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“Danger, Danger, Will Robinson!”
- University Press of New England
- Chapter
- Additional Information
“Danger, Danger, Will Robinson!” So here I am in the bustling lobby of Big Time Publishers in New York City. I am here with my two partners in the book project This Day in the Life to meet with an editor from Big Time who told our agent she loves our proposal and wants to discuss it with us in person. As I am going through the building’s security checkpoints, then standing in line to receive my identi fication badge, then elevating up sixty-seven floors at warp speed, then proceeding down a maze of halls to a tiny holding area with a wall of backlit books and a male receptionist in a dazzling white shirt, I have to keep telling myself this is really real. An editor at Big Time Publishers loves our proposal! In what seemed like a lifetime ago, I’d had an idea for a book. I had wanted to know what a day in the life was really like for women from all walks of life—young, old, black, white, rich, poor, stable, and high strung like me. How in the world, for example, can someone possibly be a funeral director? When I used to have an office job, I couldn’t even stand being around coworkers, but at least they weren’t corpses. And what about single moms? With those kinds of demands on my time I think I’d be getting high on glue sticks every chance I got. Or what about Miss America? The perks! But can you imagine sporting a crown whenever you went out in public? I feel self-conscious just wearing big earrings. When I had first envisioned this book, I’d known I didn’t want to interview women and write about their lives. What I wanted was to spend a day in their presence and in their heads. To that end, I decided I would ask hundreds of women across America to create a “day diary” on the very same day, jotting down not only what they were doing, but also what they were thinking and feeling as they went through the course of that day. The book would be a collection of these first-person, real-time accounts. Of course, it is one thing to have an idea. It is quite another thing to turn that idea into a reality, especially given the logistics involved in putting together a book of this nature. To make sure I didn’t give up before I even started trying, I invited two friends, Becky Joffrey and Bindi Rakhra, to be my partners in the project. Now here the three of us are, in New York City, following the beacon of the male receptionist’s dazzling white shirt into the Big Time editor’s office. I take a seat on her cozy couch under a voracious, potted palm with an overhanging frond that keeps grazing my forehead. The editor who loves our proposal arrives and sinks into the cushion next to me. She is the epitome of today’s hot, young literati—five minutes out of a prestigious women’s college, exuding self-assurance, and fashionably concave in her ribbed black turtleneck, skinny skirt, and pointy-toed boots. Next to this woman, I feel like her peasant grandmother who just arrived from the North Country . A copy of our book proposal rests on her lap. I peer under the frond and try to read the notes she has jotted in the margins. “You have a fabulous concept for a book,” the editor tells us. After having weathered an avalanche of rejections from other publishers, it takes all my reserve (of which I have painfully little, even in the best of circumstances) not to burst into joyful tears and kiss this woman’s pointy-toed, black boots. In fact, I am a bit stunned by her manner, which is warm and hardly fakey at all. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this . . . this humanity. Not from someone who works at Big Time Publishers, perpetuated in the press as some bottom-line-driven megacorpglomeration sprung from so many mergers and acquisitions that no one is really quite sure who owns it anymore. The editor makes a few more enthusiastic comments about our proposal and I beam beatifically. Maybe I am getting a little ahead of myself, but I start anticipating how I am going to let everyone in the world who...