My Misspent Youth Read Online Free PDF Page A

offices with radiators upon which cardboard-mounted book jackets are gleamingly displayed. I spent quite a lot of time in my editorial-assistant days dreaming about when I’d be able to answer with a “hello.” I even experimented with it intermittently, pulling it out like a pair of torn jeans on casual Fridays. “Hello,” I’d say, with faux nonchalance at 7:30 in the evening after everyone had left. This usually resulted in the person hanging up, or my mother’s voice emerging on the other end, insisting that such lack of professionalism surely wasn’t going to result in a promotion any time soon.
    So it’s all in the phone greeting, the banter with authors and agents, the art of raising the pitch of our voices when we call the accounting department to ask what happened to that check for the $100,000 advance because the “author is desperately poor and the agent is ballistic.” (The truth is that we discovered the check request under a pile of magazines on our desk two months after we were supposed to process it.) But the voice will fix everything. It rises when we’re covering up our clerical errors, drops to sultry depths when we’re schmoozing or gossiping or ordering a decaf cap (with skim milk) from the deli around the corner. We’re secretaries fully versed in Derrida, receptionists who have read Proust in French. This is a land of girls. There are always at least ten of “us” for every one of “him.” We’ve got decent shoes. We’ve got B.A.s in English from fancy schools, expensive haircuts, expensive bags, and cheap everything else. We’ve got the studio apartment with the half-eaten one-hundred-calorie yogurt in the mini-fridge. We’ve got one message flashing on the answering machine (it’s Mom again), bad TV reception, and a pile of manuscripts to read before bedtime. We’ve got an annual take-home of $18,000 before taxes if we’re lucky, a $100 deductible on the health insurance, which is useful about one year into the job when we reach that milestone of entering therapy (inspired by the books we’re working on), when we have to remind ourselves that getting out of bed every morning is mandatory rather than optional, when we realize that the phrase “there’s a lot of writing involved” as it pertains to a job is subject to interpretation.
    Like all legends, the glamour of publishing that we read about in McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs or Mary Cantwell’s Manhattan, When I Was Young is likely to be shattered somewhere around the first anniversary of assistantship. Though our heroines were no doubt just as burdened by this age-old indentured servitude as we are, there’s something in the retelling, in the breezy we-can-laugh-about-it-now quality of such memoirs that today’s editorial slaves find confusing. It’s as if a sepia tint has been imposed onto a thoroughly fluorescent-lit world. Unlike our predecessors, we find ourselves spending considerably more lunch hours waiting in line at Ess-a-Bagel than sitting at the counter at the Oyster Bar. We realize that we’re spending a significant amount of office time changing the fax paper, chasing down botched contracts, and writing flap copy for Thin Thighs in Three Seconds rather than inhabiting a publishing world like the one Dan Wakefield evoked in his memoir New York in the Fifties, where “the booze ran freely and the talk was always funny, sharp, knowing, dealing with what we cared about most—books, magazines, stories, the words and the people who wrote them.”
    To the dewy eye of the editorial assistant, there is something about this mythos—the stiff patent leathers tromping around Madison Square, the particular literary drunkenness that seemed obtainable only from the taps of the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas met the shot glass that killed him—that feels lost, abandoned in nostalgia’s inevitable recycling bin. Instead, there are lunches eaten while hunched over a plastic container of tri-colored pasta