"The Latecomer" Author Jean Hanff Korelitz, Invites Us into Her Hugely Popular Literary Salons

 

Sometimes our great ideas hammer away at us for years before they break through. And sometimes they just float into our heads and take a chair. And sometimes our great ideas…aren’t even ours.

Okay, maybe that sounds bad, like I’m advocating plagiarism or outright theft, two literary no-no’s I wrote at length about in The Plot (2021). But I’m not talking about swiping someone else’s lifelong work or groundbreaking insight (that really would be verboten); I’m talking about what happens when a casual suggestion hits you like a ton of bricks and you think: Wow! Good idea!

In 2001, for my kids’ school’s annual fundraiser, the call went out to parents for auction items. Because this was a Quaker school, there was none of the private school auction excess featured in my novel You Should Have Known (later adapted as HBO’s The Undoing): no Park Avenue facelifts or private chalets in Gstaad. Instead, we parents were encouraged to create enriching kid or parent activities or handmade crafts. The principal said to me: “You know so many writers. Why don’t you organize a book group and invite writers to come?”  oprahdaily.com

Over the next decade nearly 100 writers of fiction, nonfiction, biography, humor, and memoir came to my house in Princeton, New Jersey, and sat down with about 20 book group members, each of whom had made a donation to the school (that was the fundraising piece!) and had purchased and read the author’s book in advance. Princeton had plenty of local writers, thanks to the university, and many of them (Joyce Carol Oates, Chang-rae Lee, Susan Choi) graciously attended, but I was amazed that authors also willingly came from New York City. Rachel Dratch? (Girl Walks into a Bar) Sure. Min Jin Lee? (Free Food for Millionaires) Okay! Steve Martin? (The Pleasure of My Company) Gulp.

Why did they do it? I think the fact that I’m a writer myself created a degree of trust. And even the most “successful” author among us appreciates an opportunity to sit down with smart, friendly readers who’ve actually bought and read our book and want to discuss it.

My favorite thing about those discussions was something I came to think of as “the Question,” and it got asked in some form at every single meeting. The Question always began “Did you know…?” A novelist might be asked if she’d known, when she began her book, that a character would turn out the way they did, or that a plot twist would happen, or that research would send a book in an unanticipated direction. The answer was always “No.” The writers were inevitably surprised by where their books took them. The readers in our group were always stunned to hear that.

I know from my own writing that every set-in-stone word is the result of a discovery, a negotiation, a reconsideration, perhaps even a rejection before it makes its way to black-on-white permanence inside the finished copy of a book we read. The writing process (a term we writers sometimes roll our eyes at!) invites our private self-doubts and anxieties to work alongside our imaginations, research skills, and even—especially!—the telling of our personal stories, but—as if in compensation for that—it also opens up some mystical pathway inside us, making all manner of revelation possible. That’s part of why the process is so mysterious, even to ourselves.

I became addicted to watching what happens when authors and readers discuss a book together, and I didn’t want to stop doing it, so when my family and I moved back to my native isle, Manhattan, in 2013, I decided to reinvent the book group as a for-profit company. (I had come to regret the fact that I was not compensating the authors for their time, and paying them meant charging participants.) I also wanted to move from a regular group of attendees to a format in which people attended only the events that interested them, making for a constantly shifting group of reader-participants. The new endeavor was called BOOKTHEWRITER, and our events were dubbed “pop-up book groups.” I registered my little company in a dusty basement office at city hall, even as I tried to find people to host the gatherings (if you think it’s hard to convince people to allow 20 perfect strangers into their home, you’re right), and answered questions by confused potential customers (what did I mean, the author was present? Like, actually there?).