Good in Bed (3 page)

There was so much I didn't know—things like how long a book was supposed to be, or that you should never submit a single-spaced manuscript to a publisher. There were things I couldn't guess at, like the way books by and about women would come to be viewed as a dangerous threat to legitimate literature. God help me, if I'd known that part, I might not have written the thing at all.

But I wrote it. Then I put it in a shoebox and slid the box under my bed. Six weeks later, I pulled it out and tried to read it as a reader, not as its author.
Maybe there's something there
, I thought.
Maybe other people will think so, too.

My next step was finding an agent. In those early days of the Internet, when you couldn't check out an agent's particulars via Google, let alone do a little formatting, pay for a cover, and publish a book by yourself, I did it old-school, going to the dedication pages and acknowledgments in my favorite novels to figure out the names of the agents, then writing query letters explaining who I was and where I worked, the distinguished professors I'd studied with and the short stories I'd published, and what
Good in Bed
was all about.

In the fall of 1999, I sent out twenty-five query letters. By December, I had received twenty-four rejection letters. In some cases they were rejection postcards, packing the maximum amount of painful humiliation onto the minimum required postage.
Not taking new clients. Not taking new fiction. Not taking new women's fiction. Not taking new young women's fiction. Thanks, but no thanks.

The one agent who eventually agreed to read and, later, to represent the book was full of what turned out to be not-very-helpful suggestions.
Does the heroine need to be fat?
she inquired, pointing out the difficulties of getting a movie deal when the putative film stars a plus-size woman. Yes, I said, the heroine needs to be fat, because if she's not, then this is basically Bridget Jones with a bat mitzvah, and not even I want to read that. Fine, she huffed. But can we cut some of the sex scenes with the fat girl? No, I replied, we cannot. Then came the straw that almost broke the (fat) camel's back. I think, said the agent, that instead of calling the book
Good in Bed
, we should call it …
Big Girl.

I didn't know much about publishing back then, and I didn't have other literary agents beating down my door to represent me, but I'd been a reader all my life, and I'd spent enough time with books and in bookstores to know that a book called
Good in Bed
would have a much different time in the world than one called
Big Girl
. Actual big girls—myself included—would be loath to carry around a book called
Big
Girl
, but even casual browsers would feel compelled to thumb through a novel called
Good in Bed
, if only to see if there were pictures.

Agent one and I parted ways, and eventually I found agent two, the delightful and tiny Joanna Pulcini. We worked together for months, revising and rewriting and tightening and fixing, before we took the book out to editors, a number of whom responded with great enthusiasm. We ended up with three different publishers bidding for the rights to publish the book, and I got to make the trip to New York to meet them. Less than a week after we took it to market,
Good in Bed
was sold as part of a two-book deal in May of 2000, to Greer Hendricks, at what was then Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster … and I was over the moon.

For the next year, as the book inched its way toward publication, I continued working as a reporter at the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, and dating a nice new guy I'd met. I didn't quit my day job, and I kept my expectations modest. I imagined that
Good in Bed
would be published, that I'd do a reading or two, that my friends would buy copies and my mother (who rarely springs for hardcovers) would reserve one at the library, and, as is the case with most books, that would be that. True, I also fantasized that the act of publication would fix everything that was wrong in my life, that it would guarantee my eternal happiness, that it would silence my critics, most of all the ones who live in my own head. I pictured the manuscript as sort of a fiery cross to brandish in the face of the world's vampires, a magic wand erasing all doubt and insecurity.

Good in Bed
didn't serve that function—really, no book could—but there were signs that it might end up connecting with readers who were not me, my friends, or my immediate family, once it made its way into the world.

I remember my agent calling me for the first time, telling me, in a breathless voice, “I loved your book! It spoke to me!” (I also remember hearing that tiny voice and thinking
How?
) I remember my editor telling me that she'd missed a subway stop because she'd been so engrossed in the manuscript. …then, months later, calling to say that I'd gotten a quote from Susan Isaacs, who called the book “a contemporary Cinderella story, told with intelligence, wit, and style.”

Then there was the experience, touted by other writers as surely the most joyous of any novelist's life, of going home and telling my mother that the book she'd been hearing about for the past year, the book she'd doubted I was actually writing, had actually been written and was actually going to be published. Of course, that particular joy was short-lived. With tears in her eyes, she flung her arms around me, hugging me tightly and saying, “I'm so proud of you!” before asking the inevitable question: “So what's the title?”

“
Good in Bed
,” I said, in an uncharacteristically tiny voice.

My mother's brow furrowed. “
Good and Bad
?” she asked dubiously.

“
Good in Bed
,” I said. Her eyes widened.

“Jenny,” she said, “how much research did you do?!”

Most of all, I remember the day my editor called, her voice bubbling with barely restrained excitement. “I have two covers to show you, and I like them both a lot, but one of them I really love,” she said. I remember parking myself in front of the feature department's fax machine, waiting for the pictures to roll out. One of them was of a woman's legs in a bathtub, her body obscured by foam, her pedicured toes resting on the lip of the tub. (That cover would eventually end up on a book called
The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc
, if you want to check it out.)

The other was a shot of a pair of legs, fleshier than the gams you'd typically see in magazines or on book covers. The legs appeared from the knees down, attached to an invisible body reclining on a bed. The shins were tanned and alluringly curvy, the toenails a sassy, sexy red. The background was a welcoming, shimmering blue, and the title appeared in a curvy, ultra-feminine script:
Good in Bed
. Subversive words, fighting words, scrolling over legs like that, legs you might see, if you saw them at all, in a “before” picture for a weight-loss place instead of on the cover of a book. A slice of cheesecake, topped with a strawberry, sat on a corner of the bed, a final, beautiful touch suggesting that the book was a delicious indulgence, a treat.

This was in 2000, before disembodied legs were not yet the eye-rolling book-cover cliché they'd become. The cover was stunning. It was fresh and different and vibrant and gorgeous, eye-catching and
impossible to ignore, and I think the moment I saw it was the moment it all became real: I was really a writer. This book was really going to be in stores. I'd really done it.

Good in Bed
was published, with a reasonable amount of fanfare for a first novel written by an unknown, in May 2001. There was an ad in
The New York Times Book Review
, a paper that would decline to review
Good in Bed
outside of its big summer lady-book roundup, where Janet Maslin would deem Cannie “this season's beach book Queen for a Day.”

I took a leave of absence from the
Inquirer
and went on a marathon cross-country book tour, when such things happened with much greater frequency than they do now, and in more than one of those cities I sat in the bookstore alone, chatting with the clerks and the manager, signing the eight or so copies of the book they had on hand, and going back to my hotel room alone.

Near the end of the tour, I was in the Bertucci's in Simsbury, Connecticut, dining with my mother's book club, the members of which had all come to the Borders nearby to hear me read, when my brother Joe slipped into the restaurant and handed me a note that read:
Editor called. #33 on New York Times list
.

I remember feeling completely exultant, entirely, if momentarily, validated, and knowing that, no matter what else happened with the book or with my career, I could forever say that I was a
New York Times
bestselling author.

The book did well in hardcover, but really took off in paperback in the spring of 2002, where word of mouth would send it from mother to daughter, from friend to friend, from high-school senior to big sister in college, who'd then tell her roommates to read it.
Good in Bed
went on to spend almost a year on the bestseller lists. For a book without a movie, without Oprah's seal of approval, without the kind of critical fanfare that high profile literary titles receive, it was astonishing. I'm still astonished. Everyone dreams of success, and certainly I spun out a few daydreams involving Oprah's couch or Barbara Walters's questions or
The New York Times
dispatching a reporter to write the kind of glowing profile that was (and is still) reserved for the young male authors the paper deems worthy of its attention.

But in general I was realistic, and I was more than prepared to keep being a reporter and enjoy the fact that
Good in Bed
had simply been published, that I could walk into a bookstore, locate the Ws, and say, “I wrote this.” The idea that someday there'd be more than a million copies in print, that women who were children when I wrote it would email me or find me on Twitter and Facebook to tell me that the book had helped them through their own bad breakups or troubled relationship with family, that it had shown them that life, even with a screwed-up family and a larger-than-acceptable body, could still be happy, and that it helped them feel less alone … it's more than I hoped for and still, some days, more than I can believe.

The book's success allowed me to quit my day job to be a full-time writer of fiction, which means that, at forty, I got to be what I wanted to be when I grew up.

So what's changed in ten years … and what hasn't?

The thing that struck me the most, upon rereading
Good in Bed
, is how much technology's improved. When Samantha needs to alert Cannie to the fact that her ex-boyfriend is writing about their sex life, she actually picks up the phone and calls, instead of texting. When Cannie wants to see the story, she actually leaves her desk, goes to a newsstand, and buys a paper magazine, instead of hitting Google. How old-school! How quaint! You practically expect the two of them to strap on sunbonnets and go raise a barn when they're through!

In the world the characters inhabit, there's no Facebook on which Cannie can obsess over Bruce's relationship status, no Twitter feed to spy on, no Foursquare to tell her which bar he's just become mayor of, no Google alert to ping when he's posted his next piece, no text messaging from the ladies' room or beaming pictures from Los Angeles back home. Have these advances made things better for the lovelorn, or worse? Is it empowering to be able to track your former beloved's every move and date and utterance, or were things better in the ignorance-is-bliss days of the late 1990s and early 2000s? Unclear.

Aside from the technological progress, the world hasn't changed as much as some of us were hoping.

As I write this, it's the morning of March 9, 2011, and I'm in Studio
City, California, toggling between copyedits on a novel that will be published this July and a script for a sitcom that will debut in June, taking a break to read the news.

A famous actor lost his job last week: not for years of alleged drug use, not for allegedly holding a knife to his then wife's throat, not for beating up an adult-film actress, or for years of alleged threats and violence against women, but for calling his (wealthy, male) boss a clown.

An actress turned author turned performance artist, star of the first series of Star Wars movies, did an HBO special a few months ago in which she rolled her eyes at Internet criticism of her weight gain, saying that she hadn't realized it would be her job, for the rest of her life, to give teenage boys boners. A few weeks after the special aired, she signed on as the spokeswoman for a commercial weight-loss program.

Last week,
The New York Times
ran a story on an alleged gang rape in Texas, where eighteen teenagers and young men were reported to have raped an eleven-year-old girl, filmed the act on their phones, and distributed the footage. The reporter quoted sympathetic neighbors fretting that “the boys will have to live with this forever,” adding, meanwhile, that the eleven-year-old girl dressed much older than her age. The paper didn't actually quote anyone as saying “she was asking for it,” but you could feel those words hanging like an ugly haze over every sentence of the story.

Nor have things improved much for the damn'd mob of scribbling women, as evidenced by the
Los Angeles Times
's decision to illustrate a story about Jennifer Egan winning the National Book Critics Circle Award with a picture of Jonathan Franzen.

Chick lit is still being held up in certain quarters as the ruination of literature, condemned for trafficking in dangerous fantasies and peddling lies.

The New York Times
continues to review bestselling mysteries and thrillers written by and for men and continues to ignore the entire chick-lit genre, save for the occasional sentence in the rare seasonal roundup.