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Authors: Frances Kuffel
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made a mistake. I want it known as company policy that I sign all contract letters. Add it to the office manual and don’t let this happen again.”
“I didn’t let it happen again. Abigail took your instructions down word-for-word. We’re always taking letters and notes verbatim only to be told we did a terrible job later. Do you have any fucking idea what it’s like to try to work when everything you do is either wrong or subject to change?”
“Add it to the manual, Frances. I don’t want to discuss this any further.”
That was the second time in my two years with Alix that I’d exploded. The first time, I ran out of the office hyperventilating in an octave I didn’t know I could reach.
Having eaten instead of living with my feelings for most of my life, it’s an onerous task to sort out my reactions. I’m pretty clear about things like heartbreak and love, but strong outward emotions—such as fury and desire—and the middle ground of disappointment, being teased, and preserving boundaries—is shrouded in a fog of inexperience. Despite being Alix’s executive vice president, I couldn’t be evenhanded about that contract because I hadn’t questioned the shift in procedures when it first occurred. I couldn’t establish a working rapport because of the precedents of subservience I set up when I asked to go to the dentist or on vacation or to a funeral instead of telling her I was going. I especially had not told her that it was inappropriate to touch me. Put a couple of glasses of wine in Alix, and she was twisting my nose, stamping on my feet, insisting I hold her around the waist and hip bump in time to music. She did these things in front of our staff, colleagues, and clients. The hip-bumping incident got us thrown out of an important party.
“If we worked for Simon & Schuster,” I used to joke, “she’d be so fired.”
Within forty-eight hours of one of these scenes, I would be summoned to a meeting and told I was on the verge of being fired. It was classic hangover regrets and I knew it and I was too scared to confront any one part of it. I needed the job and Alix owned the company. What could I do?
Writing about this episode in my life is exquisitely painful because, years later, every time I binge, I dream of Alix or my former boss, Barbara. Before moving to Alix’s agency, I had worked within the irksomeness of being an outsider in Barbara’s family business, but it was nothing compared to the lack of oxygen in my shiny office twenty-some floors above Central Park. Barbara had encouraged the cultivation of promising authors, and she felt a lifetime commitment to them. Alix was interested in nursing advances but not talent, and she could be ruthless in terminating writers. I hadn’t been happy in either agency, but it couldn’t be dumb coincidence: surely, I was to blame?
I was to blame. I wasn’t a very good agent. Agents have to be ambitious. I wasn’t. The big advances that make agents successful don’t always make the writer successful, or not in the long run. I was content with smaller advances that the author had a reasonable chance of earning back, which would make a second book sale much more likely. (In fact, I instructed my own agent to be cautious in her ambitions for the sale of Passing for Thin for exactly this reason.) Such thinking was counterintuitive to these successful entrepreneurs who supported families on 15 percent rather than the salary I received. And I was burning out on the reading and demanding clients and disappointments that are inherent in the job.
It didn’t matter that I’d been fired with three months’ severance, with my own book to finish and publicize. I’d wanted to be a writer as much as I’d wanted to be thin, but everything “good” (interesting, intelligent, sociable, diligent, passionate, sensitive, funny— hireable ) about me had been a false front waiting to topple. It had finally happened. My fifteen-year career was a
“I didn’t let it happen again. Abigail took your instructions down word-for-word. We’re always taking letters and notes verbatim only to be told we did a terrible job later. Do you have any fucking idea what it’s like to try to work when everything you do is either wrong or subject to change?”
“Add it to the manual, Frances. I don’t want to discuss this any further.”
That was the second time in my two years with Alix that I’d exploded. The first time, I ran out of the office hyperventilating in an octave I didn’t know I could reach.
Having eaten instead of living with my feelings for most of my life, it’s an onerous task to sort out my reactions. I’m pretty clear about things like heartbreak and love, but strong outward emotions—such as fury and desire—and the middle ground of disappointment, being teased, and preserving boundaries—is shrouded in a fog of inexperience. Despite being Alix’s executive vice president, I couldn’t be evenhanded about that contract because I hadn’t questioned the shift in procedures when it first occurred. I couldn’t establish a working rapport because of the precedents of subservience I set up when I asked to go to the dentist or on vacation or to a funeral instead of telling her I was going. I especially had not told her that it was inappropriate to touch me. Put a couple of glasses of wine in Alix, and she was twisting my nose, stamping on my feet, insisting I hold her around the waist and hip bump in time to music. She did these things in front of our staff, colleagues, and clients. The hip-bumping incident got us thrown out of an important party.
“If we worked for Simon & Schuster,” I used to joke, “she’d be so fired.”
Within forty-eight hours of one of these scenes, I would be summoned to a meeting and told I was on the verge of being fired. It was classic hangover regrets and I knew it and I was too scared to confront any one part of it. I needed the job and Alix owned the company. What could I do?
Writing about this episode in my life is exquisitely painful because, years later, every time I binge, I dream of Alix or my former boss, Barbara. Before moving to Alix’s agency, I had worked within the irksomeness of being an outsider in Barbara’s family business, but it was nothing compared to the lack of oxygen in my shiny office twenty-some floors above Central Park. Barbara had encouraged the cultivation of promising authors, and she felt a lifetime commitment to them. Alix was interested in nursing advances but not talent, and she could be ruthless in terminating writers. I hadn’t been happy in either agency, but it couldn’t be dumb coincidence: surely, I was to blame?
I was to blame. I wasn’t a very good agent. Agents have to be ambitious. I wasn’t. The big advances that make agents successful don’t always make the writer successful, or not in the long run. I was content with smaller advances that the author had a reasonable chance of earning back, which would make a second book sale much more likely. (In fact, I instructed my own agent to be cautious in her ambitions for the sale of Passing for Thin for exactly this reason.) Such thinking was counterintuitive to these successful entrepreneurs who supported families on 15 percent rather than the salary I received. And I was burning out on the reading and demanding clients and disappointments that are inherent in the job.
It didn’t matter that I’d been fired with three months’ severance, with my own book to finish and publicize. I’d wanted to be a writer as much as I’d wanted to be thin, but everything “good” (interesting, intelligent, sociable, diligent, passionate, sensitive, funny— hireable ) about me had been a false front waiting to topple. It had finally happened. My fifteen-year career was a
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