Memoirs!

Yessss!

Not really.

In Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain,

Cintra Wilson

discusses the plummet of the book publishing business from the jarred perspective of the author, rapier flourish blessedly intact. I got out of book publishing myself almost thirty years ago when the first dot-com bubble looked like the writing on the wall to me. What chance would books stand against an immersive, interactive, quasi-television environment teeming with anonymous porn? Not much of one, as it turns out.

Knowing no better (there was no such thing as Glassdoor then), I jumped to a few years marketing an architecture firm before jumping again to market engineering. Fast forward a couple decades to last night. I’m reading Dan Menaker’s memoir, My Mistake, the part where he describes a dry spell early in his career as a writer and editor at The New Yorker:

One lead after another disappears or presents prospects so dismal (writing and copy-editing a plumbing-supplies corporation’s newsletter, for example) that I would choose unemployment and maybe even starvation before applying for them.

Okay, well ouch. Though it will take more than that to count as my reckoning. I know someone who got kept-real on national TV, after all. Being introduced as a contestant on a gameshow – “a housewife from Glendale, California, say hello to…” – this woman suffered a nervous collapse right there on daytime TV, existentially confronted with her credentials so. She got a divorce, moved to New York, and enrolled in The Neighborhood Playhouse.

That’s borderline schizophrenic, isn’t it? Being taken to task by the voice of a TV announcer?

I had already been involved in and around media and the arts for some time then. I suppose we were jaded. These were opportunities to exploit for the amusement of each other. I had one friend who had gotten sideways in her employment at CBS News and was banished to CBS Overnight, the network’s on-air graveyard shift, consisting of a competent anchor and a cameraman, a producer dozing in the booth, and a single on-set production assistant, my friend. I was working to all hours then, moonlighting writing copy and for-hire kids’ books and how-tos, and she would call from the set.

“Hi, turn on channel two.”

There she’d be, back behind the anchor in the open newsroom.

“Watch this.”

She would set down the telephone receiver, stand up, and walk across the back of the shot from her desk to a copy machine. She would make a photocopy and walk back. Thirty years ahead of FaceTime, we were.

Another friend – my dearest pal to this day – also attended The Neighborhood Playhouse, where he became friends with an actress who went on to a respectable acting career. As students, they made up a game that they called Celebrity Tag. To score points, you had to physically touch a celebrity and say loudly enough for the celebrity to hear, “Tag!” There were plenty of occasions to play, this being New York and them being theater students who also made the odd buck or two as waiters at catered star-studded events. This actress is in “Cape Fear” with Nick Nolte. They have a scene playing racquetball together, during which she’s being flirty with him. Switching serves at one point she touches him with her racquet or the side of her shoe (I can’t remember) and says “tag.” Still playing, an ad lib for my pal. Then Robert DeNiro bites off her cheek.

My pal meanwhile ended up in movie production for a time, developing a name for himself in the industry as an extras wrangler and location scout. “Backdraft,” “Rudy,” “The Babe,” “Hoffa,” “Only the Lonely,” and others. He called me at my desk one day.

“We’re shooting at O’Hare. I can’t do Christmas presents this year, so I’m calling you from a bank of pay phones and there… goes… Macaulay Culkin.

“Okay, so when ‘Home Alone 2’ comes out and you see the scene where Macaulay Culkin is running through the airport, he’ll run by a bunch of guys talking on pay phones and I’ll be one of them, on the phone with you right now. Forever, whenever you watch the movie. Okay, gotta go.”

You know, it occurs to me that I could come off as having been sniping at Daniel Menaker a little earlier, which I wasn’t. My Mistake (2013, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – the last place I worked in publishing, funnily enough) is a treasure of a book if you care much about writing. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of The Paris Review’s “Writers at Work” series, when what I really needed wouldn’t appear until middle age – books about editors at work.