Chapter 37
Tyler
The manuscript that had landed me a literary agent, the same manuscript Meredith Bradford was currently reading on the sofa
in her great room, underneath a painting worth more than the gross domestic product of several islands in the South Pacific,
was the first book I’d ever truly finished.
The original draft, in and of itself, was fine. A seventy-thousand-word speculative diatribe about a college-age boy who,
reeling from the sudden death of his twin brother, climbed inside of his coffin, switched souls with him, then wandered around
the backstreets of Providence in a liminal space, getting drunk and fucking strangers and, by the book’s final page, falling
to his knees, begging to crawl back into his own casketed body.
I had written the whole thing in the span of three months, right after Mikey died. I was a freshman in college then and, by
October of fall semester, had already turned twenty and been sober for eighteen months. I stayed out of trouble. I did my
homework. I went to meetings. I tried to forget. And then, whenever I began to remember, I wrote.
Two years later, when I studied abroad, I decided to rewrite the story from start to finish in my host family’s house. The
new version was dark, sad, and poignant—and had ballooned to 120,000 words. I didn’t care. I loved every page of it.
When I returned to Providence for my senior year, I began querying the project in earnest. By then, I was running the campus’s literary magazine and had just placed a short story in the New England Review.
Within a matter of weeks, I’d signed with an up-and-coming, New York–based agent with solid connections to the most prestigious
literary imprints around. By Thanksgiving, he’d taken the manuscript out on submission to more than a dozen acquisitions editors.
Over the next nine months, every single one of them passed. Too dark. Too sad. Too familiar. Too foreign. Too speculative. Too literary. Too young. Too difficult to make Instagram graphics
for. And so, from ages twenty-four to twenty-six, I wrote another and another and another. All of them, absolutely fine—coming-of-age
streams of consciousness that grappled with the usual bullshit: grief, anger, fathers who did not love us. I’d hoped, with
the help of my ever-growing publication list of short stories, that eventually, something of mine would sell. That, eventually,
I’d get my yes.
But no. My agent had lost interest in my work—had grown weary of putting his reputation on the line, bringing the same failed
writer back to his contacts over and over again. By my twenty-seventh birthday, he’d dropped me.
And then, this spring, out of nowhere, Selma emailed me. Selma wasn’t the sort of agent I’d have queried, but I knew who she
was. She was one of the most successful agents in the game—the Bill Clegg of genre fiction, if you will. And when I saw her
name pop up on my computer screen, I couldn’t help it. A jolt of hope coursed through me.
Hi Tyler,
I know this is going to seem completely out of the blue, but I chanced upon your short story, “Like a Bull in a China Shop,” while in the waiting room of my therapist’s office the other day.
Your name immediately rang a bell, although at first, I couldn’t quite figure out why.
Turns out your former agent, Oliver, is a colleague of mine—my agency acquired his earlier this year.
Right away, I asked to have a look at what he believed was your most promising project and dug right in.
On a personal level, I thought BODY AND SOUL was wonderful: Tragic and clever and perfectly voice-y. But I do see why Oliver
couldn’t sell it a few years back. It’s very literary, but it’s also very New Adult. The book, as it currently stands, is
simply impossible to place. Publishing, as I’m sure you’ve learned, isn’t a meritocracy. It’s a business.
Still, certain things could be done to make the project more attractive in today’s marketplace. I don’t have the bandwidth
to be so hands-on with my clients anymore, but I’d be happy to send my suggestions over to you. If you decide to incorporate
these revisions into your manuscript independently, I’d be glad to take a second look.
In the meantime, I have a proposition for you. I am looking to hire a writer under contract to quietly assist with a project
for one of my clients. You’ll be asked to write a standard-length novel with a partner in New York City. This partner is highly
experienced, but unfortunately, her would-be collaborator dropped out at the last minute. If you’re interested, let me know,
and we’ll set up a video call right away.
And that, I suppose, was how I got here.
Got to pacing around Meredith’s kitchen, palms damp and mouth dry, waiting to hear what this woman—a woman who, two months ago, I could not have picked out of a lineup, whose name was synonymous with beach bags and bodice rippers and all the other things on this planet I thought were beneath me—thought of this literal slice of my soul.
I went on a walk. I made a sandwich. I did the dishes. I made another sandwich, realized I’d forgotten to eat the first, then
went on a second walk. I watched the clock on the wall change from five to six to seven. And then, finally, footsteps. Two
sets. The pitter-patter of paws on hardwood, and then Meredith, gliding in after Pinot, the last chunk of my manuscript in
her hand. She set it down on the island and smiled.
“It’s fantastic,” she said.
“Really? You really think that?”
Meredith nodded, chuckling as she eyed the two plates of identical, untouched sandwiches on the gleaming marble. I bit back
a smile of my own and offered her one. She shook her head no, then grabbed a notepad and took a seat at the table.
“We can sell this thing,” she said. “Although Selma, I’m afraid, isn’t wrong. It’s too dark. It’s too long. Your protagonist
is certainly a few years too young. And your old agent—he should’ve known that on day one. But this is absolutely a novel,
Tyler. This is as good as anything else out there. This story belongs in bookstores.”
I wiped the sweat off my forehead. “What do I need to do? What should I do next?”
“You need to give your protagonist something to live for. You need to figure out what he sees when he closes his eyes.”
“But he dies at the end. He goes back in the coffin, he . . .”
“I never said he shouldn’t die,” she said. “Only that he needed a reason to live.”