husband and a stepdaughter, she would have laughed in their face. Back then, she was living in New Orleans, barely eking out an existence waiting tables at night in a restaurant that catered to tourists and spending her days slaving away at her novel. Marriage was the furthest thing from her mind. Sure, she wanted to get married someday, but that someday was far off in her future. The guy she was sort of seeing, Dave Trask, was no more marriage minded than she was. Neither one of them saw much future in the relationship; they were more friends with a strong sexual attraction than anything else. Dave was too selfish, for one thing, and for another, he didn’t have enough time for her. He was going to Tulane, majoring in prelaw—she suspected that sleeping with a local girl gave him some kind of “cool” credibility with his fraternity buddies. And she doubted she was the only one sharing his bed. They barely saw each other, which was fine with her. She liked devoting her free time to her laptop computer and the world she was writing about, the world where she was in complete control of everything that happened.
She’d always wanted to be an author from the time she was a little girl and first discovered the magic world of books. As soon as she got her first library card, she was at the library every Saturday, going through the shelves and finding things to read. She would come home every time with an armload of books, and spent the rest of the weekend in a secluded spot reading. She read about anything that struck her fancy, until her tenth birthday when her mother gave her a book called The Secret of the Old Clock. She became hopelessly addicted to Nancy Drew. She devoured the series, then found others: Trixie Belden, the Dana Girls, Judy Bolton, and even the Hardy Boys.
By the time she was thirteen she was certain she could write those books better herself, and started writing her first book as a freshman in high school: The Secret of the Haunted Carousel. Her heroine, Vicky Knight, was very similar to herself—a high school freshman, pretty but kind of bookish and quiet, with an older brother into sports and parents who didn’t seem to quite know what to make of her. She wrote the book in longhand, in spiral notebooks she carried with her everywhere. Her father, a mechanic, would tease her whenever she would bolt from the dinner table to head to her desk, “There goes the writing fiend.” Whenever she couldn’t think of anything to write or how to get Vicky out of her latest predicament, she would lie on her bed and stare at the water-stained ceiling, thinking about her future when she was a rich and famous writer. She dreamed about having lunches with other writers, where they talked about books and writing. She dreamed of Paris, London, and Rome, of sitting in coffee shops and drinking espressos, plotting out her next novel.
There hadn’t been money for college, and she wasn’t a good enough student to get a scholarship—she spent too much time in classes that bored her, daydreaming about what she was writing. Math and science were nightmares for her. Algebra might have been a language from another planet for all the sense it made to her. Her parents thought her dreams were just that—daydreams that wouldn’t come true. “Writing is for dreamers, Karen,” her mother had told her once, “not for people like you. You have to get some kind of training and get married, have children. You’ll never support yourself as a writer.” She knew her mother wanted her to go to beauty school and join her at the hair salon, just like her older sister, Vonda.
Karen would rather die than end up like Vonda. The thought of being like her sister was her worst nightmare. She was going to be different. She wasn’t going to lose her virginity in the bed of a pickup truck to some guy who was going to wind up working on an oil rig, getting knocked up and forever trapped in a life that meant more kids and doing other people’s hair. Vonda, at twenty-three, looked as if she were going on forty. Her figure was gone, her hair a mess, and she just didn’t care.
No, Karen planned to escape from Chalmette, the little town just outside New Orleans on the St. Bernard highway, if it killed her. No tired little old house with an unkempt lawn and a statue of the Virgin Mary stained with dog urine for her, thank you very much.
Much as her mother’s lack of support had hurt, it made her more determined. She’d show her mother, her father—all of them. She didn’t need a man. She didn’t need a backup career. She was going to be rich and famous and write books that made the New York Times best-seller list and got made into movies with big stars that won Oscars. She was nineteen when she moved out of her parents’ house and into the tiny apartment she could afford on her tips. She bought a used laptop computer and began working on her first adult mystery novel. She used Vicky as her main character still, only now Vicky was grown up and worked as a reporter for the New Orleans Enquirer. It took her a couple of years to finish it; and when it was ready she spent about a hundred dollars she could ill afford to make five copies and mail it off to agents in New York she’d found in The Writer’s Market. As she dropped each copy through the package mail slot at the post office on Loyola Avenue, she said a little prayer to her patron saint, Teresa of Avila.
Over the next five months, every copy came back to her. The first rejection letter had seemed encouraging.
You’re a very talented young writer, and I can see a bright future for you, but this isn’t the book. I’m afraid that I can’t see a way to sell this book in today’s highly competitive marketplace. But your characters are good, your sense of place is excellent—New Orleans really comes to life in your hands—but there are some problems with the plot that I think will hurt it in the eyes of the editors.
Keep writing, and the best of luck to you in your future endeavors.
Despite the rejection, Karen chose to see the letter as a positive. She hadn’t expected to be represented by the first agent she’d approached—that would have been too much for her to even fantasize about. All the little sections in The Writer’s Market written by award-winning best-selling writers talked about how difficult it was to get started but to keep plugging away. And the agent thought she had talent—which was the first time anyone other than her high school English teachers had said so. This was from a publishing professional! She was certain she was on her way. She’d gone out that night after work to celebrate.
Then the next letter came, and said almost exactly the same thing as the first, only in different words.
When the third came, again the same thing in slightly different words, she was crushed. It was a standardized form letter all agents used, nothing more, nothing less; the same as the rejection letters from editors to whom she sent her short stories.
Maybe she didn’t have talent.
Maybe she couldn’t make it as a writer.
The fourth rejection letter made her cry.
Written in ink on the back of a torn-off piece of recycled office stationery, it said simply:
Ms. Donovan:
I find your plot and your characters to be neither interesting or compelling. It is, to say the least, the work of an immature writer and no publishing house would be interested in publishing such a thing. I suggest you try another line of work.
Best of luck to you.
Even though she noticed the agent’s incorrect usage of “neither” with “or,” it still hurt. That night after she got off work she did something she rarely did: she went out and got drunk. That was the night she met Dave. He’d sat down next to her at the bar after her third tequila sunrise and said something stupid like “What’s a pretty girl like you looking so sad for?” She’d laughed in his face. Just the act of laughing broke the depression she’d been feeling, and about an hour later she took him back to the sad little apartment with her. He was good looking, with blue eyes and ragged blondish hair and a crooked grin that made him look like he was up to something. He wasn’t her first; she’d lost her virginity shortly after moving to the Quarter to a bartender at the restaurant she worked at. She hadn’t really seen the big deal about sex—nor did she feel the need to run to confession the following Sunday. She hadn’t been to Mass since she moved out of her parents’ house. There had been a few others since the bartender—but they all turned out to be mostly disappointments. Dave was different. Dave played her body like a musical instrument, and she finally understood what the big deal really was.
They fell into their routine of seeing each other once or twice a week, when the mood struck or, as she suspected,