Editor makes left turn into fiction writing
Surprising debut comes with uncertainties Jackson has long helped authors navigate
NEW YORK — Jenny Jackson means onetime Brooklyn Heights resident Truman Capote no disrespect, and his quote, “I live in Brooklyn. By choice,” serves as an epigraph to “Pineapple Street,” her first novel. But Jackson sets off on a walking tour with a different Brooklyn Heights in her sights.
She gestures toward the red brick Heights Casino, where the novel’s old-money Brooklynites play tennis year-round, and the St. George Hotel, which catered to Brooklyn’s rich of the Jazz Age. There’s the imposing bay-windowed house on Columbia Heights that inspired the heirloom-stuffed limestone at the heart of the book. And the Joe Coffee on the corner of Pineapple and Hicks streets is where Georgiana, the youngest daughter of the novel’s adamantly Social Register Stockton family, utters the immortal line, “Oh no, I left my Cartier tennis bracelet in Lena’s BMW, and she’s leaving for her grandmother’s house in Southampton,” as she is fatefully spotted by the reluctant heir to a zillion-dollar defense fortune.
Darley, Georgiana’s older sister, is a former finance crusher and increasingly reluctant stay-at-$10million-home mom, while their mother, an event planner, has never met an issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine she didn’t scour for prospects for her unmarried daughter.
Stuck, uncomfortably, in the middle, is Sasha, the middle-class New England girl who has married their brother, Cord, and, despite all signs to the contrary, is referred to as “the Gold Digger” by her sisters-inlaw.
“It’s the novel Jane Austen would have written,” said author Chris Bohjalian, “if Jane Austen lived in Brooklyn Heights in the 21st century.”
But Jane Austen didn’t hold a high-profile position in publishing, as well: Jackson, the author with a splashy debut on her hands, is also a vice president and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Bohjalian is one of her authors.
Jackson’s foray into writing came as a surprise to most who know her, not least those who have known her as editor, and raised questions: How will Jackson deploy her skills in her new circumstances? And what does it feel like to be on the other side of the author-publisher relationship?
“It was like finding out your spouse is an Olympic equestrian,” said author Kevin Kwan, who hit the publishing stratosphere with Jackson as his editor on “Crazy Rich Asians.” “Or better, given her natural skills, an Olympic gymnast.”
Since joining Vintage, Knopf ’s paperback arm, in 2002, fresh out of Williams College and the Columbia Publishing Course, and segueing to Knopf ’s hardcover shop nine years after that, Jackson, 43, has established herself as a literary hit-maker with a track record of fostering bestselling authors who straddle the line between literary and commercial fiction, and nonfiction on occasion as well. With a loyal roster that ranges from such authors as Gabrielle Zevin and Emily St. John Mandel to Peter Heller, Katherine Heiny, Jennifer Close, Esmeralda Santiago, Helen Ellis and actor Selma Blair, she is also considered extraordinarily adept at helping market and promote her authors.
Zevin’s star-crossed gamers saga, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” topped Amazon’s list of Best Books of 2022, ended up a Jimmy Fallon Book Club pick and scored a rare John Green recommendation. Almost the minute that Amazon’s Times Square billboard went up trumpeting the novel as its “#1” choice, Jackson shared it on her busy Instagram.
Jackson said she was almost as surprised as the rest of the publishing world that she’d written a novel. Like countless others, she had felt isolated and unsettled as the pandemic “changed the world and the way we lived,” she said. Far from her normal epicenter among a younger cohort spanning a swath of publishing houses and literary agencies, Jackson wrote the novel, she said, in place of being able to talk and gossip and socialize with what had seemed to have become a vanished world.
For the first six months of the pandemic, she and her husband, Torrey Liddell, and their two young children lived with his parents at their country house in Sharon, Connecticut. “I love Torrey’s family,” Jackson said, “but they’re not my family.” The complications of marrying into someone else’s family drive her novel’s fish-out-ofgene-pool plot.
Jackson wrote “Pineapple Street” in just four months after she read The New York Times article “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism,” about millennial one-percenters’ distinctly ambivalent relationship with the millions they stand to inherit. The conundrum visits the Stocktons in “Pineapple Street” when Georgiana grows a social conscience and decides to give away her trust fund.
As a seasoned editor, Jackson has witnessed the eggshell egos and creative struggles of many of her authors, and has ridden the ups and downs of their insecurities and rough drafts. “Pineapple Street” had the potential of throwing the same emotional obstacle course her way.
J. Courtney Sullivan, whose first novel, “Commencement,” began her string of bestsellers with Jackson, talked through some of those vulnerabilities with her, she said, and “how, as a writer, you have to put so much of yourself out there, and the risks that holds, the vulnerability.”
Jennifer Close, who has been with Jackson since they made “Girls in White Dresses” a bestseller in 2011, exchanged texts with her almost daily. “The first time she got notes back for revisions,” Close said, “she texted me, ‘I hate revising. This is miserable. How do you not hate me?’ It was funny because she’s a person her authors love.”
“I feel like I’ve always been sensitive to my authors,” Jackson said. “But it’s gone up a level. I’m never going to just dismiss a rude email one of them gets ever again.”