Chapter 3

[Excerpt from "Eye on Books" radio interview]

Bill Thompson   I'm Bill Thompson with "Eye on Books."

In early 1998 TV journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen was assigned to go to Moscow to track details of a story. Before going she launched an e-mail correspondence with a college friend who worked in Russia. And before long they fell in love and decided to marry. But that was before things started to unravel.

Cohen's book is called Lying Together.

What inspired you to write this book?

Jennifer Cohen   Well, I didn't start Lying Together as a book; I started it as sort of a diary. I was living in Moscow far away from my friends and family and some pretty bad things had happened to me and I needed an outlet. Couldn't really find a psychiatrist ...  [end of excerpt]

A couple days before the official release of Lying Together, Cohen did her first interview in the cozy Silver Spring, Maryland studio of Bill Thompson, the affable host of "Eye on Books," a nationally syndicated author interview program that airs on more than 1,000 stations nationwide.

That was just the first of an impressive sequence of interviews Cohen had during the next two weeks, interviews that found her on live national television making unexpected, unscripted small talk in her rusty Russian with CBS weatherman Ira Joe Fisher, and trying to keep pace with the manic energy of morning drive-time radio.

But as a network news producer, Cohen's accustomed to asking the questions, not answering them.

Jennifer Cohen   "I'm very used to interviewing people and I'm very used to selecting sound bites. And it is sort of a detriment because I am very aware of what I'm saying. You know, is that a good sound bite? Is that less than 15 seconds? You know, is it tight? Is it concise? Does it make sense? Is it pithy? And I'm trying not to think about that so much because it does make me nervous.  Click to follow audio

"But then I also have the sort of pathetic thought of, 'What if he doesn't like me?' (Laughs.) I don't know, it's this sort of pathology I have; I need everyone to like me. And I was thinking this over my six-and-a-half-minute live interview with this man in Dallas, Texas, who I have no idea — I have no idea what he looks like, I don't know how old he is; I know nothing except that he's got this very fast, you know, cadence. I had never listened to the show before. And so it's this weird vacuum. And yet I'm thinking, you know, I hope he likes talking to me. It's crazy. (Laughs.) It's totally crazy."

At one point Cohen found herself defending choices she made in her book, and her life, to a prying, insistent New York City radio host. He seemed to be one of those "I told you" so voices she writes about with such trepidation in the book.

Cohen admits that when the book was first released she feared those reactions from readers and radio hosts alike. She was more concerned though about the judgment of her CBS colleagues — the people she'd see at the office every day.

Jennifer Cohen   "My colleagues reading about me being on antidepressants or sexual relationships I had — those aren't things you normally talk about at work, ever. But the thing is, you know, the more I thought about it the more I realized, you know, everybody at work has their skeletons. It's pretty obvious; we know that. The only difference is, I've put mine in a book and it's available to everyone. But there's nobody who can really cast a stone, or if they do they have no right to, because everybody has their story. Everybody has a story. And there's nothing to be embarrassed about."

Cohen is adamant that Lying Together is, at its heart, a true story. But parts of the memoir are, in fact, fictionalized. Time frames are changed, names are changed; some of the characters are composites of people she knew at the time.

Jennifer Cohen   "I changed things to make it a better read. It's true."

At a certain point though distinctions between fact and fiction begin to blur. Cohen says she's reached a point where she's sometimes not sure if parts of the memoir were fictionalized or real. Cohen remarked in a radio interview, "The funny thing about writing a memoir is, as true as it might be, it really becomes a story and it stops feeling like it was my life."

Jennifer Cohen   "Except that every now and then my life creeps back into it. You know, somebody from my past will show up or call, and suddenly it's real again.

"You know, part of the reason it doesn't feel quite so real is because my memory of it is of course now so much more vivid than most of my life, because it's sort of like when you've seen lots of photographs of a part of your childhood and so that's what you remember. So because of that, because I've spent so much time thinking and pondering and talking about this part of my life, it's sort of overly vivid, which makes it feel not real because real memories don't feel that vivid."  
Click to follow audio

As the first-person protagonist in her story has in some way become a separate character, Cohen says she feels a kind of powerless frustration in reading or thinking about the story.

Jennifer Cohen  "You know, I'll read parts of it when I'm doing a reading or something — and I think what the hell was I doing? (Laughs.) Like, oh, my God, I can't believe I really experienced that. And it's sort of a very out-of-body thing. Like, did I really experience that?"

When Lying Together was released last September, Cohen expressed modest expectations for the book.

Jennifer Cohen   "I'm sort of afraid to say that I expect to sell this many copies, I expect to have this many decent reviews, I expect this, I expect that. I don't. I hope that it does well. I hope I get some nice praise. I hope the numbers are pretty good."

The book has far exceeded those expectations. The San Francisco Chronicle was the first major newspaper to weigh in, pronouncing the book "a quick, juicy read."

Jennifer Cohen   "It was amazing. I mean, it's like, 'Wow, it's real; I mean, it's really real. The 11th largest newspaper in the country wrote a review about it, I must be an author.' (Laughs.) You know, it's still sort of this 'pinch me.'"

The New York Times made the book an Editor's Choice two weeks in a row, praising Cohen's story as "simply riveting."

Following her appearance on the CBS "Early Show," Lying Together had a brief run as one of Amazon.com's 100 best-selling titles. The University of Wisconsin Press quickly ordered a second printing.

Jennifer Cohen   "The book did so much better than I really ever thought it would. I mean, yeah, I had these crazy, wild dreams that it would be on 'Oprah' and all of this, but those weren't my realistic dreams. In my realistic dream scenario, you know, I thought well, maybe I'll get a few kind of mixed reviews, you know, where we can pull out a few words and put them together. You know, "this ... is ... a ... good ... book," you know. And in fact, there it was in The New York Times Editor's Choice two weeks in a row with this — some of the things she said I could put on my epitaph. I mean, they were pretty amazing.

"And so yeah, the numbers of the book — we're not talking Clintonian memoir numbers here, and I haven't made back the money that I paid for the publicist, but I'm very happy with it."

Of course, it's not over yet. Word of mouth on the book is strong; it continues to sell. Major publishing houses have expressed interest in acquiring the paperback rights. Cohen's literary agents are shopping the book around Hollywood.

A commercial paperback release, a movie version would no doubt give the book, and its author, a significantly higher profile, the sort of exposure a small university press typically can't manage. But a small press has its advantages.

Press acquisitions editor Raphael Kadushin:

"I mean, we have a very different mentality from a lot of commercial presses where, you know, they put 90 percent of their marketing money behind 10 percent of the list. If a book doesn't, you know, break, if there isn't a huge review or great orders in the first month, they essentially just abandon it. We don't do that.

Raphael Kadushin