Work Will Set You Free. Or Not.

“I am thankful for all those difficult people in my life. They have shown me exactly who I do not want to be.“ – Anonymous

My father kept recommending library school. After graduating from Rutgers with a major in history and a minor in various other things, mainly English but also drama, modern dance, ceramics, and Italian, and the year in Ireland where I immersed myself in the potato famine, I graduated into the recession of 1979-80.

After the stint working with the children of battered women and then running an Installation gang and then being a cocktail waitress, I could climb telephone poles, comfort miserable kids, and sort of manage a room full of drunks even though I was always giving the wrong change. Despite this bizarre job history, I knew two things: I was really smart and had no idea what I wanted to do aside from writing, which was dangerous. I had been told repeatedly that my writing was very good, even great; I kept numerous notebooks filled with stories, novel beginnings, plays, and poetry, but writing was forbidden fruit, a thing that implied I was able to be as brilliant as the famous writers my parents knew and yes, as brilliant as my father. Who thought I should be a librarian.

Thus, the never-ending list of awful jobs. I was hired by a small advertising firm to write copy, but when I refused to sleep with one of the partners, I was fired. I worked at a terrible fish restaurant on the Upper West Side where the cooks, all Chinese non-English speakers, drank, and if you made any mistakes, you were hit in the face with a raw flounder or bluefish, whatever was on special. I worked for a manufacturer of blankets with major accounts with the military. The office was a desolate warehouse in lower Manhattan. The wife, it was a family company, had a desk next to mine, and if I moved the stapler or the pile of files, she would walk over and place them exactly where they had previously been. The warehouse guy was a nice man named Clarence, who drank a lot. When I quit he came out of his cubicle saying, “Halleluiah, Molly! You run away from this place. You belong in the light.”

I was a fake patient in a closed Brooklyn Hospital. We were hired to give new ESL doctors practice with their diagnoses and patient communication. We were told to undress except for underwear, and in our hospital gowns, we sat in this creepy, closed hospital waiting for some young and confused medical student to ask questions according to a script. I had something like a torn ACL. Despite these sessions all being videotaped I was asked to take off my clothes several times. I responded in the negative.

It was a hot summer, and sitting in that airless fake doctor’s office with sweat rolling down my face, I wondered when things would get better. I wasn’t drinking or getting beaten up, but it was hard to be this broke and lonely in New York City. I kept writing. I went to an AA meeting every day and waited for the pain to lessen. The immediate shock and sharp edge had softened somewhat, but I was still crying myself to sleep most nights.

Then, I got an assistant’s job at Random House, leading to meeting several well-known writers for Rolling Stone. They were really interesting, talented men, and I ended up dating one of them for almost a year. They introduced me to their friend Harriet Fier, the youngest female editor of Rolling Stone, style editor at the Washington Post, friend to Yoko Ono, Bruce Springsteen, and powerful business people like Clay Felker. Harriet was pretty, brilliant, wore amazing Japanese designers, was funny, and, as I would eventually discover, a sociopath. But I loved her. God, how I loved her. She was a few years older than my sister Catherine, and one of those people who showered you with compliments while feeding you poison. I already knew I was liable to be seduced by a woman like my dead sister after following some strange woman all over the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wanting to be near her, and realizing at the last minute, thank God, I was chasing a ghost.

photo by Robert Bye

The publishing industry, books, and magazines, was booming and contracting in the mid-eighties. Harriet hired me as an assistant editor at Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell. She encouraged me to start looking for my own authors and my other job, reading hardcover books for possible paperback reprint. I was paid around $18,000, while senior editors were paid ten times that much. Still, I was very happy in my cubicle with my glamourous boss, who had stories about everyone like Hunter Thompson, whom she edited at Rolling Stone, and wild nights spent with various famous people. I could take people to lunch on the company’s dime and invited a number of literary and non-literary friends to fancy meals at B Smith’s, The Sherry-Netherland hotel, Cafe Luxembourg, Cafe Des Artiste, and other ‘hot’ NYC restaurants.

Publishing parties in the eighties were wildly excessive. They launched a book in The Met’s Temple of Dendur, where caviar was served in ice sculpture swans. Meanwhile, a small cadre of starving, poverty-stricken assistants used their tote bags to stuff food and books into, hoping to sell them to the Strand and have enough food for the weekend.

Life was heady, and Harriet scored a coup by purchasing the Pentagon Papers to be published in book form. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the United States had bombed Cambodia and Laos and waged coastal raids on North Vietnam and Marine Corps attacks, none of which had been reported by the American media.

Then, it was over. I had sat through an editorial meeting when she introduced a project that had been something I had found and negotiated for, claiming it as her own. I stayed quiet until we were in her office. Then I asked why she had not given me credit. She laughed at me and shrugged. I said it felt like she’d stolen my idea. She fired me. The last thing she said on my last day, leaning out of her enormous office in an Issey Miyake outfit that cost way more than my monthly rent, was: “Now, maybe you’ll write your novel.” Which I did.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach