The Publishing World: A Writing Center Event with Tracy Strauss
By: Rachael Kuper '20
In the window-filled corner room on the second floor of library, the sounds of a ukulele’s calming chords ring. Around twenty people, a collection of English Department students, professors, and other guests are seated in armchairs and office chairs with their cheese and crackers, listening raptly.
The Mary G. Walsh Writing Center has a new Director this year, longtime Writing Center veteran Al DeCiccio, and his first event is underway. He walks to the front and, with a few thank you’s and personal anecdotes, introduces his longtime friend and colleague, writer and speaker of the day— Tracy Strauss.
Strauss is well-dressed with an observant look in her eye. She at once commands the attention of the room and proclaims her shy-ness. Her voice draws you in as she thanks Al. Strauss stands in front of a projector screen displaying the title of her talk: Persistence, Production, Publication: Some Thoughts for Salem State University.
Strauss, a non-fiction writer published in countless big-name magazines, has had a mind-bending journey getting publishers to take on her personal memoir. The major tripping point: the inclusion of child sexual abuse. She insists her book, in every version she’s crafted and the one published, is really a story of hope. How can the desire to avoid a (frankly and depressingly, common) taboo override the desire to reveal true hope despite it? What does that say about society? I wonder.
In her presentation Strauss traces the over-a-decade-long process of getting her story, untouchable by publishing metrics, out into the world. She speaks to the “Spiral Staircase” form of progress, that she had to revise and redraft and resubmit countless times (though in actuality she did count and it was over 300 times) to get published. And it was ultimately marketed as a self-help book titled I Just Haven’t Met You Yet.
She talks about the industry: the events they hold, the lies they tell, the tricks they pull. And she reiterates this idea with one point in particular – how can memoirs containing the taboo topic of childhood sexual abuse be both without an audience and flooding the market? Literary agent after literary agent, publisher after publisher, editor after editor all parroting the same party lines. But they contradict each other? The audience immediately notices.
Strauss drives home her take-away for us, “Persist, Persist, Persist.” She says to seek the helpful people, and never be deterred by the plot-twists of life. She says to “Believe,” in the value of your story and the hope for a happy ending.
She reads two chapters of her book as the event comes to a close. First a comical and light-hearted story of meeting a man from a dating site who clearly lied about his age, second a heart-wrenching story of a missed connection and living with wondering what-if.
Strauss opens up for Q & A. I ask why her book is marketed as self-help when it’s truly a memoir. She replies that the publishers made that call, concerned that a non-celebrity memoir without a “special” topic (think universally recognizable events, a tragedy or the like) will have a market of nil. She says readers gave feedback that the angle was misleading, but they loved her writing.
After hearing her read, so do I.