July 1, 2005
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Rabbit Rabbit.
What's something that you used to do all the time as a kid and
suddenly stopped? You have still over a week to submit your little story of
looking back, fondly or not.My Dad takes
charge of my website and reminisces and you should do the same, so drop
me an email with your paragraph.
I will be taking a long break from Zulkey.com next week but never fear: I
will have the proverbial guest editor. Was it I who made fun of blogs that
have guest editors? No. Anyway, hopefully this person will provide fun and
games for you. Otherwise, just expect a daily insult, either directly or backhandedly.
Today’s interviewee is the young fiction editor of Esquire who has
recently published her acclaimed first novel, The
Coast of Akron
.
As the editor at Esquire, she has published works by Don DeLillo,
Aleksandar Hemon, Arthur Miller, Tim O'Brien, George Saunders, and Elizabeth
McCracken, among others. Bonus points if you can figure out which of those
authors I have interviewed and which have taught me in grad school.
The Adrienne Miller Interview: A Little Less Than Twenty
Questions
Not to be sycophantic, but Esquire
is my favorite among the magazines I subscribe to, in large part to its fiction
and nonfiction. It seems like men’s magazines have loftier ideals when publishing
fiction and nonfiction than women’s magazines. Do you agree?
I hear you. My God, how embarrassing and offensive are women’s magazine? There
are a couple of notable exceptions, but generally, they suck suck suck. Why
are women’s magazines so dumb? I guess first we need to ask our culture why
it hates women. Then, once we understand that, we can try to get some answers
from women’s books (in the magazine industry, magazines are called “books,”
which I’ve always found hilarious). But, anyway, yes, isn’t Esquire good?
Thank you for saying that. The magazine published “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,”
you know.
You’re just over 30: can you tell us how you came to get your gig at Esquire?
I’m not being phonily modest when I say that I’ve had incredible luck in my
jobs. Up until about a week before I graduated from college, I was planning
on going to grad school and getting an MFA in fiction. Long story short, I found
out about a job opening as an assistant at
GQ. I interviewed for the
job, shockingly got it, and moved to New York (I had nowhere to live so I stayed
in a gray-walled dorm room for my first grim couple of months). A few years
after that, the job as literary editor at
Esquire became available. I
was, looking back on it, annoyingly aggressive about pursuing the job. But it’s
all been about luck and timing for me. Thank you, luck and timing, my twin gods.
You said in an
interview with Web del Sol that in interviewing for the gig at Esquire,
you “wrote a few passionate letters that laid out all the reasons why I, naturally
must be hired as literary editor.” Do you remember what any of these reasons
were?
I don’t remember what any of the reasons were, but those reasons probably didn’t
matter all that much, to tell you the truth. I probably got the job in large
part because I’m a really good letter-writer (if I do say so myself). In fact,
letters appear to be my natural writing form. Maybe someday I’ll write an entirely
epistolary novel! Doesn’t that sounds like just what the world needs?
Do
you think you’ll still go back and get your MFA or not anytime in the near future?
Man, I don’t think that would be a good idea, for anyone.
Did your work
as fiction editor: what you saw, what you didn’t see—inspire The Coast of Akron?
Well, I’ve gotten to work on some pretty incredible stories in my time at
Esquire,
and those stories – and those writers – definitely inspired me to want to try
to excel, both as an editor and as a writer. But I do read a lot of submissions,
too, and, as any editor will tell you, most submissions aren’t very good. So
I was negatively influenced, too, if you catch my drift. For instance, I didn’t
want to write a greasily autobiographical story of the sort I often read. I
didn’t want to write about hookers (often called “whores” in slush pile parlance).
I didn’t want any trailer parks, impotence or incest. I wanted heightened language,
style, humor. I wanted a mansion and suits of armor and emus. I basically tried
to write a book that I wanted to read.
How did you make time to work
on the book?
This isn’t a very pleasant or uplifting answer, but I’ve learned to become insanely
protective of my time. I go to maybe one party a year. I wriggle out of every
social/professional engagement I possibly can. (The good news is that if you
develop a reputation as a no-show, the invitations will eventually stop coming.)
I’ve become a hideously negligent friend. I’ve learned to fear the telephone
and email. I’ve dropped every superfluous thing in my life. I’m no fun, basically.
My boyfriend agrees with the no-fun assessment, by the way.
Have you
been reading your reviews? Yes, I have been reading my reviews, and what
a bad move on my part! I don’t recommend it, and I really wish I could stop.
Nothing good can come from reading a review, as any writer knows – you take
away nothing from the stupid reviews because they’re stupid, and you take away
nothing from the good reviews because they confirm everything you already knew.
I hope I won’t read the reviews of my next book, although I doubt that I’ll
have the willpower to stop myself. It’s like reading a journal entry about yourself,
or overhearing people talk about you. You know you should look away, or stop
listening, but it’s pretty impossible to do that, not when you’re the subject.
You say in the interview with Web del Sol, “But a couple of months ago, when
I was reading over the last set of proofs, I came pretty close to having a nervous
breakdown.” Why is this?
Mainly because I just felt as if I couldn’t read it one more time. I really
just could not bring myself to read the thing again. It was as simple as that.
I felt as if I’d eaten too much. All I wanted to do was lie down.
You
also say that the book strikes you as sad now (whereas you thought it was humorous
as you were working on it.) Do you feel you’re the kind of person who enjoys
being sad once in awhile (like listening to some Elliott Smith or watching a
thoroughly depressing move) or that’s not your style?
Believe me, I have absolutely no problem tapping in to my vast reservoirs of
melancholy. But I guess I was trying to say that I didn’t want to write an entirely
melancholic novel.
How long did the entire process of writing to publishing
take?
About five years, maybe a little longer.
Have you seen any ‘revenge’
reviews by people who felt you did not do them justice in (or, not putting them
in) Esquire?
I have seen some reviews by people whose stuff I haven’t been able to use for
the magazine, or, even worse, people whose books I’ve reviewed for the magazine.
But if I were to paranoically suggest that, yes, there have been some sour-grapes
reviews, then I would also have to paranoically suggest the converse: That reviewers
who seem to like the book are only writing good reviews to suck up to Esquire!
The former scenario is very soothing to my ego, but the latter is too horrible
to contemplate. So I try not to think that way.
Do you plan to stick
with fiction or do you think you’d ever work long-form in nonfiction?
I can’t imagine doing long-form nonfiction, mainly because -- with all due respect
to the many wonderful nonfiction writers out there -- it bores me. The nonfiction
pieces I’ve written have pretty much consistently felt like school assignments
to me. This is probably my own fault as a writer, but I haven’t figured out
how to have fun with nonfiction. I think I feel stifled by the truth. Or something
like that.
Have there been any ‘big’ books in the last few years that
you felt were simply overrated?
Critics are pretty much consistently wrong about everything. You can always
count on the current critical consensus to be incorrect, so you have to love
that predictability. (One of my favorite examples is from a famous
Le Fiagro
review of
Madame Bovary: “Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer.”) Whenever
a book – or a movie or a CD or a play or whatever -- is given an unambiguous
critical lollipop, the contrarian in me suspects that it is so middlebrow and
schmaltzy that it will send me either to bed, or to the toilet. The contrarian
in me usually, but not always, proven right.
You’re from Ohio and you
write about Ohio but you work in New York. Do you consider yourself Midwestern
or are you definitely a New Yorker?
When I’m in New York, I’m a Midwesterner, but when I’m back home in Ohio I’m
definitely a New Yorker. I actually really loved living in Ohio, and was happy
there, but when I was growing up, I just always had the feeling that life was
happening elsewhere. Even at a very young age, I knew I had to get to that elsewhere,
wherever it was. So I guess what I’m saying is that I’ll always probably feel
like a displaced Midwesterner.
Did you have a method for organizing your
book as you wrote it? A storyboard? Notes? An outline? Or was it all in your
head?
Oh, would that I knew what I was doing! I had absolutely no clue about where
the story was going, or what was going to happen. I’m like a blind person taking
baby-steps in blackness. After I’d been working on the novel for about a year
or so, I knew that I wanted the last word of the book to be “dreams.” So “dreams”
was the word, the idea, the lighthouse through the fog, that I worked toward.
Other than that, though, it was scary how little I knew about anything.
Can you give an example of a good story (or type of story) that you’ve had
to pass on because it’s not right for Esquire, and what a story that is in Esquire’s
tone and sensibility is?
Hmm, well, I occasionally like some historical fiction – I recently read a really
great historical piece – but Esquire can’t publish anything like that.
You wrote the contributor’s notes for McSweeney’s #1. How did you get that
gig?
Dave was an editor at
Esquire for about a year. We started there at exactly
the same time, our offices were right next to each other – although there were
far fewer empty Snapple bottles on my office floor than on his -- and we were
about the same age, which meant we were a lot younger than anyone else. Anyway,
we were friends, and I helped do some stuff for the first issue of
McSweeney’s.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on something that I’m privately referring to as my “thingy.” That’s
the file name on my hard-drive, actually: “THINGY.” It seems too grandiose to
call it a novel yet.
How does it feel to be the 126th person interviewed
for Zulkey.com?
It’s great! I love it! One-twenty-six, who wouldn’t love that, to be right at
the end? Seriously, though, you’ve been very nice. Keep up the good work.
More interviews here!
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