Tod Goldberg writes:
I come from a family of writers, so you’d expect that at some point one of them would have sat me down and explained the crushing feeling of rejection, or at least prepared me for the way an editor you’ve never met, at a publishing company you’ve never heard of, can write four little lines about your first novel and send you spinning in angst for days. As a public service, here are a few snippets from the twenty-four rejections my novel Fake Liar Cheat received over the course of two weeks in June, 1999 before the fine people at Pocket Books purchased it and made me into the megalomaniac I am today.
From an editor at William Morrow:
As we discussed, I’m returning Fake Liar Cheat by Tod Goldberg to you. I vacillated between thinking this was the most genius, entertaining book that I’d read in a while and frankly hating it.
Turns out she hated it.
From an editor at Henry Holt:
Perhaps it is Mr. Goldberg’s intention to write in a self-consciously novelistic way, to let the manuscript declare itself a work of art and fiction. However, in general, this technique is not entirely to my taste.
As it happens, that was my intention. I now write my novels as if they are cook books.
From an editor at FSG:
Tod Goldberg’s Fake Liar Cheat is tight as a drum (or as Claire’s skirt on one of Lonnie’s first dates with her), but I found this a shade more familiar than I would have liked, even though I’ve never been to L.A.
“Tight as a drum” is short-hand for: Why did he summarize that month of action in the middle? [A side note here: Claire never wears any skirts in the book.]
The other 21 rejections include one that says the book is “slick, shallow and hollow of emotion,” another which compares the book, unfavorably, to watching Saturday morning TV and four that echo this odd term: “I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to.” Does that mean you did love it a little? That there was a true emotional bond, a commitment, a declaration of love and adoration, but, as it turned out, the bond was just not strong enough to withstand a withered plot and sophomoric rants on American culture?
Of course, you don’t see any of this when you walk into Barnes & Noble and see the book crammed on the shelf between Carter Beats The Devil and Memoirs of a Geisha, five long years after it was originally released. The lesson to be learned here is that even books soundly rejected twenty-four God-forsaken times still have a chance for success, if only in the sense that, like any first date, there’s always hope someone might take it home and enjoy it.
Tod Goldberg is the author of the novels Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Fake Liar Cheat. His latest book, Simplify, a collection of short stories, will be released in September.
