It's appropriate that PW meets former publishing exec and When Work Doesn't Work Anymore: Women, Work and Identity author Elizabeth Perle McKenna where she now does her work: her Upper West Side New York City apartment, which comes complete with hammering contractors, just-awakening toddler son and, best of all, a soothing nanny.
It's a far cry from the 18-year fast track McKenna had been on, as associate publisher at Bantam and publisher at Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley and, most recently, at William Morrow, a position she left in spring 1995 during that house's now notorious upheavals. While McKenna misses that corporate life somewhat -- "It's awfully nice when you're covered with baby spit to [think of putting] on a pair of pantyhose and have your assistant open your mail," she told PW -- she ended up extending what was originally to be just a summer off. Instead, she "spent two years detoxing, and can now look at [corporate life] with fresh eyes, to see how much of it makes sense and how much of it d sn't."
The result of this "rehab" became When Work Doesn't Work Anymore, Delacorte's lead fall nonfiction title, to be published in September and reportedly acquired for a significant, and some say risky, mid-six-figure advance. McKenna had originally planned to do a quick Life's Little Instruction Book-type paperback on "all the things women said to me or I said to them to survive in an alien environment," but quickly realized she was "treating this too fliply" and wrote an impassioned proposal that caught the attention of agent Richard Pine and, ultimately, Dell/Delacorte associate publisher and editor-in-chief Leslie Schnur. In the book McKenna combines her personal experiences -- including such embarrassing episodes as, while unemployed, filching money from her husband's wallet rather than asking him for it -- with interviews with mostly anonymous sources. "This is women's dirty secret: they want to work, they love to work -- and they're going crazy working," she said.
But what has driven McKenna most crazy recently has been the right-wing's reduction of Arlie Hochschild's The Time Bind (out last month from Holt, to much publicity, if not sales) to the message, "Women go home."
"Women might look at the title of my book, too, and say, 'Gee, are you telling people to go home?' I'm not," McKenna said. "You can critique work, and change it." She also doesn't see Hochschild's book as competition, because "this topic is so big you can't talk enough about it. "
Indeed, McKenna would like to write a paperback spinoff of When Work Doesn't Work Anymore, aimed at young women, just as they embark on their quest for success. And Delacorte plans to keep the conversation going with an online study guide to accompany the 40,000 first printing of When Work Doesn't Work Anymore. The technological extension has turned out to be especially appropriate for McKenna: this fall, she'll be gone from Manhattan (those hammering contractors are sprucing her apartment for sale), and she plans to relocate, thanks to her advertising exec husband's job transfer, to Singapore. From there, McKenna plans to keep in touch online and work on her next book, whose subject she's keeping under wraps. And she's not ruling out a return to corporate publishing someday. "There's always been this sense of climbing the corporate ladder until your heart gives out; that's just not how people live any more," she said.
