One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t want to disturb you and, like, hound you, especially being the new guy here, and again, I was told you really never weigh in on galleys. Is there anything you wanted to change? I can definitely see about changing it for the paperback, or—”
    “The title of the book is not
The Something
.”
    There was a long silence.
    “What?”
    “The title of my book is not
The Something
,” said John Grisham.
    “I … am looking at this manuscript right now, sent in by you to us, dated July second:
The Something by John Grisham
.”
    “I just meant ‘The … Something,’ ” said John Grisham—careful to calibrate both his emphasis and his anger precisely, not letting either cloud the other. He then repeated what he had just said with every possible intonation, approaching it like the methodical defense attorney he once was, just so it would be entirely, one hundred percent clear to this person named Dale. “ ‘The …
Something.
’ ‘
The …
Something.’ ‘The SOME-thing.’ Do you get it, Dale?! It was going to be ‘The … … …
SOMETHING
’!!! I was going to decide that part later!”
    “Huh. .… Okay.… I think … Why didn’t … Okay.”
    John Grisham could practically see the excessive blank space between Dale’s words: more typos, these ones over the phone.
    “I gotta tell you, John,” said Dale, finally, starting again: “I gotta say, people have actually really responded to
The Something
. It feels … deliberately ambiguous. You know? It’s elegantly vague. It basically lets people project whatever—”
    “The book,” said John Grisham, “is about a civil rights attorney who is blackmailed by the El Salvadoran maid he risked his career for in order to sneak her children into the country. Okay? It is not meant to be
elegantly vague
. This is about
right
and
wrong
, about the
limits
of the
law
, about
concrete legal issues
and
specific personal actions
. A good title would have been, oh, I don’t know, Dale, off the top of my fucking head?
The Case
?
The Betrayal
?
The Immigrant’s Trial
,
The Immigrant
,
The Threat
,
The Letter
,
The Lawyer’s Pen
,
The Blackmail
? Just to name a few?! Or,” he said, trying to sneak this one in there, the one he reallywanted but was a little shy to bring up, “I thought
So Far Only Goes So Far
wouldn’t be the stupidest title in the world, if we wanted to go for something different?”
    “What would that refer to?” asked Dale.
    “Oh, like
The Something
refers to
anything
!” exploded Grisham. “The point is … Look, forget
So Far Only Goes So Far
, it’s stupid, it’s pretentious, it’s not what I do—look. Look. This isn’t a
ghost
story, Dale, okay?
The S-o-o-o-o-m-e-t-h-i-i-i-i
—no.
No!
This is about concrete issues of our time maybe more than anything I’ve written since probably
Pelican
. And thematically, it’s about the unforeseeable consequences of the compromises we all make. In any case,
The Something
is, on every level, a
completely inappropriate
title. Okay? Okay, Dale? Do you understand that now? How if you were to get any two words wrong in this book, these are two pretty fucking important ones?”
    “Yes,” said Dale. “Yes. I do.”
    John Grisham exhaled, feeling his breath leave his body as he did, like his wife’s yoga instructor had taught him to do that one time. He never went back to that yoga instructor, but he still thought about that session sometimes.
    “I do want to say one very small thing—not to defend myself, at all, but just to make you feel a little better while we sort all this out,” said Dale. “For what it’s worth—and the answer may be nothing—people have not mentioned the title once. Really. Not once. Reviews have been good. You know, considering—you’re an extremely popular writer, and some reviewers are naturally going to hold that against you, but … really, I read all of them. All of them. Everything. I have not read one review that has brought this