the new office/studio, aka, Paloma Media. You’ve seen videos from here (there’s a whole YouTube channel, go subscribe!), including last week when Yael Bar tur and I got in there to talk about policing issues, a topic which, for better and worse, has a fuck-ton of currency these days.
Notice how bad the lighting is? How tin-canny the sound? These plus 968 other issues need to be addressed as we build out the studio, amp up the content, gather it all into a one-stop-shop, it’s a glob and a mess right now but so was the book, which I needed to write because I disagreed with and maybe even disdained something else the first agent said: that there was no reason to look into why a mother kills her children because there could only be two reasons: evil or crazy. This turned out to be the opinion, too, of the sentencing judge, as well as the father of the children, which he voiced in court. The latter, well, let’s just say if he told you water is wet, you better check. The judge had no excuse for being this incurious, and to circle this back to Paloma, is there a reason that it must be built? No, but also, yes! As I wrote this morning to someone who wants to work with us:
I want to try pretty hard to not cater to an appetite on one or the other side of the spectrum, mostly because the idea that there are sides is so annoying; there are innumerable ways to see the world and the last thing I want to do is shout at people. I want to make more good stuff and, with luck, that will appeal to people in ways we might not have predicted. People I believe are ready to not be constantly agitated and used as props in other people's agenda, here, have a nice piece of cherry pie.
Speaking of, a resounding, “Yes we can!” to this pro-pie Opinion piece in the Washington Post.
Some other good reads/listens from this week:
What’s Wrong with Lingerie? A progressive rebrand at Victoria’s Secret forgets one thing: sex, by Kat Rosenfield
The Pursuit of Happiness: Arthur Brooks and Yascha Mounk unravel the elusive science of living happily
Robin DiAngelo Is Very Disappointed in the White People Making Her Rich: Nice Racism—and the anti-racism consulting business—rakes in the bucks while losing hearts and minds, by Matt Welch.
Speaking of Welch, he took me to a Angels-Yankees game and that was an absolutely phenomenal thing, starting with getting off the train and right into the soup of life on a hot steamy night in the Bronx, meeting painter Craig Mahoney, the green green field, the slushy margaritas, the adorable hecklers, the beautiful beautiful people (Liz Wolfe!), the happiness.
Until soon, a figurative slice of cherry pie (premium subscribers, your seasonal baking boxes from me will be arriving any minute!), plus love and rockets xx
