Book News-- Marriage 101: Here We Go Again
Julie Mayeda -- 1/1/01
A new how-to title causes a stir with its old-fashioned advice for women
What year is this, anyway? That's what some women may wonder as they hear about a new paperback original called The Surrendered Wife: A Practical Guide for Finding Intimacy, Passion and Peace with a Man (S&S/Fireside) by Laura Doyle. But this title, unofficially dubbed "The Rules for married women," has its enthusiastic supporters as well.
Just off the press late last month, there are already passionate postings pro and con on Amazon.com about Doyle's either old-fashioned or barbaric (depending on your point of view) recommendations for a successful marriage. She advises letting the husband make all of the decisions and handle all of the finances, and for the wife to defer to her husband's pronouncements with a "whatever you think," and to say "yes" to his every sexual advance.
No, The Surrendered Wife is not a regurgitation of some 1950s' homemakers' manual, nor is it a tongue-in-cheek affair to be stashed in the humor section alongside The Machiavellian Guide to Womanizing. Doyle wrote the book as an earnest, prescriptive account of a contemporary woman's transformation from unhappily married shrew to blissful, beloved wife. She never expected it would strike a chord with both the public and the media.
Desperate to save her marriage, Doyle experimented on her unwitting husband, instilling in herself behaviors that fostered intimacy and dumping those that didn't. Her marriage gradually rebounded. Five girlfriends wanted to know how she did it, and so Doyle facilitated monthly meetings of a Surrendered Circle. These five each knew three or four more interested women, and so on, until the circle outgrew Doyle's living room. As hundreds more stepped into the circle, Doyle speculated that there were likely many more wives desperate for advice on how to regenerate their marriage.
"I thought, if I write it out, that would be helpful for women who are interested--little dreaming that one day I would be with Simon & Schuster," Doyle marveled. But before her book contract came to pass, she self-published. "We printed 2,000 copies in October 1999, and by November we'd sold them out," she said.
A former marketing copywriter, Doyle understands the craft and the necessity of selling her wares. "One of the amazing things about Laura," Fireside editor Doris Cooper remarked, "is that she had generated publicity before we even acquired the book. When the book was submitted to me, it was submitted with an article from the Los Angeles Times; it was submitted with a video from some local TV show she had done in Seattle [NorthwestAfternoon]; and Marie Clare in the U.K. had printed an article about her. So I thought: not only has this woman written a book that shifts a paradigm, not only is this woman unafraid to say something other self-help authors wouldn't go near, but she's managed to also get attention for herself."
Three national television shows have scheduled interviews with Doyle for the first week of January, prompting S&S to bump up the original spring publication date to coincide with these airings. Additionally, S&S doubled the initial print run, for a total of 50,000 copies. "It's not often you can go in with a paperback original and say, ˜I've got Dateline, The Today Show and The View already lined up,'" noted Marcia Burch, S&S v-p and director of trade paperback publicity. She d s not anticipate a tepid response: "Everyone relates to it on a visceral level. Whether they think it's stupid or they think there's a point to it, they have a very strong feeling about it, and that's what I think is going to propel this book."
The response from booksellers PW spoke with ranged from disdain to philosophical calm. "The pendulum swings back and forth, d sn't it?" was all Margaret Maupin, book buyer at the Tattered Cover in Denver could say. Anne Christopherson, co-owner of Woman and Children First in Chicago, was likewise guarded. "There are a lot of people who listen to Dr. Laura Schlessinger," she told PW, "so I suspect there will be interest in it. There's certainly a reactionary, return-to-the-old-ways kind of audience out there." Then she added, "It's not a direction I want to see us head."
Kepler's Books and Magazines in Menlo Park, Calif., sold several hundred copies of The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right--Warner's 1994 bestseller by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider--and plans to stock at least a few copies of The Surrendered Wife. "We've got a lot of people coming through looking for books on sustainable personal relationships," book buyer Karen Pennington said. "And although this may not be my choice of lifestyle, it could be valuable material for somebody else. If it has merit, then it will stay. If not, it will be a kind of flash-in-the-pan. Pundits will write about it. It may pop up on talk shows, but then it will go away."
Doyle d s not intend to disappear any time soon and is working on her next book--you guessed it--The Surrendered Single, slated for a January 2002 release.
And why not? The authors of The Rules and The Rules II: More Rules to Live and Love By have yet another book due out this spring, The Rules for Marriage: Time-Tested Secrets for Making Your Marriage Work. Warner plans a 75,000-copy first printing. Fein and Schneider certainly struck a nerve--there are close to two million copies of their first book in print and more than 200,000 copies of the sequel. What's next? Rules IV: Rules for Divorce and Alimony?
Mayeda is a freelance writer living in Eugene, Ore.
Wives, a Historical Perspective
For better or worse, the role of the wife looks to be a lively topic in 2001. Marilyn Yalom's upcoming book, A History of the Wife (HarperCollins, Feb.), lends some perspective. A logical successor to her 1997 critically acclaimed A History of the Breast, Yalom provides for the wife the same rich and adeptly researched historical interpretation of a subject rarely treated with due respect.
"Like A History of the Breast, A History of the Wife is positioned to be provocative and to instigate discussion so that we can draw our own conclusions," Harper publicist Dawn DiCenso told PW. "Is marriage extinct as we know it? Are we holding on to values that may no longer be a part of our culture? Are we as women expecting too much or too little from the role of wife?"
Karen Pennington, book buyer at Kepler's Books and Magazines in Menlo Park, Calif., said she thought Yalom's volume will be an "important addition" to the discussion of marriage. "It will be historically based, intellectual and readable," she said. "It will have meaning and depth."
A History of the Wife recaps the evolution of the Western wife from husband's chattel to "the little woman" and then to equal partner, revealing along the way that changes occurred not in a smooth progression but in fits and starts with some surprising U-turns. With the publication of The Rules and most recently The Surrendered Wife, there d s appear to be a movement (or at least a yearning) to go back to earlier definitions of the role of a woman in relationship to a man. While the question "What is a wife?" is never settled, Yalom's book shows "how we got here."
As the author of The Surrendered Wife begins her flurry of media appearances, HarperCollins is planning a launching strategy for A History of the Wife when it comes out February 13. Highlighting the tour, HarperCollins and the 92nd Street Y in New York City are co-sponsoring a panel regarding the future of the wife; Yalom will be joined by Erica Jong, who's been known to have a thing to say on the subject, and by Steve and Cokie Roberts, authors of From This Day Forward (Morrow), a book about their own marriage. --Julie Mayeda |
Reissue News
Vindicated After 55 Years
It happened in the waning days of World War II. After completing her mission to deliver the nuclear essence of the bombs later dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to an island near Guam, the USS Indianapolis set off on her return to the Philippines with assurance that the waters were safe from enemy vessels; her request for naval escort was denied. Visibility was next to nil that night, and Captain Charles McVay ordered a straight course instead of a zigzag, a strategy often used to thwart enemy sub attack. Just after midnight, the clouds parted, revealing 10 minutes of moon. The Japanese sub I-58 surfaced, fired and dove again. Reportedly, the Indianapolis sank in 12 minutes. Three hundred men went down with the ship, and more than 900 were left for five nights and four days in shark-infested waters wearing life vests meant for 48 hours. Among the 316 survivors was McVay, who was court-martialed with record speed. The sinking of the Indianapolis was the greatest naval disaster in American history.
The story inspired Abandon Ship! by Richard Newcomb. First published by Henry Holt in 1958, it spent 16 weeks on the bestseller lists. Late last month HarperCollins reissued Abandon Ship! in hardcover (with an 80,000-copy first printing), primarily at the insistence of author Peter Maas. While researching his last book, The Terrible Hours: The Man Behind the Greatest Submarine Rescue in History, he picked up a used copy of Abandon Ship! at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan. It turned out that the naval officer who communicated to McVay that the waters were safe that fateful night in 1945 had commanded the Squalus, the submarine at the center of The Terrible Hours. Maas became fascinated with Newcomb's book.
"It was an exciting story that had all these ech s of Greek tragedy," Maas told PW. And he wasn't just talking about the sinking of the Indianapolis. This week in the New York TimesBookReview, Maas writes about how Abandon Ship! changed so many lives in a way few books have.
Abandon Ship! came out 13 years after the sinking of the Indianapolis, and the survivors hadn't dared to speak about their horrific ordeal before that. The book inspired survivor reunions. At the first one, in 1960, a wary McVay discovered he still commanded the respect of his men, who thought his court-martial a grave injustice. Unfortunately, the hate mail from the families of those who perished in the disaster was too much for him, and McVay shot himself. But the story didn't end there.
As information became declassified, it became clear that the navy knew the Japanese sub was in the vicinity of the U.S. ship back in '45 but had withheld the information to protect another secret mission: the successful cracking of the Japanese code. There were mishaps and misinformation all over the story. McVay's sons tried to get their father's name cleared by Congress in the '90s, to no avail. Then an 11-year-old Florida boy, Hunter Scott, became intrigued with the Indianapolis because of a reference to it in the movie Jaws.
"The fact that this kid gets involved becomes irresistible to the media," Maas said. Young Scott and several of the survivors appeared before Congressional committees and, just last fall, McVay was finally exonerated.
All of this helped Maas sell Harper president and publisher Cathy Hemming on the idea of reissuing Abandon Ship! Maas's personal involvement and his success with The Terrible Hours--which hit the lists 11 days after its hardcover release and got another boost when the mass market was released the same day the Russian Kursk sank--didn't hurt, either. "He recognized that America was hungry for her s," said Hemming. Add to that what seemed an incredible injustice done to McVay and the untiring fight by the survivors to restore their captain's name. "Peter can get all worked up about these things," Hemming said, "And that's how he got me all fired up."
It was Maas who found Newcomb, now 88 and living in Florida, and suggested he bring the book into print at Harper. Although Maas is the frontman on this, going on tour and making media appearances for the elderly Newcomb, he wants it made clear that he is not the author. "He cares about keeping this story in front of the American people," Hemming explained. In the reissued Abandon Ship!, Maas provides an introduction and an afterword that describe what transpired after the publication of the original, which ended with McVay's court-martial. "I don't mean to sound flip, but if you think of a ham sandwich, the original book is the ham, and I'm the two slices of bread," Maas said.
It is one sandwich that could turn into a feast. There are two more books about the Indianapolis in the works. Holt, the original publisher of Abandon Ship!, paid a healthy six figures for Doug Stanton to expand his Men's Health article on a survivor reunion into a full-length book, In Harm's Way, due in May. (Sister company St. Martin's has paperback rights.) And another book on the subject is slated for the fall from Broadway. However compelling these tales are--and both houses have high expectations for sales based on the public's interest in such stories as The Perfect Storm--Abandon Ship! enjoys the added cachet of having changed history.
"I hate to play the fife and drum," said Maas, "but I can't think of another country in the world where, after 55 years, they right a wrong," said Maas. "None of that would have happened without this book."
On a lesser scale, The Terrible Hours accomplished a similar feat. The book is certainly no Valentine to the navy, and Maas said he was surprised it received such a positive response from the establishment. The book is about Charles "Swede" Momsen, an unsung hero repeatedly thwarted by the navy. Since its 1999 publication, Maas said, the navy has notified him about its official Momsen Web site and a Momsen training dedication ceremony for the warship USS Momsen, "the Secretary of the Navy, Richard Dansig, was nice enough to say that The Terrible Hours played a major role in the decision."
Though it might seem odd that an author renowned for writing about corruption and criminality in such works as Serpico, The Valachi Papers and Underboss would get so worked up about military her s, the truth is, Maas first heard about Momsen during his own naval service. He even wrote about him when he was a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post in 1968. "It was the worst newsstand sale they ever had," Maas said. In the political and societal tumult of 1968, he explained, "the last thing anybody wanted to read about was a hero, much less a military hero." Given the success of more recent books like Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, it appears the tide has changed.
--Bridget Kinsella |
