Three Answers: Jennifer Gilmore

by Dick Donahue, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 6/12/2006

Three Answers today are from Harcourt publicity director Jennifer Gilmore, whose debut novel, Golden Country, will be published by Scribner in August.

PW: Knowing how tough the publishing business is on authors, why would you want to put yourself through it?

JG: When you’re writing out there alone in the world, you don’t realize how many stages a book goes through—how many people have to see it, and how many people have to love it, especially fiction. And it’s true. I mean in a way it’s very demoralizing to work as an author and to work in publishing. But, I was already working on the book when I started at Harcourt. I’ve been working on this book for six years. So if you have a choice about it, yeah, don’t do it. I just always felt driven to do it.

PW: Has your own experience made it difficult to back off and not try to do your publicist’s job?

JG: In general—I don’t know if my publicist would agree—I think it’s made me easier on the publicity aspect. Because I know how difficult it is to be harangued by an author, and how hard people actually do work. But I also know all the things that can go wrong, and so I’m trying to strike a balance of not bugging everyone to death but at the same time doing what I can do. But I go out to lunch with people all the time and I’m not in any way talking about my book. People ask me about it, but I don’t want to make them uncomfortable. I’m not a rabid self-promoter; at least I don’t think so. I gave this talk at BEA about being a first-time author and first-time promotion. I said in the end you’re an author; you’re not a publicist. And you have to in some way let your book go.

PW: The old axiom says, “write what you know.” Did you?

JG: I think “write what you know” is sort of dangerous, when you have so many first-time authors who are writing so much about what they know. It’s sort of claustrophobic—interior, very present—that’s sort of what’s come out a lot lately. I was trying to resist that. I know Jewish-American literature; I used to teach it, and I was sort of fascinated by the tropes of it, so in that way I am sort of writing about what I know. But my challenge, I guess, was taking these ideas I had about America, immigrants, that kind of thing, and attaching it to my family. I’ve played fast and loose with facts, but there was a way to have an emotional connection without writing, “this is how it feels like to be however old I am in New York right now.” I lost interest in that.