An interview with Stephanie Kip Rostan, the author's agent, conducted by Andy Miles, December 6, 2004, Hoboken,
New Jersey

AM  What were your first impressions of the manuscript?

SKR  The thing I was most impressed with is Jen just had — not every single sentence but throughout the manuscript — a brilliant turn of phrase, and that was the thing that drew me to it at first. She just had a way of putting something that was so perfect. And it actually was incomplete when I first read it, so it was a little unclear — I mean, it was clear how it turned out, but it was a little unclear how it got there.

AM  In what way was it unclear?

SKR  She hadn't finished writing it. (Laughs.) It was a partial manuscript. When I took it on I just basically took it on because I thought she was really promising as a writer. She had a great background and she was clearly a go-getter and worked hard on the book and to promote the book, which she's done. So I took it on and asked her to finish it. And so she worked with me editorially to finish it. We went through a number of revisions and she worked very hard on it. And then we went out to try to sell it.

AM  What were the areas you thought needed work?

SKR  We went through many, many, many drafts, so there was obviously a lot to it. She needed to flesh out a lot.

Because she was writing from memory she had left a lot of placeholders — like "write a scene here in which 'this' happens." And so she had to fill in a lot.

She had trouble, I remember, with the ending; I think that was problematic for a long time. And I remember she had an issue with the beginning being so different in tone than the second half, mainly because there's a big shift in the events. She starts off as sort of this happy-go-lucky girl who falls in love and then things spiral downward. So there was a real tone shift. That's something we worked on too.

Because it's a memoir there was a preexisting structure in terms of how everything happened. So it was a lot more about selecting the scenes and fleshing out motivation and working on her character — because, you know, you're writing a memoir in the first person yet you're a character in your own story, and it took her a little while to find her stride with that — you know, get enough distance on it to make herself a character but stay connected enough to it to really reveal — she didn't want to reveal very much about herself. She wanted to tell a lot about the other people involved, including Kevin, but at the beginning she didn't have very much about herself. So a lot of the stuff about herself — it was very hard for I think. She started telling me about it, and I was like, "How can you write this story and not tell your part of it," which is very relevant but hard in terms of her family.

AM  To what degree were you involved with that struggle that she did have? Obviously at this point she had decided that it would be a memoir not a novel, but she still was grappling with aspects from her personal life as well as trying not to compromise her family's privacy.

SKR  Yes, she was very, very nervous about that, all of that. And really, what changed it for her, and what I recommended to her, was to talk to them. And she actually got in touch with — obviously she was in touch with her parents, but she talked to them about it in detail.

AM  And the quote from her mother, having read it, was, "What were you so worried about?"

SKR  And that was the thing that I said to her too — I'm like, you're revealing things but you're completely kind about it. So, you know, it's true; these things happened. And that's the standard that we judge a book by, whether it's the truth. So she was nervous about that, but I guess she had gotten over that by the time we got her to [UW Press]. She had kind of come to terms with that. But it was a lot about connecting with the people in the story, which, having worked on other memoirs, I find that to be the case, even when there is nothing damaging about the person. It's hard.

But her parents were also not in the original version as much. She had really kept back a lot about herself and a lot about her parents and hadn't really fleshed out that relationship. And I had so many questions when I read the story. Like, well, what did they think about you running off to Russia to marry this guy? (Laughs.) That's part of the story. And she agreed, but it took her — she struggled with it before she got it out.

AM  How willing was she to make those changes?

SKR  She was always willing to do whatever she could to get the book published. I believed in the book from the beginning, but she was completely committed to it from the beginning, no matter what it took.

AM  In what ways would you say that she was committed to the book and to getting it published?

SKR  First of all, she did these endless, endless revisions that I asked of her. She took a lot of criticism and worked really hard. And she also went through all of this process of presenting it to her family, including more detail about herself and her family than she originally might have felt comfortable with. But she did agree it was important. And she did it willingly. I think it was like somebody had to say, "Yeah, you have to do it." (Laughs.)

But the second part of that is the actual process of selling it, which we started out — we must have gone through three or four rounds of submission. There was some revision in between. She came very close a number of times.

AM  And when you say "rounds," that's sending it out to numerous —

SKR  Sending the manuscript out to 10, 15, 20 editors.

AM  And getting a number of rejections and then kind of preparing it for a new round?

SKR  Yes, and then trying again.

And what we basically did was we kind of started out going with the big hardcover houses; then we did a mix of small presses and paperback houses, looking for still a wide-distribution publisher. And then the last round was smaller presses, which included universities — but still prestigious.

It was important to Jen — you know, being published by a small press she was totally open to. As I said, she just wanted it published. But it was important for her to do it with some legitimacy and with somebody who was, you know, serious about it and it would be "reviewable" and something she would feel proud of. So University of Wisconsin turned out to be a great place for her, because they're small but they do have that prestige, they do get a lot of books reviewed.

But I wish I could tell you the number of places that we sent it to that it got rejected from, because it's high. (Laughs.)

AM  Higher than?

SKR  Like over 30.

Normally an author who had an experience like Jen, where we sent it out, sent it out again, they revised, they revised, they revised, normally they would give up. They would say, "Okay, I'm going to work on a new book." Or I might even tell them you should really — this is not going to work out. But with Jen, she was just like keep going, no matter what.

AM  At some point you decided it was worth that effort.

SKR   Honestly as an agent, we sometimes say, "That's all we can do for you," because we only get paid when the book sells, too. So it's like you put in an enormous amount of effort and then you make a small sale, so you don't get paid necessarily based on the amount of work it takes. So you make a business decision not to work with somebody anymore. But with Jen, with her it was more about her as a package. I felt like she was going to write more books. She was an amazing person. If she got the book out there I knew she would work hard to promote it. And I became good friends with her too, so I felt committed personally to it, too — like I really wanted it for her. So in terms of the commission I earned, I did a lot more for her than many other clients. (Laughs.)

AM  You recognized this as a longer term project, looking ahead to a next book, as does Jen.

SKR  Yeah. Well, she was clear about that with me from the beginning, too. You know, get this one published in such a way that it will position her for another book. So getting it reviewed was important. But yeah, she from the beginning approached me as, "I want you to be my agent because I'm going to write more books, too."

AM   What do you think did account for the difficulty in selling the book?

SKR  Well, I can tell you both what I think and what editors said about it.

Memoir is a difficult category, always, unless the person is a celebrity, because you're selling it basically just on writing and on what they believe is the "promotability" of the story, because you're either seeing it as a literary work or something that you can get media attention for.

And despite her connections and her background, most publishers just felt like the media is not going to be interested in this story. "It's really this love gone wrong story and haven't we heard that before?" So they just felt there was no way they could get the kind of attention they would need. They didn't think they could get reviews for it. And maybe they couldn't have, because it would have been one of 10 books on their list. I don't know; we'll never know. They just didn't see it as something they could sell enough copies of to make it worthwhile.

I think they felt like it fell into — it was at a time when memoir had been really big and was sort of cascading down and people had bought a lot of memoir when it was selling well. And they had started to fail, many of them. So they were, I think, more hesitant to buy then.

And I think it's really interesting, and most people I talk to find it really interesting — the setting of 1990s Russia just seemed like a screwball thing to them. Like, "What do you mean? Who's interested in that?" It's like, it's totally fascinating. It just hadn't been done very much, I guess. I don't know.

AM  What is your impression of how the book has been received?

SKR  Really amazingly well. I think it's very gratifying. The reviews are incredible. I mean, we don't see that kind of review attention for a lot of big hardcovers from Random House or Penguin Group, or whatever. I mean, she's been reviewed everywhere. They've been almost uniformly positive and the criticism has been in some cases completely true and in some cases been very funny, where it's almost like the reviewer is criticizing Jen for the choices she made instead of the book she wrote. That I thought was really interesting. There were a couple where they were very critical of her, like you don't want to read this book because it's just this girl that does stupid things, basically. And I think a lot of readers react to that as, "Well, I've done stupid things too, so actually I'm not going to hold it against her." (Laughs.)

That is, I think, a fascinating thing — this is probably a whole other conversation, but memoirs written by women, the fact that the woman's getting dinged for her life rather than a review of the book, where I don't know that you see that the same way [with male authors]. But maybe memoir that's always an issue, where people feel free to criticize what you do in the book instead of necessarily how it was written. Maybe that's one of the hazards.

AM  Do you think that the fact that it was well written doesn't really in the end go that far?

SKR  I think it was well written and is well written, but it's not the most super-literary, prize-winning kind of prose. You know, it's good, and she's a really good story teller and it has a cinematic quality. The pace is very fast; she really moves you through and you keep turning the pages. And she just has these moments where she just hits something right on and you're like, "oh, yeah." But it's not like she's the most literary writer.

So when you talk about writing, selling a book, it usually has to be at the sort of über-literary level where it's just really, really beautiful, so unbelievably well done. And I think by her own — I don't think she would say that she was either. She's not quite that type of writer.

AM  What are your expectations going from here?

SKR  At this point I have two things in mind. One is her new book. She's working on a novel, which is only partially completed. And the second thing is I would really like to see somebody pick up paperback rights. I know UW Press is interested in selling them, or open to selling them, and hasn't necessarily gotten the big bites yet, although there was some interest. So I'd really like to see that happen so that she keeps the book in print. And I think if she gets wider exposure at a lower price point, she could sell more copies and get more exposure that way, all in the service of setting her up for the publication of this novel.

So I feel like she's in a really good place to take it — you know, I was hoping she would be in a place to take a small step; now I feel like she's in a place to take a bigger jump forward and really make the second book into a bigger publication right from the start.

AM  Anything else you'd like to add?

SKR  It was nice, just on a personal note, getting to be friendly with Jen. Just the fact that as we were getting closer to selling the book, then she met Michael. And she had already known him; I'm sure you've heard the whole story. But she reconnected with Michael, and then it started to seem serious. So when we started selling the book, nothing was on the horizon in her love life, so it was this story of this busted affair that seemed more tragic. But by the time we sold the book she had met Michael, they were getting married. Even though it has nothing to do with the book, it felt like this great wrapper for the story.

Once she was with Michael, it was actually so much different. And it was funny because I had this weird thing when I first met Michael that, like, I was the agent who had worked with her on this book about the "other guy," and he always thought that was funny and made a lot of jokes about that. I actually went to their wedding and there were a lot of jokes made about that.

AM  And what was the chronology, as you remember it? The manuscript was finished but hadn't yet been sold?

SKR  When they re-met the manuscript had not been sold. They were dating when we sold it, but I don't think it was totally clear that it was going to end up in marriage or anything like that. So that just all kind of happened, and then she's like, "We're getting married." And it was so funny because it was like — it was so great because it just felt like this story was all about how she didn't get married; it was this awful experience. And now she had this happy ending just as the book was coming out. It was really nice.