Today I chat with an author who spent ten years in the publishing industry before she started writing books herself like Animal Husbandry and Dating Big Bird. Her new book, Piece of Work, is about a woman who's been a stay-at-home mom for ten years, but when her husband is laid off from his job, she's forced to go back to work as a celebrity publicist and resurrect a screen legend's career. And apparently some of this is not-NOT-autobiographical.

Did your experience working on publishing give you any insight or upper hand when you wrote your books?
I guess the main part of working in publishing that helped me write my books is the material it gave me --- mainly for this new book, Piece of Work. Not only is Mary Ford, the has-been celebrity who is looking for a comeback, based on many of the celebrity authors I came in contact with over the years (or heard about through similarly abusedpublicist-friends), but Julia, the main character, is a publicist. No one, I don't think, except other publicists, can ever truly understand what it's like to be one -- imagine waitressing without the tips, and you begin to approach the what's-in-it-for-me? part. Which is ironic, given the fascination people have with celebrities now. People have this idea that celebrities are wonderful fabulous people and oh my god, most of them (except Nia Vardalos and Hugh Jackman -- see below) are just awful. Sometimes I'll be watching Entertainment Tonight and I'll see an actor or actress doing a sit-down interview for their new movie and something about them makes me suddenly know deep in my bones that they are one of the awful-est ones. I'll usually have a frightening realistic flashback then and have to turn the TV off (or climb under a table) in order to calm myself down.

Why did you decided to also release Piece of Work as an ebook?
I'm releasing Piece of Work as an ebook? I didn't know that! I don't even know what that means!

Based on your experience as a publicist, what advice do you have for authors when it comes to dealing with their own?
My advice to authors when it comes to dealing with their publicists is very complicated. Extremely complicated. So complicated that it can be reduced to two words: BE NICE. Sometimes authors, who purport to be highly intelligent people (they write books, don't they?) can't seem to grasp this concept, so I'll flesh it out just a little: DON'T BE RUDE. Usually, by this point, with these five words, most authors can pretty much figure out what I'm getting at. But every now and then there are authors who really don't understand. For those people it's necessary to spell it out completely: WHY WOULD A PUBLICIST WANT TO WORK REALLY REALLY HARD FOR YOU AND DO A GREAT JOB ON YOUR BOOK IF YOU'RE RUDE AND IMPOLITE AND COMPLAINING ALL THE TIME? When I was a publicist, only three authors -- three out of literally several hundred I had worked with over ten years -- sent me flowers for working on their books. I'd name them here but I'm not sure they've sent flowers to their latest publicists and I wouldn't want to cause trouble.

Piece of Work involves a narrator who gets pushed around a lot by her client. Where do you think the line is drawn--for publicists, writers, agents, anyone-between being accommodating/professional and just being a pushover?
Long ago, when I was a working book publicist, I thought that line was hard to pin down: I was young, I needed my job, and I felt I couldn't risk getting fired just because I wanted to stick up for myself. At the time, it seemed that even though the torture was on certain occasions unbearable, speaking up to the person inflicting it on me was a luxury I couldn't afford. The known equation was: Being a publicist = Getting Abused, so there didn't seem to be much point to trying to fight it. Now I see things very differently. I don't think that line is hard to pin down at all. It should be a firm line drawn in the sand marking whatever limit you have for the amount of abuse you are willing to take (Example: I will allow someone to yell at me for something that is my fault, but not for something that isn't my fault; I will allow someone to swear at me but I won't allow them to call me stupid, etc). I'd like to think my line would be very simple and very firm: the minute I stop being able to digest food due to the extreme stress of being insulted and screamed at, I will put my foot down. If I'd had this line in place long ago, I think I would have spared myself a lot of misery.

How much input did you have in the film adaptations of your books?
I have no official input into the film adaptations of my books, but that doesn't mean I get shut out. With Animal Husbandry, which became Someone Like You, the producer Lynda Obst had me go to L.A. and New York several times to meet with her and to get to know the screenwriter. That included taking the screenwriter on a walking tour (actually, a driving tour, in the back of a hired black sedan, with me pointing out the window) of my old neighborhood in the East Village where parts of the book were set. When HER was optioned by Julia Roberts' company, her former agent and then head of Revolution Studios Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas had me come up to New York from Washington to meet with her and with Wendy Wasserstein who had signed on to adapt the script. And for "Piece of Work," Nia Vardalos and I got in touch immediately after Tom Hanks' production company, Playtone, optioned the book and we've been NBFs ever since, emailing each other regularly and finally meeting face to face for lunch in New York this past June. It's really nice to feel like you're a part of things without having to do any of the actual work.

Um, bonus question. Did you get to meet Hugh Jackman when he was cast in "Someone Like You," the adaptation of "Animal Husbandry?"
Please. Meeting Hugh Jackman should have been one of the highlights of my life. And it could have been. Had I not just had a baby and been about forty pounds more than I normally weigh. They started shooting the movie in NYC right after my son was born in July 2000, and several weeks into the filming Lynda Obst called several times to invite me to come visit the set. I refused several times -- I'm too fat! I wanted to say -- until finally she convinced me that it was something I shouldn't miss seeing just because I was about three times the size of any woman affiliated with the film. So we got in the car -- me, my husband, my husband's mother, my then 8-year-old-stepdaughter, and my six week old baby -- and drove to NYC where I had lived for ten years and where my husband had lived for 15.

We were trying to find the building they were shooting in, which was somewhere way way downtown in Tribeca -- a neighborhood that just happened to be one of the ONLY ones neither my husband nor I had ever lived -- and so suffice it to say that things got rather tense as we were trying to find our way out of Chinatown in late-afternoon traffic made worse by rain. Things got so tense, in fact, that my husband actually accused me of "withholding directions" from him -- as if I would purposely have gotten us lost so that we would arrive over an hour later than we said we would. When we finally got to the set, they were shooting a scene with Ashley Judd (Jane) and Hugh Jackman (Eddie)-- the one where they're sitting on the couch together waiting for their boss to come in for a meeting and Jane notices a huge hickey on Eddie the womanizer's neck. It was one of the few scenes that used actual lines from the book -- "I cut myself shaving," is Eddie's excuse -- and it was really pretty cool to watch Hugh Jackman say that line, or say anything, for that matter. When they were finished with that scene, he came over to us and asked us all about Benji and told us all about Oscar who he and his wife had recently adopted. Clearly I could go on and on about Hugh Jackman but I don't want to look any more pathetic than I already do.

(photo by Greg Martin.)