I'm used to good reviews and blurbs on my books, mostly of the "lucid
and entertaining" sort. Sometimes I'll get an "eye-opening" or even
"brilliantly constructed." My books are praised mainly (as usually
happens with nonfiction) for their interesting subject matter and my
ability to lay it out clearly and compellingly. I've rarely gotten much
praise for the writing itself, for whatever I bring that's uniquely
mine—until my latest book, Men of Tomorrow. I hit something with
that one, stylistically and emotionally, that made people notice. There
were some head-turning blurbs—"a constant delight" (Michael Chabon), "a
magnificent piece of work" (Alan Moore)—and reviews to match, as well as
some positively gushing reactions at readings. All of which made me a
bit nervous and set off the voices in my head saying, "It can't really
be that good." (An easy argument for me to make, because the book was
about comic-book history, a subject that's inspired a lot of writing but
not much writerly writing, if you know what I mean.) But at the same
time it excited me. I wanted to jump into the next book.
Then the worst happened. A great editor told me I was good. And he wanted to work with me.
Eric Chinski came up through Oxford University Press, then moved to
Houghton-Mifflin, where he called attention to himself by discovering
Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated on the slush
pile. He moved to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the most prestigious
purveyors of a certain sort of damn-the-marketplace literary writing,
where he became editor-in-chief in what seemed (to me) like an absurdly
short time. His specialty is literary fiction, and he was once quoted in
Poets & Writers as saying, "an editor's job is basically to
fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already
is." A writer's editor, the kind you fantasize about impressing when
you're twenty years old and gradually come to think doesn't exist
anymore.
Eric loved the voice and the storytelling in Men of Tomorrow
and called my agent to say he wanted to work with me. He didn't want me
to write more about comic books, he didn't have any particular subject
he wanted out of me, he just wanted to work with me. I had some
half-baked ideas in my head about the early tabloids and True Story
magazine and Macfadden Publications and ran them by him—still only
baked around the edges and pretty gooey in the middle—and he said "go
for it." Not literally "go for it." It was one of those, "All of us here
at FSG are excited about...blah blah," emails. But the gist was, if
it's fun cultural history and it's written by Gerard Jones, then it's
what Eric wants.Which was good for about two days of euphoric fantasies
about blowing away the critics and making FSG my literary home forever
and ever.
Until the terror hit. How could I possibly ever be half as good as
this "Gerard Jones" whom Eric Chinski has somehow mistaken me for?
During the same period I was freezing up royally on "the FSG
book" (as I came to call it, in a neurotic fixation on who was waiting
for it instead of what it was) my office mate Po Bronson started
unveiling pieces of Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children, a
book he and Ashley Merryman are writing. The first piece was an article
in the New York Times that basically said, "Don't praise your kids."
Or, rather, acknowledge them for working hard and doing their best, but
don't try to pump them up with messages like, "you're so smart" or
"you're so talented" or "you're very, very special." Because a kid will
hear, "This is what mom and dad want me to be," which becomes, "This is
what I'm supposed to be and if I don't live up to it all the time then
I'm no good." And expectations like that...well, to invoke Philip
Larkin, they fuck you up. They don't mean to, but they do. Po and Ashley
rolled out a lot of hard data showing that kids who've been regularly
told they're remarkable tend to perform much less impressively and end
up a lot less happy with themselves than kids who've just been
encouraged to keeping showing up and working hard.
I think the hardest job I've had in getting from frozenness to
fluidity on this book has been shutting up those voices that tell me I'm
supposed to be smart or talented or special. Because the truth is, the
only reason Men of Tomorrow impressed anyone is that I worked
really hard on it. It sounds cruel, but the best thing I can do for
myself now is pound home the truth that I'm really not special at all. I
just have a fair amount of evidence that if I show up and work I can
make something that somebody will like.
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