You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood Page B

submissions (these being the days of bulky manuscripts delivered by messenger), taking my lugubrious phone calls, and building up the ego of someone from whom she had yet to make a dime.
    At the same time that I felt hopeless about ever publishing the book I was aware of being spared a confrontation with my mother and father, two of its more exaggeratedly if not sympathetically rendered characters. It was certainly the case that the guilt I felt about what I had written enabled me to resist Marge’s suggestion that I end the relationship with my agent and submit to an independent press, one that might have been open to a quirky first novel, and I convinced myself that if I could not write a book worthy of a big time New York City publisher I did not deserve to be published at all.
    Within a month of following Marge advice, however, I received an acceptance letter from a small press located in a remote village in upstate New York known mostly as the home of a bar called the Rongovian Embassy, and some weeks later the contract from hell. Never mind. I was real. My novel was going to be published and if it was to be with an obscure literary press this fact might work in my favor. As an envious waiter-friend had said, “Nobody’s going to pay any attention to a book published in Trumansburg .”
    With the exception of the publicist, who loved it.
These were the days before e-mail, when book publicists prided themselves on their Rolodex, and I have yet to meet anyone who gave better phone. There was no Oprah’s Book Club back then but if there had been he would have hounded her producers until someone begged her to read the book. He sent out an unbelievable number of advance review copies for a small backwater outfit and followed up on every one. The quirky novel from the unknown press was widely reviewed and not long after pub date I got an excited call from my mother. “Why didn’t you tell me you wrote a book?”
    â€œDidn’t I?” Shit. Shit. Shit. “How do you know?”
    â€œWhat do you mean? There’s a big review in the Sunday New York Times .”
    But my parents only read The Daily News .
    â€œYour aunt called from Phoenix. I’m going out now to buy the book.”
    â€œDon’t do that!” I said. “What I mean is, a mother should never have to pay for her son’s book. I’ll send it to you.” I thought I had bought myself about a week.
    As family therapy was a term I had not even heard mentioned in my house, I’d never had a conversation with my parents about growing up. Like many boys I spent as much time away from home as possible. I turned seventeen, I had decent grades, I applied to college, I was out of there. I rarely came home for holidays. Why look back? Why tell my beautiful but vain mother I had felt her revulsion for me since I was ten years old when, on what must have been a very bad summer night for
her, she entered my bedroom to say, “How could anyone ever love you, you’re so fat.” Nor did I question taking diet pills, prescription dextro-amphetamines, for years. We were always strapped for money. Doctors were expensive. They were obviously trying to turn me into a normal American boy. Whereas I now understand both my parents’ struggles with self image and undiagnosed depression and can mine my childhood for its wealth of mortifying stories, in writing my first novel—the bildungsroman —the anger was still raw.
    The egregious part of the book appeared in Chapter Seventeen, a totally fabricated first meeting between the protagonist and his girlfriend (read: me and Marge) and his (my) parents in a Chinese restaurant. In one of many similarly imagined exchanges the protagonist’s mother, described not inaccurately as “a size five petite, an anorexic Madame Bovary who consumes no solid food except Sara Lee cake,” becomes unhinged, not only jealous of her son’s apparent happiness but