I first saw Jonathan Lethem’s name while perusing the Powell’s Books literary fiction section. This was sometime in the late 1990s. I had worked at Powell’s and spent a lot of time there, so I knew those shelves backward and forward. Then one day, I found a new author I’d never heard of.
This was Jonathan. The odd thing was, he already had three books out. The latest was published by Vintage Contemporaries, which if you were a young writer, was the exact place you wanted to be. They were the great discoverers of new talent.
So who was this guy? I looked at his books. He was apparently a science fiction writer but for some reason had been recently reclassified as literary fiction. Which was why I’d never heard of him.
Looking at his bio, I was surprised to find that Lethem was younger than I was! (I was 36) He lived in Berkeley, CA. He looked kind of “nerdy science fiction” in his author photo. But obviously his science fiction had some special quality if he had the best publisher in New York and was being shelved in “literary fiction”.
I didn’t have the internet yet, so I couldn’t get to the bottom of this mystery. But I remembered it.
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At that same time, my own writing career—which had begun in 1994 with the publication of my first novel GIRL—was hurtling toward disaster. GIRL had been published by Simon and Schuster by a controversial editor. That editor had quit (she was strongly disliked), leaving me and my novel (also disliked) with a hostile junior editor who would barely take my phone calls.
I was also having problems with my agent. I was having problems in general (drinking, drugs). Getting my first novel published had not fixed my life like I thought it would. It had made my life worse.
In hopes of salvaging my publishing situation, I moved back to New York in 1997 and luckily moved into a cheap housing situation with some San Francisco people in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
But being in New York didn’t help either. Within a year I would be dropped by Simon and Schuster. Not long after that, I would part ways with my agent as well.
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And then, as happens at such times, I stumbled into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where I found a little hope. If not for my professional life, then for my general well-being.
It was possible my writing career was over. But AA reminded me I had my whole life left. There was still the possibility of doing something positive—if not in writing, then in some related field.
And why was I pursuing writing anyway? “Being a writer” was one of those delusional/narcissistic professions self destructive alcoholics gravitate toward. It wasn’t something a normal healthy person would even consider for a career.
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So yeah, the AA meetings were a great relief. For that first year, I often went to multiple meetings a day. Then one night I returned home to my house in Greenpoint and there was a new excitement in the building.
A new guy had moved in upstairs. A guy who was friends with my housemates from San Francisco. Everyone was buzzing about it. His name was Jonathan Lethem.
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I remember meeting Jonathan for the first time. He seemed like a smart, capable person. He wasn’t arrogant or difficult like a lot of New York writers I’d met. So that was good.
He had grown up in Brooklyn, with artsy urban parents. So this was a homecoming for him, of sorts. The San Francisco people in the house were thrilled to have him there. He was like a hero to them.
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