Traditional publishing is a frustrating industry whose workers are under-resourced and often mandated to chase metrics like authors' audience size and nascent trends based on "data," "vibes," and "TikTok."
If, in the yearslong dark period when I had an agent but not yet a book deal, an editor had told me exactly what I needed to change about my project to get them to buy it, I would have jumped at the chance. Especially if what they wanted was a book I already had in the works—it just wasn't the one I wanted to publish first.
This is what happened to Alexander Chee in the years after he graduated from his MFA. He had been working on two novel concepts, and editors vastly preferred one over the other. But he had a strong preference that one come first, his "shitty autobiographical novel" that would eventually become Edinburgh. The second novel, which would be The Queen of the Night, eventually did get published, but that was 15 years after Edinburgh.
"I want to talk to you about desperation," I asked Chee when I interviewed him for Try Hard. "I'm curious about how you managed to hold your own despite all of these people telling you, Hey, like we will publish you. You just have to do this other thing, and it's this thing that you wanted to do. It just maybe wasn't the thing you wanted to do first." How did he stick to his conviction that Edinburgh should come first, even when the gatekeepers and arbiters of talent in his industry told him otherwise?
Chee is one of my favorite writers, and it was so exciting to get to talk to him about how he's kept his creative backbone firm, the precise number of chances you get to blow up your book deal, and the ongoing performance of what he calls "success theater."
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