JULIE LANGSDORF

White Elephant

Age: Fifty-six. Residence: Washington, D.C. Book: White Elephant (Ecco, March 2019), a novel about the chaos that ensues when a developer moves into a quaint community and starts tearing down old houses. Agent: Suzanne Gluck of William Morris Endeavor. Editor: Megan Lynch.

DON’T give up too soon,” I recently told a group of aspiring writers at a writers conference. “If I’d given up after twenty-seven years, it would have been too soon.” I realized how crazy it sounded even as I said it. Twenty-seven years? What kind of nut keeps at it for twenty-seven years without success?

I actually started years before that, as a child. The words of imagined worlds, both written and read, were the escape I needed from a somewhat madcap family life. After college I naturally veered toward writing and got a job writing features for a small-town newspaper. In my spare time I wrote short stories and submitted them to literary magazines. In those preinternet days I sent them through the mail, checking my mailbox every day to see if an editor had responded.

“What do you do?” people asked me all the time, as people do, and throughout my twenties and thirties I proudly told them I was a writer, though I was no longer working at the newspaper. “What have you published?” they asked, and I told them about the short stories I’d placed in literary magazines. I was young, if not quite as young as I had been; I was married by now and had started a family. There was still plenty of time to get a novel published. I had to write one first, of course, so I sat down at my desk every morning as soon as I got the children out the door. An agent offered representation, but sadly she couldn’t sell my novel. Nor could she sell the second one I wrote. So I wrote another one and found another agent—who couldn’t sell the new one either, a novel called White Elephant.

White Elephant sat inside my computer for years, a neglected child I sometimes turned to as my human children grew from toddlers to teenagers. I wrote another novel—it was habit by now—but I couldn’t interest an agent. I often gave up writing during those years. I swore it off like a drug—then a writing grant or a small award would tease me into taking it up again.

Before long the kids were off at college and I was suddenly fifty. Fifty! “What do you do?” people would ask, and I would distract them by spilling a drink on them or pulling the fire alarm before they could ask the inevitable follow-up question. Having taken up yoga to deal with other transitions in my life, I decided to become a yoga teacher, which turned out to be a godsend in many ways, one of them being a more comprehensible answer to the question, “What do you do?” Before long I stopped writing altogether. I was a yoga teacher, and that was enough.

Until it wasn’t enough anymore. While I loved teaching yoga, it didn’t quite satisfy the creative urge that writing did. In the summer of 2017 I decided to give publishing one more shot. I searched through my computer to see if any of my previous novel attempts were viable and came upon White Elephant.

“This is it,” I told myself. “If it happens now, I’m a writer; if it doesn’t, I’m a yoga teacher, no looking back.” I sent out queries with fingers crossed. Soon dream agent Suzanne Gluck offered to represent me; she quickly sold it to dream editor Megan Lynch. A year and a half later White Elephant was published.

The moral of the story? Don’t give up too soon. The trouble, and the blessing, is that you won’t know when “too soon” is until you get published. So maybe don’t give up ever.

If it happens now, I’m a writer; if it doesn’t, I’m a yoga teacher, no looking back.