The Fully Fact-Checked Memoir
MY DREAM came true on a dismal March afternoon. Snow still crusted the sidewalks outside my apartment window, and it was raining. It was early pandemic—very early pandemic. Quarantine felt like we’d all been cast in a surreal episode of Black Mirror, and I and almost everyone I knew assumed it would—like a television drama—last for a finite amount of time. A couple of weeks. A month, tops.
In my twenties, I’d dreamed about the day when a power-house agent would get in touch to tell me that she was two-thirds of the way through my manuscript and loving it and not to talk to any other agent until she could finish and discuss representation with me. (In true want-to-be-a-writer fashion, I’d imagined this even before I had a manuscript.) I assumed it would happen with my first manuscript. Then with my second. Then my third, my fourth, and my fifth. By the time I was in my forties, I started to think it was never going to happen.
But there I was, standing in my kitchen, my face lit by the blue light of my cellphone screen, reading just such an e-mail. Another e-mail arrived saying that the agent was cc’ing her assistant to schedule a phone meeting.
An almost anguished elation came over me. I pumped my fist into the air and went to the window, as if to shout my good news—almost twenty years in the making—from the rooftops, but the streets were empty.
The phone meeting occurred a couple of days later. Just when I thought it couldn’t get better, it did. The manu-script, she said, needed no revisions. It was ready to be shopped to publishers. This was unheard-of. I asked about the pandemic. She said it hadn’t slowed down publishing.
Before we got off the phone, she said, “One thing. You’re going to need support.”
“Support?”
“You make pretty
