Jeanne McCulloch
Age: Sixty. Residence: Brooklyn, New York. Book: All Happy Families (Harper Wave, August), a family memoir that takes the author’s doomed 1983 Long Island, New York, wedding—her father had a massive stroke two days before and died the day after—as an occasion to examine the marriages of her parents and in-laws. Editor: Karen Rinaldi. Agent: Amanda Urban of International Creative Management.
IWAS a writer before I was an editor. My first job, in the Features department of Vogue magazine, was writing short, anonymous reviews, captions, and titles, and finally I earned my own byline. My next job was as the managing editor of the Paris Review, and in my mid-twenties I naively thought I’d keep writing while I edited a literary magazine. That works for some people, but it didn’t work for me. I found myself giving all my energy to the words of my authors. I applied the auditory tools I use as a writer to help my writers—to “listen” to the sound of their sentences, the flow and the beat. I think writers can make for very sensitive editors. We know how difficult it is to write, so there’s an empathetic support system built in, and instinctively we know how the work should sound. That said, there’s also the danger of editors putting off their own work until it’s almost forgotten.
That almost happened to me.
I do think on a personal level I found it temperamentally suited me to be an editor. I was raised in a family whose dysfunction (my father’s alcoholism) and social protocol (my mother’s insistence on formality) didn’t allow a child much opportunity to have a voice or an opinion. So I relaxed into the job of editor, as it felt very familiar—helping to shape other people’s ideas, holding their hands, reassuring them—and in the meantime I forgot about my own voice. It’s also very natural as a nurturing person to relax into the job of being an editor. I used to joke when I was in my thirties that I wasn’t ready to have children because I had all my authors to nurture. When I became a mother, in my forties, I found there was indeed a similarity in that nurturing instinct. At the time, I was nurturing my children and my writers and Tin House Books as its founding editorial director. I got almost no writing done.
Then a colleague of mine, Elissa Schappell, asked me to write an essay for an anthology she was editing on the topic of money. I struggled; it was personal and revealing, and it made me uncomfortable—in a way that made me realize I was striking a rich vein. Karen Rinaldi, then editor and president of Bloomsbury USA, saw the essay, and Bloomsbury offered me a contract to expand it into a book. Thus I did something I’d always advised my own writers never to do: I agreed to write a book when I had no idea where it was going and was uncertain if I was ready to gather all the skeletons lurking in the family closet and hold them up for scrutiny in a place of public entertainment. It took me a long time to realize the building block of the narrative arc was an August weekend in 1983—a weekend in which I got married and my father died from abrupt alcohol withdrawal. The story I had refused to take out of the family closet—the one that I was refusing to look at—was the one that in the end demanded to be told. We tend to bury the stories of our lives we don’t want to see, and it can take a long time to shear through the layers of old trauma, to find the grace, the wisdom, and the nuance, even the humor, to tell a story that in my case altered my life forever thirty-five years ago.
So here I am publishing my first book at age sixty. Ultimately, it did take me decades to get back to my own writing, and that may have had to do with all the above. Fortunately I had a very patient editor who waited me out while I dithered in the dark attic of my past. All Happy Families is my memoir about that weekend that took place thirty-five years ago and the repercussions for the two families involved. Maybe it took that long to process a traumatic experience, or maybe I’d just run out of excuses. Probably a bit of both.