Fall down seven times, get up eight.
—Variously attributed Japanese proverb
I continued to work with Ben while he wrote his autobiography, interviewing him, acting as a sounding board, and researching to fill in memory gaps and provide context. During that time, I also wrote occasionally for the Post, trying to keep my hand in the game.
One time I submitted an essay to the Post’s Sunday Outlook opinion section. It was about living in the nation’s capital, a place whose culture and climate I was becoming less enamored of the longer I stayed. I had become restless and talked about leaving. I felt mismatched with a city obsessed with politics rather than art and literature. I blamed geography because it was easier than blaming myself. More to the point, I should have reflected on why I was still playing the role of assistant rather than focusing on my own work. Instead, I projected my dissatisfaction onto the muggy, steamy city.
Since I hadn’t heard back whether the piece was accepted or rejected, after working with Ben one day, I stopped by the desk of an editor at Outlook. I knew him from my days at Style. He was an eccentric, gifted wordsmith who had a highly excitable affect that involved a lot of stammering and gesticulating.
“You wrote this?” he said, peering at me over his glasses, which were slipping down the bridge of his nose.
“Yes, of course I wrote it.”
Though he meant no harm, I was crushed. He was merely struggling to reconcile his preconceived notion of me as a girl Friday, mystified by the outlandish notion that I was a writer in my own right. I’m sure it would have horrified him to know that the question he blurted out would become a memory with no expiration date. He ran my article the next Sunday.
“Gauguin did it,” I’d written on the topic of fleeing. “Just picked up and left. I wonder what the pollen count is in Tahiti. I have lost my joie de Washington. I am languid at best, catatonic at worst. It is more than the humidity. It is a reaction to a place where people mark events in their lives as personal as deaths and weddings with phrases like ‘before the election’ or ‘after the inauguration.’ I want to live in a place where phrases like ‘before the drought’ or ‘after the flood’ carry more weight.”
My family and friends laughed about the piece. I was the girl who cried wolf, always talking about leaving Washington and never following through. I was now in my early thirties and hadn’t made any overtures to build a life elsewhere. A few readers wrote in, both those who agreed and those who didn’t, one reader remarking that I had neglected to appreciate the beauty of the city, focusing only on negatives.
I thought I was profound and jaded, that I had seen it all. I had no idea what Washington still had in store for me.
Ben and I worked at a relaxed but steady pace. He seemed to be in no hurry to get the book done, and I welcomed the contrast from the intensity of Woodward and the chaos of Bernstein. My days had a leisurely pace to them. During Ben’s writing of the manuscript, he would sometimes send me to the Post library to check a fact or get more information about something. Once he was finished writing a chapter I would fact-check it and make suggestions when I thought he should make something more clear or fill in an anecdote or cut a scene that didn’t work.
Sometimes he would get an idea for the How to Read a Newspaper book, and he would give me something to research, maybe an old article to dig up that would illustrate an idea he had. And he loved finding funny corrections in other newspapers. The longer and stranger a correction, the bigger the kick he got out of it.
When I felt antsy, I roamed the newsroom and found someone to chat with or stopped by Ben’s office to hang out with his secretary, Carol Leggett, with whom I had become good friends.
This less demanding schedule meant I had enough time to pursue a master’s degree in English at nearby Georgetown University, something I wanted to do because I was toying with the idea of teaching. My mother had taught high school English, and my growing interest in teaching reflected my wanting to keep her close. I had enrolled in the fall of 1990, a year after her death. Georgetown’s campus was walking distance from Ben and Sally’s house, so I arranged my schedule to work there on the days I had early evening classes. Being in an academic environment, surrounded by people who loved books, compelled me to return to my own novel, incorporating it into my studies when I took a class in women’s autobiography and the autobiographical novel.
After a few semesters at Georgetown, I finally finished my Poor Girls Always Have Singles manuscript, which I had retitled Miss Fortune. I thought that was an easier title to remember and that it might more easily catch the eye of an agent or editor. I still clung to my dream of becoming a novelist.
An aptly named Post colleague, Charlie Trueheart, offered to give the first hundred pages of my novel to his literary agent. About a week later, the agent called excitedly and proclaimed that this novel would make me “the Jewish Amy Tan.”
I shared this news with a few friends, and one of them brought over a bottle of champagne, and giddily we emptied it while imagining a future filled with book tours, royalties, and reviews. But my hopes were quickly dashed when the agent called to say he felt the remaining two hundred pages “didn’t deliver what the book initially promised.”
The words stung terribly, but I decided I wasn’t quite ready to give up. The agent had also said that I could rework those disappointing pages and then, if they were to his liking, he would try to sell the novel. I asked Ben for two weeks off without pay, and I feverishly edited and revised the manuscript, attempting to fix subplots and strengthen the overall story arc. At the end of the two weeks, I sent the manuscript to the agent, and again he wasn’t impressed.
And so my dreams of being “the Jewish Amy Tan” dissolved, and I was still just the Jewish Barbara Feinman. Discouraged, I tabled the manuscript and told myself I would focus on Ben’s book and finish getting my master’s degree.
Around this time, in the late summer of 1992, the Georgetown English Department needed a journalist to teach undergraduates a section of Introduction to Journalism. At the last minute, the scheduled instructor, a Post reporter, had been awarded a Fulbright that would take her to Slovenia. Georgetown didn’t have a journalism department or even a program, only one or two journalism courses each semester that were English electives. I had wanted to try my hand at teaching, and this was the perfect opportunity, so I signed on.
I also decided I wasn’t ready to give up on getting Miss Fortune published, and so I found a new agent, this time a woman named Flip Brophy. She worked at Sterling Lord Literistic, a well-respected New York agency housed in a funky suite of offices across from Madison Square Park in the Flatiron District. When I visited for the first time, I was drawn to its lively, hip atmosphere. Books lined the crowded shelves and spilled out on any and all available flat surfaces.
Everyone who worked there, from the front desk receptionist to the rarely seen eponymous head of the agency, seemed impossibly cool. Washington media types, except for broadcast news on-air talent, didn’t pay attention to the way they dressed, for the most part, and, as a motley tribe, they weren’t very style conscious. New Yorkers seemed neurotically edgy and artsy whereas Washingtonians were coldly ambitious and myopically wonky. This literary agency, and New York City, gave me a sense of an alternative future.
Flip set to work shopping around my manuscript to several publishing houses. She was a fixture in the New York publishing scene and editors took her calls. She represented mostly journalists and politicians, counting among her clients Senator Gary Hart, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer, writer James McBride, and a host of others, known, unknown, and those teetering between the two. Everyone loved Flip and she seemed to love everyone, thriving in the frenetic hothouse atmospheres of Washington media and New York literati. She had that rare quality of making you feel like you were a great secret she was about to share with the world.
The responses began to pour in. Editors liked the characters and the writing but, echoing the first agent’s assessment, felt the plot didn’t deliver. After a few weeks, it was clear that no one was going to make an offer. Crushed, I thanked Flip for her considerable efforts and retreated into a mental fetal position while the old internal audiotape of writerly doom played itself in my head: Was I kidding myself? How would I know when it was time to give up? Was it time to give up? I didn’t want to be a quitter. Besides, writing was a compulsion. I always seemed to drift back to it even if I resolved to move on.
I took out a wrinkled, folded-up note from one of my writing professors at Berkeley. He was Leonard Michaels, whose first novel, The Men’s Club, was published in 1981, a year before I was in his class. He had written my recommendation letter to the Washington Post ten years before. Attached to a copy of the letter on official university stationery, he had stapled a scrawled note from a memo pad. “Barbara, You’re a good writer. A real one. Stay with it, become your own teacher soon . . . LM.”
In the past his words had comforted me, but this time I wondered if he was just being nice, if it was a stock message worded to placate anxious student writers. He wasn’t the type to be gratuitously kind, I countered. My memory of his style during writing workshop sessions was that he didn’t suffer fools.
I had a new thought: Maybe he wasn’t being kind; maybe he was just wrong. And what exactly did he mean by, “become your own teacher”? The advice was as cryptic as a fortune cookie message. I folded up the note and put it back in my box of keepsakes. And once again, I stowed away the manuscript in a file cabinet.
Though Flip couldn’t sell Miss Fortune, she didn’t give up on me. Not long after the rejections poured in, she phoned. “Don’t worry about the novel. We’ll go back to it at some point,” she said, trotting out her brisk New York businesswoman tone that she slipped into when she was discussing something unpleasant and was impatient to move on to a new topic. “How would you like to ghostwrite a book for a congresswoman?”
By this point, in early 1993, I had worked with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and I was still helping Ben. In addition, I had done research or editing on a handful of other books on a more limited basis. As I listened to Flip’s description of the potential gig, I recognized a whole new level of editorial involvement. I would have about six months to write an entire book for a newly elected Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky.
The 1992 elections had ushered in more freshmen women to Congress than ever before. This congresswoman, Flip explained, had a deal with Crown to chronicle her first eight months in the House of Representatives during what was billed as the “Year of the Woman.” Not only would I interview the congresswoman so I could tell her story, in her voice, but I would also talk to her female colleagues, as well as a few of the men, to include their perspectives.
It was a tempting offer. And it was new territory for me—I would be in the driver’s seat, writing an entire book, even if it wasn’t under my own name. But it would mean I would have to leave Ben. I had now been working with him going on three years. While we had gotten much of the first book done, we were moving slowly, and there was little mention of the second book. I didn’t want to abandon Ben, but I also couldn’t keep my professional life on hold indefinitely. I was still feeling restless, perhaps more so than ever.
The words of Harriet Fier, the formidable Style assignment editor, rang in my ears: Don’t let yourself get too fat and happy. It was scary to think about leaving Ben and even scarier to sign on to write an entire book. My heart sank as I admitted that the fear was proof I should do it.
I summoned up my nerve and went to see Ben one morning. He was doing a crossword puzzle, and when I told him I had something to tell him, he peered at me over his reading glasses and put the folded newspaper down on his desk. I launched into a long explanation about my unsold novel and said that even though this wasn’t fiction, it was an opportunity to actually write a book rather than merely research and edit one.
“Look,” he said, “you need to do what you think is best. We’ve gotten a lot of this thing done. Just find me someone who can take over. And you will still be around. Sally won’t let you escape,” he said, laughing, picking up his crossword.
Relieved, I assured him I would find a replacement to take over the remaining research and get that person up to speed before I left. I enlisted the aid of a young friend at the Post, for whom this would be a great opportunity, and the transition was made smoothly. I hoped we would stay close, but it was time for me to move on.
Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky was a former Philadelphia NBC news reporter who had covered Congress. She understood the media better than most and knew how to take full advantage of this knowledge. A petite, energetic dynamo, she knew that a book about herself and her female colleagues as they came to power would position her as a sort of political pioneer. She had already become a public figure in her high-profile broadcast job but also as the wife of an Iowa Democratic congressman, Ed Mezvinsky, whom she had met on the job and who had lost his reelection bid after serving two terms.
Before her marriage Marjorie had also attracted a lot of attention as the first single American woman to adopt a child from another country; she testified before Congress in 1976 in a successful effort to influence legislation on adoption and immigration practices.
Her desire to tell the story of this particular group of women had a lot of potential, particularly because it spoke loudly to the largest book-buying demographic: middle-aged women. And Marjorie and I had much in common as we shared the same religion, politics, social class, and even our small stature. It was not that much of a stretch for me to appropriate her voice.
When someone as accomplished as Marjorie hires someone like me to write a book for them, someone invariably raises the question of why they don’t have what it takes to write their own book. I got asked this constantly when I told people what I did for a living. The answer is that sometimes they do have the talent, but they don’t have the time.
Say what you will about politicians, but the ones I have known keep grueling schedules and are run ragged between committee meetings and votes, constituent obligations, and fund-raising for the omnipresent next election—not to mention having to divide their time between Washington and their home state. It’s a rare member of Congress who would be able to research, organize, and write a book while still in office, even if he or she had literary inclinations. The ones who are also parents are particularly challenged. Marjorie was the mother of a blended brood of eleven children (two adopted daughters, three adopted sons, two biological sons, and four stepdaughters). This role left her no time for book writing.
As it had with Ben, working for Marjorie entailed doing a lot of background research on events and issues to inform the interview sessions with her as well as with her colleagues and other people in her universe, transcribing the raw material, organizing it, and then shaping it all into a narrative. Interviewing dozens of members of Congress was a primer in both politics and American civics. Though I had been to the Hill on many occasions, it had been mostly for Style reporting. Now I would be getting a behind-the-scenes look at the legislative and political process.
Nearly all the women in Congress we approached for an interview agreed to participate. I was doing the work under Marjorie’s auspices, and that gave me a level of access that reporters can only dream of, but what would ultimately make it into the book was completely Marjorie’s decision. I had to remind myself time and again that I was on the inside of the rope line as an invitee, a ghost, and not as a reporter. I was excited to have inside access to such an impressive group of professional women. I wanted to get a sense of who they really were and what motivated them. My earlier jobs had let me observe up close extremely successful men, but this was an opportunity to study people more like me. Because I was representing Marjorie and her book project rather than my own article for a newspaper or magazine, I hoped my subjects would be more forthcoming than they might otherwise be, that I could glean something beyond what they had revealed publicly.
Unfortunately, my hopes were quickly dashed. As I went from interview to interview, I had the growing suspicion that everything they were saying to me and my tape recorder they had already said before in stump speeches and press interviews. The members’ responses were carefully crafted and stripped of anything that could be used against them in future campaign ads.
This was pre-Internet and pre-Google so I had the time-consuming task of going back through the archives to see what each of them had said in the past and to whom. When I did, my worst fears were confirmed, that much of the material I was getting during the interviews was recycled pablum. I would have to ask better questions if I wanted usable material. Hearing that they were fighting for their constituents and that they had come to Washington to make a difference was admirable but predictable and uninteresting.
In addition to how guarded these professional politicians had been trained to be, they were usually more comfortable talking about policies than telling stories. Because they were professional problem solvers, their milieu was polling data and number-crunching. Narrative arc was a foreign concept. Answers to questions fell into two categories: safe, generic bromides or mind-numbing wonk-speak.
After one particularly eyes-glazing-over transcribing session, I came up with what I hoped would be some more compelling questions. One, in particular, proved effective. “If your life as a congresswoman were a movie, what’s the defining moment?” Because I was asking them to imagine something, it played to a more relaxed and candid response. It was almost like a game. When I got any traction, I kept going. Sometimes they would stop themselves just as they began to say something interesting, becoming self-conscious. “Pretend I’m not here,” I would say gently, prodding them to keep going.
Usually they would need more direction: “What’s the opening scene of this movie that would introduce the point you want to make about this place and yourself?” Then I would move in for the specific, defining moment. Sometimes it wasn’t a moment but a fact or a detail. In journalism this is called getting “the name of the dog,” as in getting the name of the dog/horse/turtle of the porn star/embezzler/tech start-up CEO you’re profiling.
“I want the positive moment and the negative moment,” I would instruct. This approach helped knock loose some memories and anecdotes, and it helped me figure out which women wanted to be more open but either needed help in how to communicate in that way or wanted to size me up a bit more before revealing themselves. While some, no matter how I asked, nudged, or cajoled, would not give up anything beyond what you could find in their official bios, others did open up, one woman even explaining in depth the context of her suicide attempt, another talking about personal experiences informing a stance on abortion.
A book by a sitting congresswoman was not going to have the sort of revelations you would find in a political biography written by a historian or journalist. But getting these women to open up a bit to humanize them in my own mind enabled me to portray them as three-dimensional.
Around this time, as I made my way through the interview list, I began asking Marjorie to consider putting my name on the cover as a “with.” In the parlance of publishing, whether you call yourself a writer, a collaborator, a book doctor, a midwife, or a ghost doesn’t much matter in the scheme of things. What does matter is getting your name on the cover. By matter I don’t mean it necessarily helps you get more work. These gigs are gotten mainly by word of mouth, in editor and agent publishing circles. It matters because it gives you more street cred with people outside of the business.
In the publishing world, it’s a rarity when a “name” actually pens his own book; everyone from the receptionist to the CEO at every publishing house and literary agency knows that if you want to figure out who wrote the book, look no further than the sea of names on the acknowledgment page. So I made the case to Marjorie that it would help my career and it wouldn’t hurt hers. It would be perceived as an act of generosity, one woman helping another. She readily agreed and instructed Crown to give me a “with.” I don’t know why she did it, but I was glad she did.
I spent that spring and summer researching, reporting, transcribing, and writing. The book was coming together, and Marjorie squeezed me into her schedule when she could, though sometimes it meant literally chasing after her in the halls of Congress or accompanying her on the train ride back to Philly or even on the private Capitol Hill underground subway system as she and her colleagues scurried to and from votes. The days were mostly filled with the tedium of the legislative process, congressional life not nearly as entertaining as House of Cards or Veep or The West Wing has portrayed.
But on August 5, 1993, a true drama played out on the floor of the House of Representatives, and Marjorie was a key player, though certainly not by choice. President Clinton found himself a single vote short to get his economic plan, his first budget, through the House. He had promised to take on the challenge of the country’s deficit, and his strategy was to reprioritize the budget and introduce a stimulus package.
Marjorie had been the only freshman Democrat to vote against both facets of his plan in earlier iterations. Her district was the most Republican leaning of any Democrat’s in Congress and she knew that if she changed her no vote to a yes in this next round, she would surely be voted out of office.
Jake Tapper, now of CNN, was then her press secretary. On that August day, he told her the president was on the line. Marjorie heard the president ask her what would it take? They talked for another minute or two, and then she agreed to switch her vote, supporting the president’s plan. This was considered by some to be an act of political suicide and by others as one of party fealty. Seventeen years later, political reporter Karen Tumulty, writing for Time, would reflect on this moment, characterizing it as “one of the most extraordinary spectacles I have ever witnessed in the House Chamber. . . . The other side of the Chamber seemed to explode. Republicans pulled out their hankies and started waving them at her, chanting: ‘Bye-bye, Margie.’”
This made for a lively scene in the book: though no one was physically pushed onto the subway tracks, Marjorie must have felt she had been thrown under the bus by the Democratic Party. It was obvious to all that she would lose her reelection campaign. Before that happened, she had a book to finish and some political favors to collect on.
Two months to the day after the historic vote that effectively ended Marjorie’s congressional career, First Lady Hillary Clinton sat down with us to be interviewed for the book. While she wasn’t a member of Congress, the First Lady had spent a lot of time dealing with Congress during her tenure as the head of the Clinton administration task force to overhaul health-care reform. Her policy role was unprecedented for a First Lady. Her participation in the book was obviously something the marketing department could promote in publicity materials. This was a good start, but I wondered what else the president and First Lady would do to repay Marjorie for the vote that everyone knew was going to cost her her seat. Marjorie, in the interim, had been traveling around her district and hearing from angry constituents.
I was along to assist Marjorie while Mrs. Clinton had one of her aides present. An official White House photo shows me wearing an ill-fitting suit, one I had bought specifically for that meeting, and my unruly hair was pulled back in a ponytail in a semisuccessful attempt to tame it. We had spent a lot of time preparing for the interview and had a list of questions prepared. I was awestruck by the White House. I had been there on several occasions in my role as freelance party reporter for the Style section, but I had never participated in a private meeting.
I dutifully took notes, obsessively checking the tape recorder to make sure it was working. I had brought along extra batteries, pens, reporter’s notepads, and notes. Soon my nerves settled down when I saw that Marjorie and Mrs. Clinton were doing just fine without my input. Just to prove to myself I could put several words together in the right order and make them come out of my mouth audibly, I promised myself I would ask at least one question before the interview concluded.
The First Lady and the congresswoman discussed what it meant for more women than ever before to be in Congress, that women approached legislative work differently from their male counterparts. Women were more likely to use their life experiences to inform this work and were less concerned with wielding power.
Women in politics had to deal with a lot of bullshit and bad behavior on the part of men who were resisting this sharing of the stage. Issues like rape, violence, and reproductive health were now getting airtime. Maybe more women in Congress would really change things, and for the better, I thought. I was excited by the conversation; Mrs. Clinton’s enthusiasm illuminated the room as she talked about how it made her feel to see so many women in office. I wondered how maddening it must be to have to wear the corset of First Ladydom when you have a law degree from Yale and are committed to issues such as global women’s rights and affordable health care.
The interview was wrapping up and Marjorie looked at me. “Do you have anything you want to ask?”
“A real quick one,” I said, nodding. I did have one question, an obvious one but something that I really thought should be addressed. “When do you think we’ll have a woman president?” The second half of the question, the part I was too intimidated to actually ask, was “and would you be interested in being that woman?”
“Sometime in the next fifteen or twenty years,” she said, smiling.
That was fall of 1993. Fifteen years before she would first run for the presidency. She came pretty close to her own prediction.
As the Republican House members had so coarsely predicted, Marjorie’s constituents showed no mercy in town hall meetings and other public venues where she appeared on trips home; Marjorie and her staff watched as her chances of being reelected deteriorated from unlikely to grim. A few months after our White House interview, an otherwise cheerless holiday season was brightened by an invitation from the Clintons for Marjorie and her family to attend Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head, South Carolina.
An exclusive annual retreat for top people to talk about public policy, Renaissance Weekend was described by the New York Times as a “festival of earnestness.” It was also an opportunity for Marjorie to make useful connections for her post-Congress future. But the most valuable of these connections was one that neither she nor even the most calculating political operative could have engineered or even predicted: Marjorie’s oldest son, Marc, and the Clintons’ only child, Chelsea, would meet, starting a teenage friendship that would flourish when they both ended up attending Stanford University.
This friendship eventually evolved into an adult relationship that led to marriage in 2010, making Marjorie and the Clintons in-laws. This union, worthy of a Venn diagram illustrating the incestuous nature of political Washington, got the predictable amount of media attention, focusing on the scandals and setbacks of the couple’s parents, rather than noting how much Marjorie had actually accomplished. I felt the press overlooked an equally meaningful aspect of the story.
The sheer perseverance and resilience it must have taken to live a life that included being the mother of eleven children, the recipient of five Emmys, author of three books, and stints as the head of the National Women’s Business Council, the director, deputy chair of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, and executive director of the Women’s Campaign Fund—that to me seems like something worth exploring. And the setbacks: Losing office. Bankruptcy. Convicted spouse. Divorce. (The marriage ended in 2007 after Ed Mezvinsky reportedly spiraled downward, culminating in his serving five years in prison after pleading guilty to dozens of felonies, receiving a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and becoming entangled in various lawsuits. He had fallen prey to a variety of Nigerian scams and then engaged in some illegal activities to dig himself out of debt.) Marjorie’s life is the living embodiment of that Japanese proverb: Fall down seven times, get up eight.
The complexity of challenges that Marjorie has encountered and dealt with in her life is pretty staggering and I’m not sure she’s been given the respect she deserves just for the resilience she has demonstrated. Washington is a town where everything is measured in polls and fund-raising dollars. You’re either up or you’re down, you’re in or you’re out. You’re good or you’re bad. You’re a conniving opportunist or a selfless do-gooder. You value yourself only by whether you are perceived as a player or not. I had fallen into that trap myself: estimating my own value using others’ criteria, mistaking proximity to power as proof of my worthiness.
After Marjorie’s book hit the bookstores in the early spring of 1994, it was again time to ask, “What next?” I had worked for Woodward, Bernstein, Bradlee, and now had a “with” on a book that received favorable reviews and some attention. I also had my master’s and was teaching Introduction to Journalism on a regular basis at Georgetown. Unsolicited, book projects were now coming my way, and I was beginning to have the luxury of turning down work that wasn’t appealing, either because the compensation wasn’t enough or the client promised to be difficult. Saying no was hard at first because I was afraid the work would dry up. But it didn’t.
Later that spring I received an unusual offer from a former Washington Post Food section editor who had relocated to Maine to run the Bangor Daily News. He invited me to come up to Maine for the summer and be a floating newsroom writing coach. I would make my way through the roster of reporters, stationed throughout the state in little one-person bureaus, and work with them on improving their writing. It wasn’t exactly Gauguin taking off for Tahiti, but it would get me out of D.C. during its worst weather.
I was more than ready to trade in lobbyists and the White House for lobsters and lighthouses, at least for a summer. While I was proud of Marjorie’s book, it wasn’t mine. Like a surrogate mother leaving the baby behind at the hospital, I felt empty.
I packed up my apartment, put my stuff in storage, said good-bye to my friends, and headed north. When I arrived, I stayed with my new boss and his wife for a few days, and they helped me comb the classifieds for a place to live. I found a room for rent on a horse farm owned by a friendly, warm woman named Bunny. I loved horses, having ridden in college, and Bunny promised to give me lessons in addition to occasional hot meals. I settled in and began to get to know my way around the newsroom and town.
The local news business was a welcome change from what I was used to. Conflicts of interest, for instance, were totally different. Instead of power couples like Andrea Mitchell and Alan Greenspan navigating overlapping realms of politics and journalism, here in Maine it was fishermen doubling as business reporters. Ethical dilemmas were quaint compared to those the Washington press corps faced: rather than worrying about whether you can use what you overhear as a soccer mom in the bleachers about the congressman’s marriage, it was more along the lines of must you recuse yourself from reporting on the effect of a recent drought on the price of blueberries?
The New England lifestyle was just more fun. The car I was driving at the time was made for a summer in Maine, a little blue convertible Miata with a standard shift, which I chronicled in a quarterly column I wrote for Miata Magazine (yes, there is such a thing). An essay I had written for Glamour magazine about the sense of power that driving fast gave me had caught the editor’s eye, and he called me up and invited me to be their “girl columnist.” For a few years I wrote what amounted to a serial love letter to driving. It culminated in my attending Skip Barber Racing School, one of the best places to learn how to drive a racecar, something on my bucket list.
I flirted with the idea of staying in Bangor. I daydreamed about the newspaper hiring me on in a permanent editor position. Or, maybe Stephen King, who lived in town, needed an assistant. Never mind that I hated horror stories. I was thirty-four years old, time to settle down, and Maine seemed like a sane place. I pictured myself marrying a lobsterman and having children and living in a lighthouse. I hadn’t actually met any lobstermen or anyone who lived in a lighthouse. Still. Maybe I could stay.
But then one day I got a phone call when I was in the newsroom working with one of the sports reporters. On the line was Bob Barnett, a D.C. book agent/lawyer to the stars. He was both Woodward’s and Ben’s agent. He was calling because he represented a woman named Hanan Ashrawi, who he explained was a well-known and well-respected spokesperson for the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and a university professor. She had completed a draft of This Side of Peace, a memoir of her struggles as a Christian Arab woman in a Muslim, male-dominated world, having to navigate between the likes of Yassir Arafat and Shimon Peres. Alice Mayhew was the editor on the book, Barnett said, and they were hoping I was available to help out for a month, maybe five weeks.
It sounded like a good gig, but it meant returning to Washington. Which of course, having not met my lobsterman, I was inclined to do anyway, as my contract with the Bangor paper was just for the summer. We discussed the details a few more minutes, and then I asked about compensation.
He told me to come up with a figure. My mind went blank. My brother, David, a former government lawyer and now a junk bond trader, had taught me that the first rule of negotiating was never to name a number first. So I said I really didn’t know, hoping that would force Barnett to float the first figure.
But he asked me again what I was looking for so I had to ask him if he would hold a sec, and I dialed my brother who answered by blurting his last name. I could hear guys screaming numbers in the background. I quickly told him what was going on.
“Okay, get back on the line and just tell him $40k.” Then I heard a muffled sound, which must have been David’s hand over the receiver. He was trading something, a gazillion of this, a thousand of that, shorting this, long on that.
“Forty thousand? For five weeks of work? Are you crazy?” I said when he came back on the line. “I can’t ask for that.” We lived in two different worlds. His was in a Michael Douglas movie, and mine was by Nora Ephron.
“Don’t be a chump. If they want you enough, they will pay you what you’re worth. Tell him it’s inconvenient, it will mess up your vacation, blah blah blah.” His hand went back over the receiver, and he was yelling numbers again. “Just go back to him and say $30k.”
I pressed the blinking light and said, “Hi, Bob. Um, I was going to take a vacation after my job here ended. But I guess I could come back for this. But it’s inconvenient. I guess I could do it for $20k.”
“Twenty thousand dollars?” His tone was incredulous. He was practically sputtering. “Why, that’s”—he paused to do the math—“an annual rate of $240k.”
I asked him to hold again as I went back to David, who was yelling again, calling someone in the background a moron. I repeated what Barnett had said, about the annual rate.
“You got a pen?” His tone had gone from patronizing to impatient.
“Yes,” I said dutifully.
“Okay, write this down so you don’t screw it up. Then get back on the phone with this guy and read it word for word: ‘Yes, your math is correct. What’s your point?’”
Barnett agreed to the $20k, so a few weeks later I packed up my car, made my rounds at the newsroom, hugged Bunny and every single one of her horses good-bye, and headed south.
When I got back to Washington, Alice sent me the manuscript and asked me to look for places in the narrative where personal history could be woven into the author’s role on the world stage of the Middle East peace process. Hanan would travel to Washington and spend a handful of days with me during which we were to work on making the manuscript more accessible to a wide audience.
After reading her manuscript, I was excited to meet Hanan. She was a woman of many accomplishments, someone who was an alluring mix of strength and warmth. The woman who wrote these pages was very wise, and I was humbled that anyone thought I could help make this good book even better.
I wasn’t disappointed when I met her. She was the sort of person with whom you instantly feel a connection. She had an immediacy and an authenticity about her that elicited the same of those in her presence. Though serious and not one to mince words, she was also fun and loved chocolate and tobacco, both of which she encouraged me to share.
During one of these sugar and cigarette breaks, she inhaled deeply, looked me straight in the eye, and asked, “When are you going to start focusing on your own writing?”
Good question.
Taken aback by her interest in me, I just shrugged and mumbled. Less out of reluctance and more out of denial. I was touched by her interest. A strong role model for women and fierce supporter of women’s rights, she was keeping with her core values in encouraging me. What she wrote in her acknowledgments section, like Professor Michaels’s words, buoyed my spirits: “Barbara Feinman, craftswoman and friend, understood both structure and substance.”
These two experiences, Marjorie putting my name on the cover of her book and Hanan challenging me to do my own work, helped move me toward bolstering myself to establish my own voice, to stake a claim as a writer with her own story to tell. I felt something shifting, as though I were at a crossroads with my writing, and that I still had a chance to change course.
But I had built up a solid reputation as a book doctor, and this town would never have a shortage of people who wanted to “author” books but who couldn’t or didn’t want to write them themselves. I had to make a living. It wasn’t realistic to think I could do that by writing novels, even if I managed to get one published.
Was it time to make my peace with being a “craftswoman,” as Hanan so kindly put it? What did it mean that I had gravitated to work that required—or allowed?—me to be silent, and invisible? Was it really so different from the fiction I longed to write? Was it time to give up on my fiction, even on my own voice, and be grateful for what I had: a steady stream of income and a comfortable life?