The Secret History
A first novelist couldn't dream of a better rollout than the one Donna Tartt had when Knopf published The Secret History in 1992. Tartt, then a 28-year-old graduate of Bennington, racked up an impressive $1 million in combined advances for the hardcover and paperback editions. And the novel, about a murder that rocks an elite university, was off to a running start overseas, having been sold in 11 countries. Movie rights were optioned. Did we forget to mention the seven-page Vanity Fair feature? Or the gushing of the New York media?
Really, it was enough to scare a writer half to death.
Although the literary world expected—needed—Tartt to become the Next Big Thing, it seemed that everybody overreacted. Ten years would pass before the author would publish another novel, The Little Friend, only a modest success in 2002. Sitting pretty on those royalties (The Secret History sold a combined one million hardcovers and paperbacks in the United States), Tartt took her sweet time to get things right. "I can't think of anything worse than having a big success and trying to roll out another big success," she told PW in 2002.
David Guterson
Snow Falling on Cedars
How many authors publish their first novel and land on People magazine's list of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World? Not many, as celeb magazines don't usually expect authors to look like movie stars. But when they do, like David Guterson, a high school teacher from the state of Washington and the author of an unlikely bestseller called Snow Falling on Cedars, they wind up in the glare of the spotlight. The Pacific Northwest hunk felt a little burned.
"I was devoted to the idea that if [the People] story brought the book to the attention of more people, fine," Guterson told PW in 1999. Being lumped in with the likes of Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt, he says, "sent the wrong message. My ambitions are only literary."
Or at least he learned to dial them back. It's easy to see how a struggling writer blessed with an overnight success might fall for the public adoration so rarely lavished on such a solitary activity. Snow Falling on Cedars, published in 1994 by Harcourt, told the unusual story of a trial in which a Japanese-American in accused of killing a white American fisherman. Set on an atmospheric island off the coast of Washington, the novel offered readers two thrills—a complex trial and a forbidden,interracial romance. The literary elite liked it as much as readers did. In addition to selling 2.5 million copies of his novel, Guterson won the PEN/Faulkner award and saw his book made into a 1999 movie starring Ethan Hawke and Max von Sydow. That's big money for a man so inanely described by People as the "thinking man's Grizzly Adams." But now that the fuss is over, Guterson has learned to keep his life simple, sticking close to his roots. "My life has changed enormously in that I'm now able to make a living as a writer than as a teacher," he says.
Sue Monk Kidd
The Secret Lifeof Bees
Unlike Donna Tartt, whose 1992 novel The Secret History made her an overnight literary star, Sue Monk Kidd took the slow and steady path to fame and fortune. The former journalist and magazine editor had already published an inspirational nonfiction book and two memoirs when she steeled herself to cross over into the world of hardcover fiction.
It was quite an apprenticeship. Kidd studied at Emory University in Atlanta, did the writing workshop waltz at Sewanee and Breadloaf, and eventually started publishing fiction. A 1994 fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission won Kidd a trip to New York, where she read a short story at the New York Arts Club. The title? "The Secret Life of Bees."
Renowned agent Virginia Barber was in the audience and it's no exaggeration to say the rest is history. Today, The Secret Life of Bees, which chronicles the life of a young white girl and her surrogate black mothers, has sold an astonishing 3.5 million copies and been translated into 20 languages. Kidd, who is 56, wasted no time in capitalizing on her success. Viking has just published her new novel, The Mermaid Chair, with a 400,000 first printing. The book, about a middle-aged woman who falls in love with a monk, made it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Readers waiting for a sequel to the phenomenally popular Bees will have to be patient. Kidd doesn't know if she'll write one. She told PW, "I always leave the answer open-ended."
Alice Sebold
Lucky
You probably know the name Alice Sebold because of her remarkable novel, The Lovely Bones, which was published in 2002. The novel took everyone by surprise with its story about a 14-year-old who tells of her own murder from an unusual vantage point—heaven. It sold some 1.5 million copies.
But Sebold had written a book before—a memoir called Lucky, which sold only modestly when it was published in 1999. But with the success of The Lovely Bones, Lucky was reissued and became a bestseller.
Lucky is the autobiographical story of Sebold's rape, in 1981, on the last night of her freshman year at Syracuse University. It was every bit as remarkable as her novel, and finally received the attention it was due, three years after it was published by Scribner.
Hailed for its searing candor as well as its powerful wit, Lucky was originally published as a feature in the New York Times magazine. In book form, the author described in painful detail the violence of the act, deftly capturing the indifference of the cop who told her she was "lucky" she hadn't been murdered. The incident served as a platform for Sebold to examine her own family memories and, most startling, her post-rape addiction to heroin.
In its review, PW said that Sebold was especially skilled at showing that "there are clear emotional boundaries between those who have been victims of violence and those who have not, though the author attempts to blur these lines as much as possible to show that violence touches many more lives than solely the victim's."
