The Jill Emerson Novels Series

Shadows, which was not only the debut of Jill Emerson but my own very first novel, is the story of a young woman, Jan Marlowe, who comes to New York fresh out of college, takes an apartment in the Bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, and seeks to find herself—and specifically to come to terms with the puzzling question of sexual identity. Well then... One morning in the spring of 1958 I woke up in my room at the Hotel Alexandria with a paralyzing hangover (which was not unusual) and an idea for a book (which was). I sat in front of my typewriter, and within a few hours I had produced a chapter-by-chapter outline of a novel. I had all the characters sketched out and knew how they'd relate to one another, and how the rather elementary storyline would resolve itself. I even had a title: Shadows. At the time I was working as an editor at a shady literary agency, but I'd already arranged for my departure, as come fall I'd be resuming college in Ohio. Sometime in May I gave up my room at the Alexandria and went home to Buffalo, where I turned that outline into a book. My agent sent it to Crest Books, then the country's premier publisher of lesbian fiction. They spent a couple of months reading it and thinking it over, during which time I wrote and sold several lesser books to Harry Shorten's Midwood Books. Then, a couple of months after I'd returned to Antioch and gone through a lot of sturm und drang that needn't concern us here, Crest accepted Shadows. They changed my title to Strange Are the Ways of Love. They also changed my pen name. I'd known a lesbian novel ought to have a woman's name on it, and I picked one. They decided on Leslie Evans instead, so it could be gender-neutral, and then switched it to Lesley Evans, which made it more specifically female. Welcome to publishing, young man. It's clear to me now, some 60 years later, that the book ought to set sail under its original title, and since I'm republishing it myself, that's a decision I get to make. It's also clear to me that Shadows is in fact Jill Emerson's very first novel, as it's far more of a piece with Warm And Willing and Enough of Sorrow than with anything else I've written. So that's how I'll publish it, right? As Shadows, dammit, by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson. You got a problem with that?

Here's what someone wrote as the book description for an earlier edition of ENOUGH OF SORROW: "From master storyteller Lawrence Block comes one girl's journey toward self-discovery and sexual freedom....Karen Winslow is starting over. But she's not sure how to move forward when her deepest secret haunts her and keeps her from enjoying her carefree youth. She's a sweet but troubled young thing, and not until she meets Rae, a confident young lesbian, does she realize what she's been missing. Meanwhile, she's also intrigued by a man and can't help but wonder if a normal life will put an end her sorrows for good." ENOUGH OF SORROW, I could add, is the third of mynovels as Jill Emerson, who seems to me to be rather more than a pen name. An aspect of self, perhaps. A distinct persona, if you will. My first novel, SHADOWS, originally bore a different pen name, but it's very much of a piece with Jill's work, and I don't think it's coincidental that I chose that theme and that persona for the first book I ever wrote, any more than I deem it coincidence that, when I split with my agent and had no place to sell my work, my first step toward recovery was an over-the-transom submission of WARM AND WILLING—another lesbian novel. I've written about that new beginning in the book description for WARM AND WILLING. After I turned it in, the editor at Midwood made it clear he'd like to publish more of Jill's work. (As far as he ever knew, the author was indeed a woman named Jill Emerson. I saw no reason to disabuse him of the notion, and in fact the game was half the fun.) And, thank God, it was a more innocent age, or at least a less cumbersome one. He sent me checks payable to Jill Emerson and I endorsed them in that name and cashed them through my bank account. It wouldn't be that simple nowadays. I don't know what I'd called WARM AND WILLING, but the title I slapped on the second book was ENOUGH OF SORROW, from the poem by Mary Carolyn Davies: I Sing of sorrow I sing of weeping I have no sorrow I only borrow From some tomorrow Where it lies sleeping Enough of sorrow To sing of weeping. A fine poet, Mary Carolyn Davies. Bernie Rhodenbarr's reading one of her verses in one of the books—I disremember which book, but the verse was "Smith, of the Third Oregon, Dies." I guess they liked Jill at Midwood. Their paperback sports an award sticker on the cover, proclaiming it the winer of some nonexistent contest. And, mirabile dictu, that didn't feel the need to change my title. I wonder why Jill never wrote more for them? Ah well. Let's be grateful for what we have. And note that this ebook edition of ENOUGH OF SORROW includes as a bonus the opening chapter of Jill's fourth novel, THIRTY.

After spending her girlhood writing gentle and thoughtful novels of the lesbian experience (SHADOWS, WARM AND WILLING, ENOUGH OF SORROW), Jill Emerson reinvented herself in the early 1970s, just when contemporary literature was experiencing an enormous flowering of sexuality. Even as the whole culture rocked with the sexual revolution, popular fiction echoed this change with a flinging off of censorship and a surge of sexual candor. And Jill wrote three books for Berkley. The first, THIRTY, was in the form of a diary, piling incident upon incident as the diarist, a woman in her thirtieth year, fled her safe suburban marriage and went off in search of her real self. The second, THREESOME, took the form of a collaborative novel in which the three participants in a menage a trois wrote a book together to chronicle their own experience—an experience that continued to evolve as each read what the others had written. A MADWOMAN'S DIARY, you won't be surprised to learn, is a return to the diary form. Once again the diarist is a young woman, seeking a richer and more fulfilling life in and out of bed. But the book owes its storyline to more than Jill Emerson's imagination. Interestingly enough, it grows out of a psychosexual case history previously reported by John Warren Wells. Jill, having read JWW's book in manuscript, couldn't get one particular case out of her head. It was, she thought, a perfect springboard for fiction. And the next thing she knew she was typing away, entirely caught up in the woman's story as it spooled itself out of her typewriter. John Warren Wells was unlikely to object. He and Jill, always friends, occasionally lovers, were comfortable sharing their work, and not infrequently would dedicate their books to each other. And, even if JWW found Jill's decorous plagiarism unsettling, what could he possibly do about it? Both he and Jill are in fact pen names—or, if you prefer, alternate selves—of author Lawrence Block. So they have all the reason in the world to get along. This ebook edition of A MADWOMAN'S DIARY includes as a bonus the opening chapter of the seventh Jill Emerson novel, THE TROUBLE WITH EDEN.

In early 1969, I moved with my wife and daughters to an 18th century farmhouse on twelve rolling acres a mile east of the Delaware River. We kept a variety of animals and grew things in the garden, and this was as I'd expected. But there were two things I did not anticipate. One was that I would have to go away from there, all the way back to New York City, to get any work done. The other was that I'd open an art gallery. The art gallery was in New Hope, right across the river from Lambertville. New Hope had long had a reputation as an artists' colony and boasted a little theater and a batch of art galleries, along with bookstores and antique dealers and cute little shops to sell cute little things to tourists, most of whom were neither cute nor little. I found a store for rent and signed a year's lease. Nowadays it's hard to get me to go see a movie or buy a new shirt, but back then I'd embark on the wildest adventure on not much more than a whim. I knew nothing about business, but that was okay, because the gallery didn't do any. After a year, my lease was up and I was out of there. It was a learning experience, and what I learned was not to make that particular mistake again. And I did meet some interesting people, and hear some interesting stories. And, when it came time to write a big trashy commercial novel, I knew right where to set it. By this time I'd written three erotic novels for Berkley Books as Jill Emerson. Now I don't know who thought that Jill ought to write a big, juicy, trashy Peyton Place–type of book, but my agent brought the idea to me, and I thought Bucks Country would provide a good setting. The deal was an attractive one, with a hefty advance. Berkley was a division of Putnam, and the deal was hard/soft; the book would be first a Berkley hardcover, then a paperback. When we'd first moved to the country and I found I couldn't get any writing done there, I went into the city and wrote a book in a week. Soon after that Brian Garfield and I took a place together at 235 West End Avenue. We hosted a weekly poker game there, stayed over when one or the other of us had a late night in the city, and got some writing done. I believe Brian wrote most of Kolchak's Gold there. I wrote a batch of things, too, and one of them was The Trouble with Eden. Berkley had hoped for a bestseller, but they never put any muscle into the book and didn't sell many copies. Reviewers overlooked it completely, with a single curious exception. A reviewer in Esquire launched into a lengthy discussion of a book he'd picked up a week earlier without great expectations. It looked like trash but turned out to be far more gripping and involving than he anticipated. Well-wrought characters, interesting plot developments—really pretty good. And then suddenly the review hung a U-turn, and its author said that further on the book turned out to be trash after all and, on balance, a big disappointment. I'll tell you, it was as though the reviewer read half the book, wrote half the review, ate a bad clam, finished the book, and went on to finish the review. I can't say I minded—it was, as they say at the Oscars, victory enough merely to be nominated—and I can't say I disagreed with its conclusion. But it was damn strange. Ah well. It's probably not a good book, but I have a warm spot for Eden. Like the curate's egg, I think parts of it are very good.

I can trace the origin of A Week as Andrea Benstock to two distinct sources. The first inspired my attempting the book, while the second inspired its form. Let me consider the second first. In 1949, the Belgian author Georges Simenon published a novel called Four Days in a Lifetime. All I remember of the book is its structure.Each of its four parts took place entirely within a single day of its protagonist's life. And those four days gave you the full picture of the man's existence . . . or as much as Simenon felt like giving you. I thought it was brilliant, and the device—if not the plot or characters—stayed in my mind. If Simenon gave me the structure of Andrea Benstock, Peggy Roth pointed me at the book's subject matter and made me believe I was good enough to write it. Peggy was a highly-placed editor at Dell Publishing. My own editor there, Bill Grose, reported to her, and on one occasion in the early 1970s the three of us had lunch together. I'd written a batch of sex fact books for Dell, but at the time I don't believe Dell had published any of my fiction. I don't remember much about our lunch except that we all had a lot to drink. The conversation wandered all over the place, and at one point Peggy asked me who my favorite writer was. I replied (and would very likely still reply) that it was John O'Hara. "Oh, you're a much better writer than he ever was," Peggy Roth said. Now that could only have been the martinis talking, and I'm sure I knew it at the time and surely know it now. She couldn't possibly have believed it, and if she did, well, she was wrong. But her words, even if I recognized them as outrageous and alcohol-driven, nevertheless allowed me to believe that I might try to play in that league. I'd never get a Golden Glove or hit for the circuit, but I might be able to sit on the bench. Maybe pitch batting practice, say. Then Peggy asked me about my background, and I said I'd grown up in a middle-class Jewish family in Buffalo, New York. "Then that's what you should write about," she said. I don't think it had ever occurred to me that anyone would want to read a novel with such a setting or that I would ever want to write one. But Peggy Roth, a perceptive and intelligent woman, thought that was what I should write. That didn't send me rushing to my desk, but it was something to think about. I don't remember when it all came together, but eventually I found I had a book in mind. Like Simenon's novel, it would consist of scattered days in a life—not four but seven of them, the titular week in the protagonist's life. And they'd be strewn over a decade, beginning with her wedding, when she takes her husband's name and becomes Andrea Benstock. The days chosen wouldn't necessarily be the days on which major events in her life happened but would rather be representative days. And there'd be no elaborate recapitulation of what had transpired in the months and years between one day and the next; we'd get that information, but only insofar as it would be apt to come to her mind at each present moment. I don't keep journals, so I can't say just when I started work on the book or even when I finished it. It took a while. Because of its utterly episodic structure, it was easy to put it aside between sections and turn to something else, something with the promise of immediate income. I was married to my first wife when I began the book, and that marriage ended in the summer of 1973. I moved into a studio apartment on West 58th Street, and that same year Peggy Roth died far too young of pneumonia. When I finished the book, she was one of its two dedicatees; the other was my stepfather, Joe Rosenberg.