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Interview: Wendy Lee, "Happy Family"

June 17, 2008 If you have tomorrow evening open, you might want to head over to McNally Robinson for the latest installment of their Author/Editor series. Wendy Lee will be discussing her debut novel, Happy Family (Black Cat) with her editor, Jamison Stoltz.

I met Lee a few years ago through a former colleague; at the time she was working in production at HarperCollins, and hadn't yet moved over to editorial, where she is now (and where she has been very happy as Carolyn Marino's assistant). She was working on Happy Family and didn't yet have an agent. It's been interesting and delightful to watch her progress, and I particularly wanted to speak to her when the book came out so we could talk about what it's like to have a career inside publishing while building a career as an author. 

I asked Lee what it's been like since her novel was realeased. "Things are crazy," she said, "But in a good way. Everyone at work has been very supportive. I'm convinced this is the only job that I could do that would allow me to combine a real career with writing." Does she think working full-time has hurt her writing? "No, not at all," says Lee. "In fact, it's kept me very humble. I'm doing the same old grunt work, and it's down to earth." She also says that she's seen many people buy into the "misconception" that their books are going to be bestsellers immediately. "A literary fiction author doesn't face immediate bestsellerdom," says Lee, with a laugh. "It's a quiet life, unless you happen to be that rare person who breaks out."

Lee knows one of those rare persons well; her fellow Stanford alum and "mentor" is novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, whose own latest novel American Wife will be released in September. She says that one of the things Sittenfeld's career has shown her is that the best thing is when you're actually making progress and changing as a writer. "I think the saddest thing, on the editorial side, is when you see that this particular person is not going to get any better," she says. "Seeing that this is a continuous process, or that it can be, helps."

Instead of a long, luxurious trip to the tropics in celebration of her new book, Lee is going to MacDowell for a month's stay, hopefully in November. She had just found out about her acceptance the day we talked, and is very happy to know she'll have a good block of time to refine her second novel. "This one is hopefully not so sad," she says. "All of my ideas for novels come from short stories that I write, and this goes back to a story I wrote in college." (Happy Family was originally a short story that Lee wrote for her MFA at NYU.) "I feel like this is cheating, somehow." 

I don't think readers will agree; to make up your own mind, head over to McNally Robinson tomorrow night, June 18, at 7:00 p.m., and listen to Lee yourself.

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on June 17, 2008 | Comments (0)