Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [92]
I hit SEND.
In my excitement, I’d accidentally typed my note to my friend Suzanne in the wrong document. I’d just sent the letter to the agent.
Instantly, I wrote the agent another e-mail: “As you can see, I am mentally unstable and unfit for representation. I am truly sorry for my horrible comments. I deserve to be electrocuted, I know.”
I never heard back from him.
But I did hear back from another agent, who loved the manuscript. He was a very enthusiastic man who laughed at all my mean jokes and he thought the book needed a lot of work, but he was willing to go through it with a red pen and mark up the pages.
He became my agent, and a couple of months after he helped me revise the manuscript, he sold it.
I never expected Sellevision to be a bestseller. I called it “my cheese popcorn book.” What I did expect was that Sellevision would be published. Which is exactly what happened.
Then I wrote a memoir about my childhood. And this, I decided, needed to be a New York Times bestseller, high on the list. It needed to be translated into a dozen languages and optioned for film.
“You need to tone down your ambitions,” my agent said. “Because you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment.”
I understood his point of view. I also understood that the book would be huge, not because it was exceptionally well written—in fact, the book felt like a sloppy mess—but nonetheless I knew it would be a bestseller because it had to be a bestseller, so I could quit my loathsome advertising job and write full time. I didn’t have to become rich. I just had to be able to publish another book and then another.
I needed the book to be a New York Times bestseller because I needed those words “New York Times bestseller” to accompany my name for the rest of my life, even if I never wrote another book that sold more than two copies. It was like “M.D.” I felt I needed those letters to be complete.
My therapist expressed concern. “Why do you feel you require this event outside yourself to make you happy? It’s something that is not only highly unlikely, but something you have absolutely no control over whatsoever.”
I merely smiled and said, “You’ll just have to watch and see.”
After Running with Scissors was published, I was sad to see that the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center didn’t have it displayed on the front table, like other new books. Instead, they had it tucked away where nobody would see it. I willed the chain to have a corporate scandal and fall into financial ruin. KABOOM: the next day, the free-standing shelf units were removed and my book placed on a large new table.
A month later, the book reached number five on the Times list. A few months after this, it was sold in nine countries and optioned for film. I quit my advertising job.
Luck? The greedy wishes of a desperate man randomly fulfilled? No. There are no accidents.
My editor phones me and says, “Augusten. You need to concentrate hard on DRY. You need to make it another bestseller. I know you can do it. You did it with Running with Scissors, and you need to do it again with DRY.”
“Okay,” I tell her, as though she has asked me to turn her brother into a toad and I am able to do this. “I will think hard. But first, I’m focused on something else.”
“What? What are you working on now?” Jennifer believes completely in magical thinking. She says she can do it, too, and I know she can. She is the only other person I know who shares my mental powers.
“Well, right now I’m obsessed with Elizabeth Smart.”
“That little girl who went missing from her bedroom?”
“Yes, exactly. It’s making me crazy that they can’t find her. I need them to find her. Either she has to come home, or they have to find her head on a stick in the woods.”
“God, I certainly hope she comes home.”
“I can’t control that. There are limits,” I say.
“Wow,” Jen says. “Okay, I’ll think of Elizabeth Smart, too. And then we’ll work together on DRY.”
“Okay, Jen.”
We hang up.
Three days later, Elizabeth