PW Talks with Elizabeth Maguire

PW: The jacket design for your mystery debut, Thinner, Blonder, Whiter, is sexy and posh. Yet you're known as a publisher of serious books about race, gender and class inequalities. Have you been keeping the "real" you in check?

EM: I'm a nonfiction editor, but my start in publishing, at university presses, was in literary studies. And I always knew that when I wrote a book, it would be a novel and not a work of history or social theory or psychology.

PW: Do you ever find yourself bearing down on your own editors, as your editor heroine Julia's publisher does, to protect their "franchises"?

EM: Oh no, I try to be more gentle and nurturing. [Laugh.] You know, there is a real "jazz" from having a franchise and making it work. Sometimes I think we like to pretend that publishing is genteel when in fact there is competition, and the financial pressure is real. Julia actually has a much more commercial franchise with some of her authors than I do.

PW: At times your novel reads like a whodunit, and at other times it does seem more of a sardonic riff on a coming-of-age saga. How would you categorize it?

EM: I guess the one challenge I wasn't prepared for was the mystery vs. novel-with-a-murder category issue. I did work on it as part of a mystery workshop, and I wanted it to satisfy on that level because I love mysteries and I love puzzles, and it also allowed me to take Julia on this roller-coaster journey that was set in the real world but wasn't naturalistic in a day-to-day way.

PW: Have you seen many editors become intimate with their authors?

EM: I can't say that I've seen it very often, and it's certainly not a relationship I'd advocate for editors! But for Julia, the charismatic Sam offers her entrée into a very glamorous world. Even though Julia's relationship with Sam crosses many taboos, in fact their racial identities become a source of humor to them and are also so clearly part of why they desire each other.

PW: Do you think there are aspects of Sam's character that might arouse readers' sympathy—or will he just anger them?

EM: I had so much fun creating Sam. He's larger than himself—and that's how he is to Julia. Of course, his character is meant to be controversial, not representative. I do think that the pressure on some black scholars to perform in a variety of arenas—academic, the lecture circuit, talk shows—coupled with the pressure to deliver product to an audience publishers see as avid and hungry can sometimes lead to an unhealthy dynamic.

PW: Controversy sells, doesn't it?

EM: Being a publisher, I know that issues ranging from plagiarism to controversies in the Afro-Am establishment make the book timely, and I expect my publisher to be absolutely merciless in exploiting issues that are adrift in the culture. As an author, I'll be a little more retiring about it.

PW: Did you tell colleagues you were writing a novel?

EM: I was very shy about it at first, and actually joined a mystery-writing group because I thought I wouldn't find anyone from publishing in it. Of course, the first night I was there I realized that one of the women there worked in the house I was about to join! Another woman was the best friend of someone else I knew in publishing. There was no escape.

PW: Was the novel an easy sell?

EM: The reactions were so varied. The material was considered explosive by a lot of early readers. That did surprise me because I thought publishing people were all pretty sophisticated. I've been very heartened by the response from black readers. Michael Dyson and E. Lynn Harris both blurbed the book. They "get it." Black people live this every day, and they can't pretend they don't.