Rejection, Death, and Oprah
In the winter of 1998/99, I was in my third residency at the Vermont College of Fine Arts seeking an MFA in Writing. The previous semester, the literary novelist and subject of this story, Bret Lott, had been my advisor. When I told him that my fellow fiction writers were encouraging me to write business stories but that I didn’t have a story idea, Bret told me there was an easy fix; find a true business story and fictionalize it. The first, widely publicized SmithKline Beecham merger with Glaxo Wellcome fell apart a few months later, and I’d found my business story to fictionalize. However, it was Bret’s enthusiasm for an early draft of Wing Walking, my first novel, that encouraged me to, in his words, “participate in that terrifying and exhilarating journey upon which I was embarking: the life of a writer.”
Early in the residency, on a cold January morning — starting a day that might be described as Bret’s dispiriting, then bad, then fantastic day — Bret’s agent reached him on VCFA’s only phone to tell him that the novel he’d just finished was awful. “What happened to this? Where was your heart?” she asked.
When Bret finished the call — which lasted three painful hours — he walked across the campus to lunch thinking he was in Vermont to teach others to write, but his latest novel hadn’t worked, and, honestly, he knew nothing about writing.
But that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was that at lunch, Bret learned that Jim Ferry, one of his students and, like me, a friend, had been found dead in his room trying to finish a novel he was writing and reading Reed’s Beach, one of Bret’s books.
(Although Jim’s room was directly across the hall from mine, I hardly knew him. But I was aware of the food and bottle of water that a concerned student had been left outside his locked door when Jim hadn’t shown for dinner.)
After a meeting with the program’s leadership to discuss Jim’s death, Bret returned to the office to cover the phone and relieve the shattered program director, Louise Crowley. Around 4:00, the phone rang, and the call was for Bret. The caller asked him to hold, that his boss wanted to talk with him. Muzak played, then stopped. A woman said Bret’s name, then hers, then said, “We’re going to have so much fun!”
Bret shouted, “Is this a joke? Is this for real?”
When the phone call was over, Louise asked if it was her, although she knew the answer. Bret said yes, it was her, that she’d picked Jewel, a book of his that was out of print for her Book Club, that it was a secret, and hugged his old friend.
Later, Bret wrote this: You let go the director, and see she is crying, and you are crying now, too. You are crying, and you are smiling, and you look back to the window, see the ashen violet gone to purple so deep and so true that you know none of this is happening, none of it. This is what you finally understand is surreal, a word you have heard and used a thousand times. But now it has meaning. A friend has died. The Force has called. The sky has gone from a cold and indifferent blue to this regal purple. A secret has been bestowed. A novel has been lost. Another gone unfinished… A friend has died, and you did not record his passing with the Force… What does a book matter?
A few nights later, Bret and I sat together to listen to a visiting writer, Chris Bohjalian, read and talk about his best-selling novel, Midwives. When Chris mentioned that Midwives had been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, Bret leaned toward me and said, “Someday, I’ll tell you how this Oprah thing works.”
When Bret was finally allowed to share his secret, he told me his story, adding that his publisher had been instructed to print 750,000 copies of Jewel with assurances from Oprah that they’d sell more than a million, which they did. And a guy who was convinced he knew nothing about writing on a frigid Vermont morning in 1999 became a New York Times bestselling author overnight.
It just goes to show you why at times Bret’s “terrifying and exhilarating journey of the life of a writer” drives us all a little bit nuts.
