My Hysterically Funny Grief Memoir

What the hell is the Literary Net? This question came up while I was deleting some of the hundreds of newsletters I get from people who want to help me sell my books. Turns out I joined Literary Net a year ago, soon after attending a book conference in New York, where one of the speakers sang its virtues. The purpose of the email was to inform me that my member profile was incomplete. After digging around for my user name and password, I dutifully went to the website to investigate.

   One of the things Literary Net wanted to know was why anyone should buy my books. The answer to this question is what’s called an “elevator pitch,” and it is a standard tool in an author’s kit. An elevator pitch is supposed to be very short, so you can rip it off between floors if you should happen to run into Morgan Entrekin or Judith Regan on your way to buy ink cartridges. Perfecting it can take weeks, even months, but I’ve been in the book-selling biz long enough to have it down. My elevator pitch is so polished I could recite it if the elevator were in freefall. I could recite it on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over my face.

   At second glance, the Literary Net website looked a bit paltry—273 writers pitching their books to each other while waiting for somebody important to come along. Like a sad little crafts fair next to an Interstate highway where the traffic is speeding by. And our head shots—phew. One author was peering out from behind an enormous cat; another was holding a copy of the Holy Bible; a third had chosen to represent himself as a white snowflake on a blue background. A glitch in the website caused the heads to look squished, like a reflection in a cereal spoon.

   Gazing at those photos, I felt a pang in my heart. Truthfully, I wanted to bolt. I wanted to leave Literary Net and never return. You’ll be proud to know that I didn’t. Instead, I hung around long enough to fill out my profile. I mentioned the 93 customer reviews on Amazon, the four-star rating, the blah-blah-blah. I fixed my squishy head. I did not write “You should buy this book because I busted my ass over it for more years than I can count” or “I dedicated this book to my sainted mother so how can you NOT buy it?”

   I did, however, do one little thing to lighten the task. Before signing off, I added the following paragraph in a box labeled “Additional Information”:

   “The prepublication buzz about my ‘grief memoir’ is through the roof. My publisher won't let me divulge the title, because he is afraid aliens will steal it, so for now it is just ‘Sara Tucker's Hysterically Funny Grief Memoir.’ The book is almost done except for the recipes.”

   Between you and me, the hysterically funny grief memoir consists of a few lines scribbled in my spiral notebook. It is not "almost done." If it ever materializes, it will probably not have recipes. But the folks at Literary Net don't need to know that, and anyway, we are all entitled to dream. xo Sadie

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Above: School notebook, 1908. The scholar was Harry H. Cooley, my maternal grandfather. One of his essays, astonishingly, concerns Fontainebleau, France, where I now live. At the time he wrote it, he was a Vermont schoolboy. He never in his life went to France. I discovered the notebook last summer while I was going through my mother's things and couldn't believe my eyes. Material for another post.

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