A Woman in the Publishing Field: An Essay

For the Walrus, Stacey May Fowles discusses her career as a woman in book publishing.

From the piece...

I don’t consider myself a “total unbelievable hottie” by his description, but after a decade in an industry where I’ve played the roles of novelist, publicist, editor, and marketer, I feel like I’ve been trained to successfully navigate and tolerate the tricky drunken terrain of strategic innuendo and ass grabbage. Admittedly, I am also a relentless flirt. I’m not sure if I was like that to begin with or if publishing has made me that way — I’m guessing the latter. (A therapist once asked me, with genuine concern, why I was “out until four a.m. with strange men,” and the only response I had to offer was, “’Cause that’s my job.”) Sadly, the late-night cocktail of flirtation and suggestion seems to be the lubricant that gets book deals done.

My initiation into publishing’s “wear something low-cut, soak liberally with booze” world came when I was only seventeen. A very famous male author who I idolized (in that way only teenage girls can) made a rare appearance in Toronto for an intimate, swanky book signing at a bar. Over the age of seventy and recovering from a recent stroke, the author was generally considered to be reclusive, and I knew this was once-in-a-lifetime chance for hero worship. I used my summer camp–counsellor earnings to buy a black dress at Le Chateau, lied to my parents, and drove downtown in their car with a fake ID and the boy I would later lose my virginity to. My only literary experience to date was writing bad poetry in a Scarborough Coffee Time, so everyone in that bar seemed remarkably sophisticated, with their expensive cocktails, tailored suits, and grown-up drunkenness. In retrospect, as a seventeen-year-old innocent, I was a trusting hen in their fox house.

The (ahem, married) author, in a rumpled beige suit with a red carnation pinned to the lapel, was absorbed in conversations with people far more qualified to talk to him than me, but the boyfriend pushed me to sit in an empty seat at his table and wait my turn — which came in the form of the author putting his palm on the inside of my thigh before I even introduced myself. More than half a century older than me, he turned, fingers creeping under the hem of my dress, and mumbled with a voice marred by his stroke, “You’re the devil. You could make me do very bad things.”

Imagine a teenage girl in a little black dress discovering that a previously inaccessible writer who had moved her with his words, who was world-renowned and had appeared on multiple best-of lists, was powerless to her inner thigh. That in a world where girls were practically invisible, literary influence could exist under the hem of a little black dress. Dangerous knowledge indeed.