You've probably heard it before, but it bears repeating: editing can be a heartbreaking business. It hurts when you love a book that doesn't sell. It hurts to explain to an author why you can't offer the advance he needs. We try to stay businesslike to compensate. But as publishers have morphed from family-owned businesses to multinational conglomerates, editors are often accused of being nothing more than functionaries for their corporate parents, with little regard for the living, breathing, creative people who write the books.
Nothing could be further from the truth. We editors are still passionate about our work. And not only because of our passion for the written word. If we cared only about the joy of reading, we could easily have become librarians or professors and been content to enjoy nothing more than the words on the page. In trade publishing, we have opted to take on more than just the written word: we become inextricably entwined with the writer, too.
It's not always a pretty picture. In Sophie's Choice, William Styron caricatures Thomas Wolfe's painfully pompous editor, Edward Aswell, for dragging the editor-author relationship from the sublime to the ridiculous: "His identification with Wolfe was so complete that it was as if he were the writer's alter ego. In staff editorial conferences he was fond of uttering such locutions as 'Wolfe used to say to me....' Or, 'As Tom wrote to me so eloquently just before his death....' "
While we don't all strive for that kind of close identification, the truth is, it's the authors who keep me coming to work each morning. Even when there's friction between author and editor, it's nearly impossible to separate the writer from her writing. If I love a book, I've always had some love for the author.
Alas, the course of true love, does not run any smoother in the publishing world than it does in real life. The most passionate author-editor relationships are usually the most fraught. I learned that lesson the hard way, from an author whom I simply adored. She had the funniest and most genuine voice I've ever read and, in the six years that I was her editor, we became incredibly close. We talked about every aspect of our lives—from my sister's cancer scare to her no-good ex-husband. When her boyfriend died suddenly, she called me and we cried together. At one point she even fixed me up with a family member of hers who she thought would be a great match for me (he was).
We squealed together with delight as her books went from a tiny first print run to the top of the Times list. She truly deserved her success, and we were both thoroughly gleeful about it. If we'd gone on Oprah, we'd have been leaping on the couch before a cheering studio audience.
But after two more books—both bestsellers—this glorious personal relationship came to an utterly inglorious professional ending. My beloved author got new representation, and while she claimed she still loved me, her new agent did not. He also did not love my boss, or my boss's boss or corporate publishing in general. The books were still selling quickly, but the new agent's threats and accusations flew just as fast. In the midst of all this, my beloved stopped calling. No more long chats about kids or boyfriends or what we'd done on vacation. Just silence. My calls and e-mails went unreturned. After some protracted wrangling with the contracts department, my beloved author signed with another house.
I'd been dumped. It was clear that I couldn't be both an editor and a close friend—at least, not for this writer.
My boss was sympathetic, but to the point: "It wasn't your fault. But this is what happens if you get personally involved with your authors. It will break your heart. Live and learn."
She was right, of course. Perhaps I should have stayed cool: negotiated the deals, written the flap copy, and kept a polite, but dispassionate distance from the author. But is that really why I became an editor? Books are created with passion, and must be published with passion, even if that passion leads to heartbreak. In a world where readers and authors wail that bookselling has become nothing but a retail business, devoid of any human warmth, I can't imagine anything worse than unplugging ourselves from the source of all that creative energy.
Rachel Kahan is a senior editor at Putnam.
