Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
one
Fire Island
No one is quite sure why the narrow, thirty-two-mile barrier beach off the coast of Long Island is called Fire Island, but there is much conjecture on the topic. Many believe the name is tied to its origins-a violent winter storm in 1690 that broke through the mainland of Long Island, creating four separate inlets. The Dutch word for four (vier) is pronounced somewhat like fire, so that mispronunciation may be responsible. I tend to prefer the version that states the name is derived from the fires that pirates set on its shores to lure unsuspecting ships onto the great sandbar before looting and pillaging everyone and everything on board. Although I am a pacifist, that version is considerably more interesting to me than a Dutch typo.
The backstory of the island's name, as intriguing as it is, is eclipsed by the astonishing history of its many waves of inhabitants. What began with Native Americans, pirates, and moonshiners eventually gave way to a rapid succession of authors, actors, communists, artists, and an entire enclave of LGBTQ+ vacationers.
As a lover of the written word, I am most taken with the list of authors who've roamed its shores. Legendary scribes, from Truman Capote to Tennessee Williams, spent time on Fire Island, if not writing, I would imagine, at least thinking-which, as an editor, I know is half the battle. The poet Frank O'Hara was struck and killed by a dune buggy on its beaches in 1966, a notable distinction on a virtually car-free island. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner are said to have drummed up the premise for their infamous comedy sketch, "The 2000 Year Old Man," as teenagers there in the 1940s. And a decade later, Arthur Miller played softball on the field right across from my house, while his wife, Marilyn Monroe, sat in the stands.
It was in that house across from the ball field, ten wonderful years ago, that the love of my life, author and sportswriter, Benjamin Morse, got down on one knee and presented me with an advance copy of his second novel, opened to the dedication. It read:
I love you, Julia. Marry me?
I said yes.
Ben and I had our first kiss on Fire Island the summer before he proposed, and we knew instantly that it was "our" place. It's a common phenomenon. People need to be romantics to fall in love with a narrow strip of land that could be washed away by one big wave, and where their only mode of transportation is a bicycle or their own two feet.
At first glance, Ben and I make an odd couple. We undeniably call to mind Beauty and the Beast: me, petite, with dark shiny hair and my button nose perpetually buried in a book, and him, with his clunky towering frame, unruly locks and moody, brooding demeanor. Though I always found him to be sexy-sexy like an unmade bed. Intellectually, on the other hand, we are completely in tune and have an uncanny ability to finish each other's sentences-not surprising since for most of our marriage I was also his editor.
The decision for us to collaborate wasn't so much a choice on either of our parts as a natural progression. It began with an author passing pages to their spouse-a common occurrence even when publishing is not the family business-and grew from there. A year into our marriage, when Ben's editor hinted at retirement, the writing was quite literally on the page. His publisher agreed to assign someone else to deal with the financial components of the job and I came on board to fill the rest of the role. I had been looking to make a move for a while, and it was very exciting for both of us. Plus, as far as my career went, Ben had always felt like the one who got away. Even with two of my authors on the bestseller list at the time and one a Booker Prize winner, adding Ben to my list felt like a crowning achievement.
When I first heard the name Ben Morse, I was technically a newbie. I say technically because while I had only been in publishing for a year and a half at the time, I had considered myself an editor of sorts since the ninth grade when Ellen Crown's mother (an editor at Alfred Knopf) spoke on career day. By the time she was halfway through with her presentation, I was all in, and my intention never swayed.
I immersed myself in the classics, writing tiny notes in the page margins and highlighting character traits, conflicts, and points-of-view. While the other girls were obsessing over Titanic's Jack and Rose, I went to sleep dreaming of Cathy and Heathcliff or Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. I got a greater high poring over my friends' English assignments than smoking a blunt with them in Sheep Meadow. And nothing thrilled me more than a prompt with a small word count. To me, editing felt like the best kind of puzzle.
My first real job, after graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English from Sarah Lawrence College, was at Sopher-Grace, a midsize publishing house run by a sexist tyrant. The narrow-minded managing editor, who inserted the fact that he was a Yale man into nearly every conversation, had a huge ego with little taste or talent to back it up. While others found him a charming throwback to a Mad Men-like, three-martini-lunch era of publishing, I found him pompous, misogynistic, and, in fact, not a very good editor-and he knew it. He also knew that firing me without cause would land him in hot water with HR, so he tried other tactics, like tasking me with reading a 120,000-word dramatic tome written by a sportswriter from the Daily News, which no one else wanted to tackle.
"Any plans this weekend?" he had asked on a Friday afternoon, as I failed to slip by his open office door unnoticed.
"Nothing much," I lied, not wanting to get personal and admit that I had a blind date courtesy of my nana Hannah, who had been pushing me to go out with her neighbor's grandson, the Doctor, for months.
"Now you do," he said, handing me a cumbersome box containing a double-sided copy of the aforementioned five-hundred-page sweeping saga spanning three generations of a poor Irish family.
I canceled my plans, dealt with Nana, who I was apparently "pushing to an early grave with my lack of interest in settling down," and barely slept the entire weekend, and not because I wanted to impress my jerk of a boss-I couldn't put the book down. I immediately fell in love with its protagonist and developed an instant fascination with its author.
My nana was incorrect in her analysis; I had an interest in settling down. It was just that all my crushes of late had been on fictional characters who instilled unrealistic expectations when it came to my real love life. I went to sleep that weekend dreaming of my nineteenth-century Irish lover and woke itching with an unyielding curiosity about the man who had created him.
I excitedly pitched A Long Way to Tipperary at the office that Monday, thrilled by both the prospect of editing it and that my boss's plan to discourage me had backfired. I detailed my vision and explained how perfectly I felt it fit on our list. I comped it to epic bestsellers like Ken Follett and Pat Conroy and came just short of promising him the next Hemingway. My boss agreed to get to it tout de suite (his words, not mine) and then strung me along, as if he were in the process of reading, for weeks. Until one day, when I learned from Publishers Weekly that Random House had acquired it in a preempt. Telling my boss, who still hadn't read it, "I told you so," was of no consolation. I was frustrated and heartbroken.
The book landed on the New York Times Best Sellers list within weeks of publication and I witnessed one person after another lugging around the hefty page-turner everywhere I went. The New Yorker did a piece on Benjamin Morse, dubbing him the city's new Renaissance man on account of his ability to craft both epic love stories and gripping sports pieces with equal pizzazz. In the interview, he unsurprisingly attributed his passion for sports to his dad and surprisingly attributed his intimate understanding of the romance read to his grandmother, who had lived with him growing up. He said that as her mind aged, he would let her recount entire tales to him from memory as if they were true stories. The anecdote made me think he was a nice guy.
The entire thing would still eat at me if it hadn't led to a promotion. Word of the debacle rose from watercooler gossip to the editor in chief, who called me into her office and said that the next time I discovered the next big thing, I should bring it directly to her. No more middleman. A few months later I did, and soon became one of the youngest women to be named editor at my publishing house. It took weeks to wipe the giant grin that exploded with pride and amazement from my face every time I caught my name on my new office door.
Julia Gold, Editor
Still curious about Benjamin Morse, I followed him on social media. His meager display of incongruent images of ball games and book PR gave me little insight as to who he was as a person. I even read some of his articles, trying my best to reconcile the guy to land the first post-scandal interview with Tiger Woods with the one who infused just the right amount of titillating lust and tender longing into the pages of his novel.
I yearned to meet him in person and tell him how much I loved his work. While my insides would sometimes twist and turn when meeting my favorite authors, I hadn't fangirled on a novelist this much since my childhood obsession with Judy Blume.
Then, on a cool spring night, while waiting for the aforementioned doctor, whose company I had been infrequently keeping and even less frequently enjoying, I finally had the chance when Benjamin Morse ponied up next to me at the bar at The Odeon. It wasn't lost on me that literary greats like Tom Wolfe and Jay McInerney were known to have patronized the downtown eatery and had possibly even warmed the same stool that Ben Morse was sitting on. I wondered if that weighed in his decision to choose this particular restaurant, and if so, whether it was out of phoniness or nostalgia. I hoped it was the latter.
He looked younger than I'd expected. His success and proclivity to use old-fashioned language in his writing often made me forget he was just five years older than I was. He ordered, without a menu.
"A New York strip, rare, with a side of fries and a Scotch and soda, please."
It was just what I imagined Ernest Hemingway would order. I drained my glass of merlot and garnered the nerve to speak to him.
"Sorry to bother you, but are you Benjamin Morse?" I asked, already knowing the answer. To be fair, he was taller than I imagined.
"Hey," he curtly answered with a dismissive grin.
"I'm Julia, Julia Gold," I said, which brought just a nod in return.
"I want you to know that you broke my heart," I added.
He looked annoyed, as if he had heard this same refrain a dozen times or possibly as if he were just full of himself and didn't want to chat at the bar of a busy NYC restaurant where chatting was not only tolerated but expected. I guessed he knew that Tom Wolfe and Jay McInerney frequented The Odeon, and he came here ironically. I felt the sinking feeling of disappointment burn in my belly.
"I'm sorry I killed off Patrick O'Reilly," he said, adding, "you know they aren't real people though, right?"
I could have left it at that, since clearly my fantasy of Benjamin Morse far outweighed the ornery real thing, but for some reason I didn't want him to think of me as just an ordinary fan.
"Not in that way," I explained. "I'm an editor at Sopher-Grace. I read you on submission."
"Well, you were the only house we didn't hear back from, so I guess you didn't like it."
"I loved it actually, ergo the broken heart."
"But you didn't throw your hat in the ring?"
Finally, he spoke like he wrote. This made me smile, even though I was pretty sure he would not measure up to my lofty expectations.
"My boss didn't back me up," I admitted.
"Maybe you need a new boss."
"I got one, thanks."
His steak arrived, and he navigated the perfect bite. I looked to the door for my date and adjusted myself as not to interrupt Ben's meal. Soon he reengaged.
"Did you ever read the final version?"
"I did."
"And?"
"And it was good."
"Just good?"
Truth was, I wouldn't have killed off Patrick O'Reilly either. I wouldn't have given him and Erin O'Malley a happily ever after, but I wouldn't have offed him, a detail that wasn't in the early draft I had read. I certainly would not tell him as much.
"What? Was it the ending?" he asked impatiently. "Most people love it, you know. Only a few readers have said otherwise."
I decided he must be one of those authors who combs through Goodreads and Amazon for negative reviews. My Hemingway comparison that had seemed so promising when he ordered a Scotch and soda came to a hard stop. I doubted Papa Ernest would give a crap that Suzy from Schenectady was disappointed in the ending of A Farewell to Arms.
"It's good, really. I mean, how many weeks have you clocked on the bestseller list now?"
In a case of perfect timing, my date, the Doctor, entered and caught my eye.
"My friend is here. Very nice to meet you!" I exaggerated.
I wished I hadn't had to.
That night I returned home to a new follower on Instagram and a private message that read,
Curious about how you would have ended it.
I had thought about this before but spent more time contemplating if I should answer than how I should answer. In the end I decided it was in no one's best interest to edit a book already in print. I went to sleep without responding.
In the morning I woke up to another message from him.
Sorry if I was rude at the bar last night. I'm obviously insecure about the ending.
