How I Got Famous....

...and discovered the meaning of success, fifty years later

When I was eighteen, I became—briefly-- famous. To a small- town girl from New Hampshire who’d dreamed all her life of getting to New York City, it was an intoxicating experience.

This wasn’t movie-star fame, or (a concept that didn’t yet exist) influencer-fame, Kardashian-fame--the kind of fame a person achieves for, basically, being famous. But in the world of writers, my name was suddenly known, as was my face. If you were knocking around in the spring of 1972, you might remember a picture of me splashed across the cover of the New York Times magazine, accompanied by an essay I’d written titled “An Eighteen- Year-Old Looks Back on Life.”

For a while there, I was a writer everyone wanted to talk to—on radio and television, modeling clothes maybe, getting taken out to lunch at fancy restaurants and receiving offers for book contracts, meeting with movie people even. For a girl who’d been paid fifty cents an hour to babysit just three years earlier, the money I was making seemed like a fortune.

Then a man far more famous than I, and thirty-five years older, sent me a letter, and within a few months I had left the world of college and New York City success to live with him. He’d had enough of fame, and with a kind of bitterness and ferocity I did not question at the time, he instructed me to resist and distrust it. He urged me to publish no more articles or books and steer clear of New York and all the trappings of the success he’d known, for which –though it allowed him to live without concern for money--he registered only disdain. And because he was so much older and wiser, and because I loved him—worshipped him, a more accurate phrase—I did my best to turn away from the fame and success that had once seemed so alluring to me.

There was just one problem here. By the time I was captured by his spell—not yet having received his indoctrination into the evils of publishing, I had already signed a book contract for what was, to me, a lot of money.

After a year or so (and not coincidentally, I think, just before the publication of the book I’d contracted to write) the famous man got tired of me and dispatched me from his life.

All this happened over fifty years ago. In the years since then, I’ve published twenty more books and more articles and essays than I could begin to count. Some of these books have been successful. Two got made into movies, and one reached the New York Times bestseller list for exactly two weeks. Some of my books turned up in airport bookstores (one measure of success, in the world of publishing) and a few times I appeared on the Today show and Good Morning America.

But in all those years, I doubt my fame (call it notoriety, perhaps) ever again reached the levels I experienced in 1972. You might say that my success, as I’d known it, peaked before I turned twenty.

You might say that. I wouldn’t.

At the age of 71, having spent my entire adult life to date working hard as a writer—having made large amounts of money a few times, and having just barely scraped by plenty of others-- I’ve had ample time to consider the phenomenon of success, and to meditate on how I’d define it now. Not surprisingly, my views on the subject have changed.

I mention all of this today because I finished a new novel a few months back. Where, for the past fifteen years or so, I’d been under contract with the same publisher—one of the biggest, who’d brought out my previous six books-- I found myself, in the sixth decade of my writing life, undergoing an experience I hadn’t known since I was in my mid-fifties. I had no publisher anymore.

And so my agent (I still had one of these) was tasked with the assignment of finding a new one for this most recent book of mine.

I feel good about this novel I wrote. I’ll go so far as to say I’m proud of the work I did. But as we sent it out to editors I also knew—as a writer whose most recent novel (one of which I also feel deeply proud) did not sell particularly well, that it might be difficult to inspire, in editors, the kind of enthusiasm my work had generated in the past.

I’ll speak frankly here: I prepared myself for the possibility that I’d be paid less money than I had been in the past.

Some of this had to do with the state of the publishing business, no doubt. But without question, some of it had to do with the fact that I am not the hot property I was, back when I appeared in my blue jeans the cover of the New York Times.

We sent out my novel in early June. The phone didn’t ring. I didn’t suffer over this, by the way. I was having an excellent time, camping with my boyfriend all month. More often than not we were out of cell-phone range. If an offer had come in, it might have taken a few days for me to find out.

But no offers arrived. In mid-July, my agent added new names to the list of editors to whom she’d submit my novel.

Last week, finally, she got an offer and we accepted it. The editor who called to say she loved my book does not work with what’s known as “a big-five publisher”. The amount of money I was offered for this book I’ve been working on for a year now stood at roughly one fifth of what I was paid, last time out. Viewed from a cool, practical perspective, a person might conclude I could have done about as well, financially speaking, working as a bartender. Not that anyone’s likely to give me such a job.

There is an unwritten rule in the world of writers that most of us keep our cards close to the chest. Nobody wants to appear like a loser. Most of us do not say how much we get paid for a book, except when some big-name publisher offers a deal with so many zeroes in it that they announce it in Publishers’ Weekly, at which point a whole lot of other writers who secretly believe their work is at least as good if not better may turn a not-particularly- attractive shade of green.

I am breaking this rule now by announcing the news that only one time in my life have I ever been paid less for a book than I was paid for this one. As a woman who might still be considered, in some circles, “a well-known writer”, and one who first published her work back when Richard Nixon was president, this news could suggest that I am no longer “successful”. Maybe I should hang it up and take a course in mixology?

Nope.

I won’t pretend that I wouldn’t have been happy getting a bigger check for my work. But I’m happy to say, from the bottom of my heart, that the days are long gone when I equated success with my book sales, or imagined that getting on the bestseller list constituted reaching the top of the mountain.

What mountain? Where? (Maybe the one where I got to camp under the stars recently? )

Here is the god’s honest truth. I feel lucky every day of my life that I get to do this thing I’ve been doing nearly every day since I was a teenager. Which is, I get to tell stories for my life’s work. Sometimes true ones that turn into essays and memoirs. Sometimes ones I dream up. Most of all I feel vast gratitude that the work I create reaches readers. You, at this very moment, for instance.

Sometimes what I write may move a reader greatly, and surprisingly often, I’ll get a letter from one of them (from halfway around the world on occasion, if they read a book of mine in translation), or someone will come up to me at a bookstore, or on a street in Paris even, to tell me that some book I wrote kept her up all night, or made her laugh, or cry, or—this is the best—that it helped her through a difficult time in her own life. I cannot tell you what it means when a reader tells me a book of mine made her feel she had a friend out there she’d never met, who understood her. Me.

This is my definition of success now: That the work I create matters to someone. That what I have to say reaches somebody who needed it. There might be ten thousand of these individuals, or three.

So I’m here to tell you that I have a new novel coming out next August. Of course I’ll do all I can to let people who care about these things know about my book. In some circles, this is known as “shameless self-promotion”. I’ll call it doing what I can to see that my writing reaches readers. This allows me to pay my bills. But it also allows me to keep on publishing books and do something I love.

I’ve been able to keep at it for fifty-two years now. And counting. So I’ll call myself a gloriously successful writer. As for the fame part: I’d rather be known—truly known—by a small group of people who care deeply about language and good storytelling, and the characters I bring to life, and what it is to be a human being on this planet today, than I’d care about being popular to a million people rushing through an airport in search of a paperback to entertain them on their flight.

There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a time for a good airport or beach read. But at the end of the day—or let’s just say, half a century into a long, sometimes challenging, occasionally painful, always rewarding writing career—I wouldn’t change places with anyone.

Now here’s what I’d love to hear from you. What’s YOUR definition of success?