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CHAPTER 1

I had completed a first novel in 1997. Then I'd worked hard on writing a good query letter. I put as much effort into it as I had into writing the manuscript. I kept it really brief: a four-sentence synopsis of the book, a short paragraph about my professional background, and a one-sentence endorsement of the manuscript from a well-known author who had read it.

I'd sent out one hundred of these query letters, all at the same time. Twenty-five agents responded, asking to see the full manuscript and of those, four had offered me representation. All of this had taken more than a year, one long year of facing the weekly rejections. I had dreaded going to the mailbox. Sometime during that year the sleepless nights began, the nights of lying in a fetal position, then turning to stare at the ceiling. My animals kept me going, a pug tucked under one arm, my two Siamese cats under another, and my collie mix stretched across the foot of the bed. If it hadn't been for them and having to get up to feed horses and go to work, I don't know what would have become of me.

I was able to get a wonderful agent at a famous agency. I met the agent, whose reputation overawed me, in her beautiful New York City office, which was decorated like an East Hampton summer cottage with wicker furniture and gleaming hardwood floors. She was surrounded by her authors, their books displayed on three walls, every one of them a renowned literary name. This agent spoke to me as though my novel were already a success, as though I were already one of the elite gracing her walls.

"I expect to get about twenty thousand for this book," she said. "First novels are always the hardest. But for your second we'll get much more and for the third, well ..." She didn't finish but I was right up there in the clouds with her, floating around in this rosy vision of my literary success.

The rejections from publishers began arriving almost right away. One, two, five, twelve. Thoughtfully, she'd enclose the rejection letter from the publisher along with her own comments about why she thought the novel had failed at that particular house. I forced myself to read these letters, imagining that there was something to be learned but hating to learn it, hating this evidence of my failure. I started a file for rejections and watched it thicken.

After about a year, the rejection letters came less often and then hardly at all and then they stopped. After months of silence, I worked up the nerve to call my agent and left a message that was never returned. More months passed before I left a second message that was never returned and then, one day, she returned the manuscript with a one-line note of apology for being unable to sell it.

The nights got longer and even the days seemed dark. There were glimpses of light but never for long. Two more agents came and went. Nothing changed but their furniture. Years passed. I fell in love with a wonderful man named Paul. My beloved dogs and horses aged and died. I refilled the barn with horse boarders. My brother and sister-in-law gave me a chocolate Lab puppy and I adopted two pug siblings whose owner was leaving the country. During the day I went to my job as a social worker, then to a new job as a writing adjunct at Marist College and a few years after that, to another new job as a writing adjunct at Ulster County Community College. During all those years I got up at 5:00 a.m. every day to work on a second novel, then a third, and finally a memoir about Lay Me Down. I don't know how I kept writing through all the rejections, all the voices telling me I wasn't good enough. I just did. Quitting didn't seem to be an option.

I had liked doing social work and had often felt passionate about it, particularly in the early years. I felt the same way about teaching. Both jobs passed the ultimate question with flying colors: Did I get up in the morning looking forward to work? The answer had always been yes. But writing was different. The dilemma wasn't whether I was a good writer or whether I would ever publish. It was simply this — once I began writing, it was impossible to stop. Sometimes it felt like an addiction. It wasn't hard to get up at 5:00 a.m. It wasn't hard to spend a day trying to get a paragraph right. It wasn't hard to turn into a virtual recluse, even when I felt profoundly lonely. What became hard was doing anything else, anything not related to writing. I thought of having a T-shirt made: Help! I've fallen and I can't get out of the book. I fell down the writing hole in 1995 and I still haven't gotten out. The truth is, I don't want to.

Nine years passed. I had been in love, or thought I was, with Paul but we had gone our separate ways after six years together. One day I had envisioned myself at the age of eighty, throwing my suitcase into the back of the car for the weekly two-and-a-half-hour excursion to the city to see Paul. He was never going to leave New York City, and I was never going to leave the country. I was already sick of this drive. Thirty more years of it? For the first time in my life I had the peculiar experience of ending a relationship with someone I still cared about.

By now I was with agent number four. Helen was the first agent who didn't tell me I'd written a best seller, the first who'd eliminated hyperbole from any discussion about my writing. I had been recommended to her by an editor friend. At this point, I felt like a charity case.

"I doubt if we can sell the memoir," she'd told me in our first conversation over the phone. "The market for memoirs is mostly celebrity driven."

A rocky start. I still thought abject flattery was a good thing. I mumbled something about how close my first novel had gotten at Random House, how charmed the editor at someplace else had been. I dragged out my famous author quote on its behalf, the one I'd included in every query letter over the past nine years: "It's the female Catcher in the Rye, the best manuscript I've read in twenty years."

Helen seemed unimpressed. Switching the conversation back to the memoir, she said, "It did make me cry. That must mean something."

Not exactly wild enthusiasm. Still, she liked my writing enough to send out one of the novels and the memoir. She knew a few editors who, she thought, might be willing to take a look.

A few weeks later I walked into the house, tired from a long day of teaching. I went right to the barn to feed the horses, then inside the house to feed the dogs and cats. At about eight o'clock I checked my phone messages. There was only one and it was from Helen. "Call me as soon as you get this." Her voice was upbeat.

I called and she told me we'd gotten an offer for the memoir. A small offer, an advance of seven thousand dollars, from Soho Press. "I think I can get it up to eight," she said.

I thought about all the years of getting up at five o'clock to write before work, the hundreds of hours that went into writing a book. I thought about the effort it took to persevere. In that light, the offer seemed ridiculous, even insulting. But even as those thoughts ran through my head, I knew money was the wrong thing to focus on. If money was the standard, I'd need a million dollars to make up for what I'd put myself through.

"What do you think?" I asked Helen.

She didn't hesitate. "I think we should take it."

We'd actually gotten a smaller offer a few weeks earlier from an even smaller press. But that offer had fallen apart, nixed by the money people, who were afraid to take on a memoir from an author without a "platform," an author who was a nobody.

Helen explained that an advance was only a down payment against royalties to be earned. I might never earn more but there was a chance I would. So the publisher and I would be partners going forward, and the less money they paid out ahead of time, the more they would be able to invest in promoting the book, which, in the long run, they hoped would be to everyone's benefit.

In the end, selling the book for an eight-thousand-dollar advance felt fine. I had the deep satisfaction of being accepted for publication.

* * *

IN AUGUST 2005, after putting maximum thought and effort into my appearance, I drove into the city for what felt like one of the most important meetings of my life, my first meeting with my publisher. After parking the car, I walked through Union Square to get to Broadway. It was over 100 degrees in the shade. Before I'd crossed the park, I was dizzy from the heat and soaked in sweat. I looked at the people around me, shocked they appeared to be functioning so normally. As I stood on the corner waiting to cross Broadway, a bus roared by, blasting me with diesel fumes and grit. I could feel the grit embedded in my lipstick, glued to my arms and legs with sweat. Every few feet I pulled my black linen dress away from where it clung to my back and thighs. I glanced down at my newly manicured toes, now gray, covered with dust, slipping around in sweaty sandals. I could just imagine what I smelled like. All the planning, all the fantasies about this meeting, this ever-so-important first impression, ruined. It was beyond awful.

My hands were so wet I could barely hold the pen as I signed the guest register in the lobby of the building. Between the heat and my own sky-high anxiety, I was functioning in some kind of altered state. A few minutes later, I walked into the offices of Soho Press for the first time and was greeted by a young woman who smiled and said, "We're so excited to meet you." She offered me a chair at a circular black table in the reception area and went to fetch my editor, Laura. Behind me was a ten-foot-high wall of Soho's books that ran the entire width of the office. In front of me was a bank of tall, grimy windows that looked directly into the windows of the office building across the street. There were several small, open cubicle offices in front of the windows and in each a man or a woman was reading a manuscript. I was surprised to see that someone in a publishing house actually read manuscripts. I had always imagined that some underling glanced at the first few lines of a submission before Frisbeeing it onto the heap of other manuscripts piled in a corner. I got up and walked over to one of the young women.

"Do you get many good ones?" I asked.

"Not as good as yours," she said.

I didn't know which shocked me more, what she said or that she knew who I was. I thanked her and returned to my chair to wait for Laura. A thought ran through my head on a continuous loop. I am in my publisher's office. The walls were painted a dull gray, matched by worn gray carpeting. I sat at a table they must have used for conferences. The rest of the desks and chairs I could see were a forgettable miscellany of standard office furniture. Whatever air-conditioning existed wasn't working and the office was hot. Not exactly the mahogany-paneled sanctuary I had imagined a publisher's office would be. But I was dazzled anyway, to have entered this most elusive of clubs.

Laura appeared, a woman of average height with a trim figure and graying brown hair. She wore a black polo shirt and gray slacks.

I stood up to shake her hand.

"Oh dear," she said and immediately left to get me a glass of water.

I wondered what had alarmed her: my still wet hand, the damp hair plastered to my head, the little pieces of grit adorning my red lipstick, or my dress clinging to me like a bath towel?

She returned with ice water and we sat down right there at the round black table. I was finally face to face with the woman who, in editing my manuscript, had noted in the margin next to a sentence marked for deletion, Dreadful.

"We're very excited about this book," she said.

Had she forgiven me for dreadful? "I'm excited, too," I told her and handed her a straw beach tote filled with little gifts as a thank you to her for buying my book, for giving me this incredible moment. I had been uncertain about giving her anything, about what the protocol was for thanking a publisher for publishing me. I had no idea what other authors did but in the end I didn't care. I did what was in my heart and had had fun choosing the gifts for this woman I hadn't yet met.

She seemed surprised and put the tote on the floor next to her with no sign that she intended to open any of the brightly wrapped gifts spilling out of the open top. Later, I received a lovely thank-you note from her.

"Our publicity director should be here any minute," she said, "and then we'll go to lunch."

Kathy, the publicist, arrived, and I was struck by her youth and prettiness. She was short, even shorter than I am, with curly, shoulder-length black hair and a radiant smile. The three of us walked the few blocks to the Blue Water Grill in Union Square. I felt sickened by the sun whenever we left the shade of a building. The air-conditioning in the restaurant was doing its job, though, and for the first time since arriving in New York that day, I began to cool down and relax.

Both Laura and I focused on Kathy. She had a sparkly intelligence and a wonderful magnetic wit. Originally from the Midwest, she had recently moved to New York to work for Soho after a stint with a publisher in Boston. She had come to New York without knowing a soul, something I never would have had the courage to do. I don't remember much of what we talked about but it was during that lunch that the idea of a book tour was first discussed.

Over the hour-and-a-half lunch, I liked them both more and more. Originally, I had felt a little disappointed that the book had sold to a small press. Part of me had wanted the glamour of a big house, the cachet. A big house meant a "big" book, more prestige. More something. But over lunch that feeling vanished. I had stumbled into the perfect publishing house. Over the next few months, that feeling grew. Working on the book with my editor, Laura, and then my copy editor, Pat, proved to be a joy. After all those years of laboring alone, it was good to collaborate with others. For the first time I felt that my work was being honored. It would have been perfectly OK if my getting-published story had ended there. But it didn't. It had just begun.

SIX MONTHS LATER, on a dreary day in late February, three months before the scheduled publication date of my book, June first, I came home early from work to another message from Helen. "Call Laura first and then call me." There was that upbeat tone in her voice again, the one that meant good news.

I called Laura at Soho. I'll never forget her voice. She sounded calm and matter-of-fact. "Harcourt Brace purchased the paperback rights to your book today for a hundred thousand dollars," she said.

I think I said, What? I was standing in the kitchen and I started to walk around in little circles with the phone jammed against my ear. My knees wobbled and my hands shook. I started to cry.

Laura described the sale in detail, how she was afraid she'd lost the deal entirely when she'd refused an offer of seventy-five thousand on a Friday afternoon. "Over the weekend I thought, Oh dear, maybe I've lost Susan a lot of money." But on Monday morning they had come back with a bigger offer. She told me all of this in her flat, calm voice, explaining that I would receive about half of this sum, as the purchase price would be split between publisher and author. I couldn't take it all in. That my work — turned down by so many — had been deemed worthy of this amount of money! I kept interrupting her to say, Thank you, Laura, thank you.

It was a brief conversation, less than five minutes, and when we hung up I sat on a stool at the kitchen counter and wept, completely overwhelmed. A few minutes later I picked up the phone and called my brother.

We are both writers but he's older, smarter, more determined. He's a lawyer by day and a writer in whatever stolen moments he can grab — 5:00 a.m., nights, weekends. In the natural order of things, this should have been Lloyd's triumph. He has written two books; for a while he was represented by one of the biggest agencies in New York City. We'd shared our getting-dumped-by-agent stories. I was ahead of him by three on that score but he'd been dumped from a greater height, which sort of equalized things.

For ten years we'd been e-mailing each other about our authorial travails, sometimes in painful detail. For Christmas a few years ago, he had presented me with two huge notebooks filled with a complete record of our e-mails to each other covering a six-year period. You had to be crazy or a writer to care about such a thing. I treasured them. Writing isn't for people with thin skins and we both had thin skins, at least for the first few years. I don't know how we'd survived all the bad news except that we'd shared it with each other. Sometimes we could joke about it but most of the time it seemed to cripple us in spirit. It was impossible not to consider the complexity of how he might feel about success hitting so close to home. I knew he would be happy for me, I knew he would be proud. I'll never forget the phone call I got from him the first time he read Chosen by a Horse.

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Excerpted from "Chosen Forever"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Susan Richards.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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