I’d been talking too long with American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher about the success of the Winter Institute and was late picking up my author Lynne Truss. As I began racing across the lobby of the Grove Park Inn, I glanced at my phone. Judy Hottensen had just forwarded me an email: my old friend Mickey had passed away. In shock and with tears forming, I could no longer think. My body kept moving toward Lynne, but my thoughts raced back nearly 30 years.

In 1986, Michael “Mickey” Choate and I began our publishing careers at the newly formed Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Oil heiress Anne Getty had just made her entry into the East Coast literary world by buying Grove Press, which she then aligned with W&N. Mickey and I were low-paid assistants. He was working for Juliet Nicolson and I was working for the savvy Connie Sayre, W&N’s associate publisher.

It was an electrifying period at W&N. Literary and midlist authors could still make a living writing books; the irascible Barney Rosset struggled to hold on to his old Grove Press; Dan Green, the CEO of W&N, had been at Simon & Schuster and was trying to manage Anne and her business partner, George Weidenfeld, while bringing in quick revenue from illustrated books. There were sales conferences at the Pierre, glamorous ABA parties in New Orleans, and downtown book parties organized by Ira Silverberg. Judy Hottensen was working hard to manage authors and get Princess Michael of Kent and Lewis Lapham on to the Today show or 60 Minutes.

Mickey’s apartment on the Upper West Side was our hangout—our salon. Each weekend, we’d gather with his friends from childhood and college, along with assistants from other houses and Vogue, Mademoiselle, and the New Yorker. With cocktails in hand we had intense discussions about books and publishing gossip. I lived in Brooklyn. When it was too late or I was too weary or too drunk to travel home, I slept on Mickey’s couch. He and I often stayed up for a few hours after everyone left to banter on about the business—fantasizing about how we would make our place in the industry. Through his eyes, I could see that everything was possible.

As the 1990s approached, W&N disintegrated. We all went our separate ways. Mickey moved over to the agent side in 1990, joining the renowned Lescher & Lescher Ltd. As for me, after a short stint in bookselling, I ended up at Atlantic Monthly Press. A few years later we merged with Grove. Coming full circle, I became the associate publisher and COO of the newly formed Grove/Atlantic for the next 20 years.

In 2004, Mickey opened his own literary agency. With his keen eye, he discovered the talents of John Hart and Joe Hill. From his mother, the cookbook author Judie Choate, Mickey inherited a passion for cooking and relished nurturing authors such as Lisa Yockelson, Tish Boyle, and the James Beard Award–winning chef Michael Mina. In addition, he represented such writers as Judith Viorst and James Barney.

As so frequently occurs, our lives became busy. Mickey and his wife, Laurel, were raising a beautiful family in Westchester, and I was establishing a new life with my husband in the West Village and Provincetown, Mass. About twice a year, Mickey and I would meet up at the Old Town Bar in lower Manhattan where we would catch up, gossip, and reminisce about the old days. The last time I saw Mickey must have been just before he was diagnosed. Life got in the way. I was in the midst of a job change and a new career as a painter. I now know he had been privately battling lung cancer.

In Asheville, I was in shock from reading the email chain from my first publishing family. Later that evening Judy, who is now Grove’s associate publisher, and I hosted a dinner. The conversation was about a young novelist being paid seven figures for his debut. I struggled to stay present but drifted away. I looked at Judy, remembering us much younger in the go-go ’80s, when the publishing world was exploding. Glancing at Dennis Johnson, the cofounder of Melville, I thought how wonderful he and his wife, Valerie, were at encouraging and empowering our young staff—not unlike Dan Green had done for us at W&N.

In writing recently about his terminal cancer and the death of friends his own age, Oliver Sacks poignantly said, “There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be unique individuals, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”

Good-bye, my truly unique friend. I was blessed by having you be a part of my life. There is now a hole that cannot be filled. We were blessed to have met when everything seemed possible. It was. We succeeded beyond our dreams.

Turning back to booksellers Luisa Smith, Kris Kleindienst, and Mike Barnard at the dinner, I reentered our conversation about books and the excitement we had for the future of our industry.

Eric Price is v-p, new business development, at Melville House and a freelance book cover designer.