From the Editor
The best part of being an author, in my book.
When people learn that I’m a writer with two published novels, I always get questions about how that came to be, and what my experience was like. My trajectory was an unusual one: I first published a flash memoir version of Grosse Pointe Girl through a small press run by a friend in Portland, Oregon, where I was living at the time. This got me a legit ISBN, placement in the extremely well-curated small press section at iconic Powell’s City of Books, a reading and signing there, and distribution support through Last Gasp, a San Francisco-based company primarily dedicated to championing underground books and comics. I handled the rest myself: layout, printing, marketing, direct sales, additional distribution, and other events.
This was back in 2001. Social media was not in play and self-publishing was also not really a thing back then, not to the extent it is now. I found my printer through an ad in the back of Poets & Writers magazine and invested what seemed like a small fortune to me at the time (maybe a grand?) to get the initial stock printed. My book was just long enough to warrant an actual book spine too, though too thin to print anything on it. But it looked (mostly) like a real book. I called in a favor with a designer I was friends with through my job at the time (Marketing Director for Dark Horse Comics). I could only afford a two-color cover and my designer friend did a great job making it look intentional.
It was my version of a demo tape. Back then, to get an agent you needed to already be published, and to get published, at least by what we now call the Big Five, you needed an agent. My logic was that a small press credit might be enough to break the loop. It worked better than I expected. If memory serves, the flash memoir sold over 1,500 copies over several months, and better yet, when I started querying agents with my proof-of-concept, I heard back from all of them. Only one had a different idea: rewrite Grosse Pointe Girl as a full-length novel, and shop that instead.
That agent was Jenny Bent, who’s since built her own agency empire (of course she did!). I’d never considered turning the demo tape into the real thing, but I trusted her instinct completely. My demo tape became my first novel. My first novel became my second. Both went to Simon & Schuster. I’m no longer represented by Jenny, but I’ll always be grateful to her for taking my career into the big leagues.
As an author, you forge many relationships – agent, publisher, editor, publicist, the list goes on – all critical to your success. Another thing I will always be grateful to Jenny for is who she sold my books to: Denise Roy. Denise actually had a personal tie to Grosse Pointe, through her father’s career (he had a short stint at one of the private schools in Grosse Pointe), but beyond that, Denise had already made a name for herself as an extremely well-respected and successful editor. We were just a year or so apart in age and had all the same pop culture points of reference (which shows up in spades in both of my books – my first one takes place from the late 80s to early 2000s, my second one takes place from September 1991 through April 1992).
We clicked immediately, and on top of being an incredible editor, she became a dear friend. I’d also relocated from my first tour of duty in Portland, Oregon to Washington, DC in 2004, just months before Grosse Pointe Girl (the novel) came out. I had frequent jaunts to New York, and Denise’s apartment was one of the first I actually stepped foot in vs. seeing on TV or in a movie. When I relocated to the New York area from 2007 to 2010, I got to upgrade my face-to-face time with Denise into a regular thing. We had many a late night all over Manhattan, from Columbus Circle to the West Village and back to the Upper West Side. I was still drinking then, often heavy and hard, and she loved me through all of it. We’re both July babies – hers is today, July 15 – and we’ve been through the kind of stuff you don’t put in an acknowledgments page. Love (marriage), loss (divorce), grief (including the sudden and unexpected passing of her second husband and my first dog baby).
I moved back to Oregon in 2010, but Denise has never disappeared. We’ve stayed in touch and any time I’m back in New York, we pick up exactly where we left off (except for the copious amounts of wine I used to guzzle). She’s at Hachette now, as Editorial Director for this little real “up and coming” author, James Patterson. Uh, YEAH. Ya’ heard of him? Say less, right?
Much has changed in my life since these first came out, including the voice and tone of my writing, but when I revisit these books now, I also see some serious foreshadowing of experiences I would later have in my adult life that I never could have known at the time I originally wrote these novels. In recent years, I’ve shifted my focus from novels to scripted, including adapting my second novel into a feature film screenplay and pouring my heart and soul into co-creating and writing a new dark comedy series inspired by my own sobriety (eight years as of April 28).
When I get asked about my experience as an author, and think about what I have loved the most, it’s not having a great agent or getting a deal with one of the Big Five or being featured in People magazine or the countless, incredibly touching letters and emails I received from readers. All of that matters, and my early books will always be like dear, lifelong friends, but it’s all because of the editor behind them… who became one too.
Happy birthday, Denise. And thank you for never once billing me for the therapy.
xo,
SG
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