For some months recently, I passed as a woman. These are words I never expected to write and, for those who know me, they will come as a startling confession.
I am a bloke of the brick-outhouse variety, a little over 6 foot tall and a little under 280 pounds. In my youth I played a bit of rugby – which is like football but without the helmets. I am a heterosexual man with a 16-colour default setting, completely unable to tell cerise from fuschia; I couldn't find “rose-whisper” on a colour chart with the aid of a sat-nav.
In short, I am probably the least convincing drag act since J. Edgar Hoover hung up his girdle, and that's precisely why I became a woman.
I wrote a book. It's sold in 19 countries, so it can't be entirely awful.
Anyway, I did what all aspiring novelists do; I sent the first chapters and synopsis to an agent; let's call her Clarissa. And, Clarissa, if you're reading this, just let your eye linger on the page for a moment, especially around that bit where it says “sold in 19 countries.”
Clarissa speaks in the kind of cut-crystal tones the Queen abandoned in 1965.
One day she called and said, “I've been ringing your office and there's no answer.”
“No, I'm not there,” I said.
“We must talk.”
“Okay,” I said.
“No not now!” She didn't actually add “you stupid boy,” but I felt it hanging in the air between us.
“Then when?”
“Call me tomorrow.”
I did as I was told. It's been more than 90 years since my grandfather climbed out of his trench into a storm of machine gun bullets on the Somme, but the clipped, nasal bray of the ruling classes can still motivate the oiks.
If a woman had written this book, it would be deep and insightful and moving. If a man had written it, it would be creepy — Clarissa the agent
It was a restless night. I tossed and turned. The following day I called Clarissa in London.
She said, “I've read your novel.” (She always said that. Not “the book,” always, “yah nuvvel.”) “I very much liked it. I turned the last page and I said to myself, ‘That was lovely. What the fuck is it?'”
It was an astonishing moment, as if Lady Bracknell had said the C word.
“Well,” I said, “it's a story.”
Clarissa almost laughed. “Ah, but what kind of a story?”
And then she opened unto me the mystery of the publishing industry.
Publishers, she explained, have to be guided gently towards books. They must be introduced gradually, book and publisher, like breeding pairs of pandas. There must be a quiet, calm atmosphere with no bright lights or loud noises and, above all, there must be an atmosphere of familiarity. There must be nothing novel about “yah nuvvel.”
“Publishers,” Clarissa explained, “like to do what they have already done. So, if they did something last year, I can tell them to do your book, because it's like that. So what is your book like?”
I recognized the truth of what she said and the full horror of it dawned on me. Publishers like to play safe. We did this and that worked so we'll do it again.
Except it doesn't work. If publishers knew what worked, they would be stocking the shelves with bestsellers. They're not.
I found out some other stuff too. I found out that all serious literary fiction MUST be written in the continuous historic present. Throughout the whole story, nothing must happen – in fact there must be no story at all – and the whole thing must be written in a tone of unremitting gloom. My book isn't like that. It's got a beginning, a middle and an end and everything.
