accomplished for a debut” and a “good read.” Its publication eight months later resulted in around six reviews nationwide. However, there was a crucial, positive “In Brief” notice in the New York Times . It got me several phone calls from assorted editors at good magazines. The book sold four thousand copies and was quickly remaindered. But the fact was: I had published a book. And Judith—deciding that I was worth encouraging (especially in the wake of the mention in the Times) —took me out for a good lunch at an expensive Italian restaurant a week after I had come back from Addis Ababa for National Geographic .
“Do you know what Tolstoy said about journalism?” she asked after finding out that I was flush with magazine commissions and had long since quit my bookshop job. “It’s a brothel. And like most brothels, once you become a client, you keep returning regularly.”
“I’m not looking upon magazine writing as anything but an excuse to travel the world at somebody else’s expense and get paid a dollar a word.”
“So if I was to inquire if you were thinking about a new book for us . . .”
“I would say: I already have an idea.”
“Well, that’s an excellent start. And what may this idea be?”
“It’s one word: Berlin.”
Over the next half hour I sketched out how I wanted to spend a year living in the city—and write a book that would be very much “a fiction that happened . . . twelve months in that western island floating within the Eastern bloc; the place where the two great isms of the twentieth century rubbed up against each other like tectonic plates; a town that prided itself on its anarchism, its demimonde credentials, its ongoing whiff of Weimar Republic decadence. Yet it was also a center of gravity for a certain kind of outsider who wanted to exist amidst the edgy, walled-in realities of a metropolis with a storied and hideous past, now rubbing shoulders daily with the monochromatic bleakness of Communism.”
For someone who has often been accused of being a little closed-off, I’ve always had a certain talent when it comes to pitching an idea, especially in the knowledge that it could get me on a plane somewhere. Having carefully thought through this spiel before heading out to lunch with Judith, I reeled it off with a fluency and a confidence that I hoped didn’t sound too rehearsed.
“Now don’t tell me all that came to you just now,” she said when I finished. “But it does sound like the makings of a damn good book . . . especially if you can do what you did with the Egypt book and make us interested in the people that you meet. That’s your greatest strength, Thomas: the fact you are fascinated by other people’s worlds, the way you really do get the idea that every life is its very own novel.”
She paused to take a sip of her wine.
“Now go home and write me a slam-dunk proposal that I can get past those stiffs in the sales and marketing department. And tell your agent to give me a call.”
The proposal was written and submitted within a week. I had a thumbs-up from my publisher three weeks later (oh, for the days when publishing was so straightforward, so willing to back a modest idea, so writer-centric). And my agent did well with the deal, garnering me a $9,000 advance—half of which was to be paid up front. Given that it was three times my first contract, I was elated. Especially as I was able to wave this new contract under the noses of several magazine editors and come away with three commissions from Harper’s, National Geographic, and The Atlantic Monthly, which added another $5,000 to my kitty. I started doing proper research about minor details like the cost of living and discovered that in a scruffy area like Wedding I could probably find a room in a shared apartment for around 150 deutsche marks a month—which, at the time, was around one hundred bucks. And thinking that it might give the book an interesting texture if I were to be somehow
“Do you know what Tolstoy said about journalism?” she asked after finding out that I was flush with magazine commissions and had long since quit my bookshop job. “It’s a brothel. And like most brothels, once you become a client, you keep returning regularly.”
“I’m not looking upon magazine writing as anything but an excuse to travel the world at somebody else’s expense and get paid a dollar a word.”
“So if I was to inquire if you were thinking about a new book for us . . .”
“I would say: I already have an idea.”
“Well, that’s an excellent start. And what may this idea be?”
“It’s one word: Berlin.”
Over the next half hour I sketched out how I wanted to spend a year living in the city—and write a book that would be very much “a fiction that happened . . . twelve months in that western island floating within the Eastern bloc; the place where the two great isms of the twentieth century rubbed up against each other like tectonic plates; a town that prided itself on its anarchism, its demimonde credentials, its ongoing whiff of Weimar Republic decadence. Yet it was also a center of gravity for a certain kind of outsider who wanted to exist amidst the edgy, walled-in realities of a metropolis with a storied and hideous past, now rubbing shoulders daily with the monochromatic bleakness of Communism.”
For someone who has often been accused of being a little closed-off, I’ve always had a certain talent when it comes to pitching an idea, especially in the knowledge that it could get me on a plane somewhere. Having carefully thought through this spiel before heading out to lunch with Judith, I reeled it off with a fluency and a confidence that I hoped didn’t sound too rehearsed.
“Now don’t tell me all that came to you just now,” she said when I finished. “But it does sound like the makings of a damn good book . . . especially if you can do what you did with the Egypt book and make us interested in the people that you meet. That’s your greatest strength, Thomas: the fact you are fascinated by other people’s worlds, the way you really do get the idea that every life is its very own novel.”
She paused to take a sip of her wine.
“Now go home and write me a slam-dunk proposal that I can get past those stiffs in the sales and marketing department. And tell your agent to give me a call.”
The proposal was written and submitted within a week. I had a thumbs-up from my publisher three weeks later (oh, for the days when publishing was so straightforward, so willing to back a modest idea, so writer-centric). And my agent did well with the deal, garnering me a $9,000 advance—half of which was to be paid up front. Given that it was three times my first contract, I was elated. Especially as I was able to wave this new contract under the noses of several magazine editors and come away with three commissions from Harper’s, National Geographic, and The Atlantic Monthly, which added another $5,000 to my kitty. I started doing proper research about minor details like the cost of living and discovered that in a scruffy area like Wedding I could probably find a room in a shared apartment for around 150 deutsche marks a month—which, at the time, was around one hundred bucks. And thinking that it might give the book an interesting texture if I were to be somehow
Similar Books
