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| A still from Up in the Air |
The new George Clooney film, Up in the Air, hit a nerve with its portrayal of an unmoored corporate executioner who makes his living by firing people. Now several writers and their publishers are hoping to catch the same wave with a cluster of forthcoming memoirs and novels that describe the fallout of losing a job, losing a house or losing an investment account.
Call it layoff lit. Next month will bring The Bag Lady Papers, a memoir by Alexandra Penney, the former editor-in-chief of Self magazine, who said she had lost all her savings to Bernard Madoff. In May, Dominique Browning, the former editor of House & Garden, has a memoir, Slow Love: How I Got Kicked Off the Fast Track, Put My Pajamas On for a Year & Found Happiness.
On the fictional front, Janelle Brown, an author whose first novel chronicled the lives of several boom-time Silicon Valley characters, has another coming in June, This Is Where We Live, that opens with a 30-something artsy couple in Los Angeles on the brink of losing their home — after their adjustable-rate mortgage adjusts.
T.M. Shine, who was laid off from his job as a feature writer for City Link, a weekly magazine in Florida, has a September publication date for his novel, Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You, which he originally intended as a memoir about being fired.
These books offer a personal flip side to the rash of titles that have taken a more reported, historical view of the financial crisis, examining the collapse of various investment banks (House of Cards by William D. Cohan), the role of government (In Fed We Trust by David Wessel) or the big picture (The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson).
But the publishers also hope that readers will view these new memoirs and novels as a timely addition to a longstanding genre: books about starting over and second acts.
“I think there’s this perennial promise that we all have trouble believing, but always turns out to be true, which is that what’s out there always holds more promise than we can imagine,” said Kristine Puopolo, a senior editor at Doubleday. That company published Cherries in Winter, a memoir by Suzan Colon, a laid-off editor from magazine who interwove reflections on frugal, more mindful living with stories from her own past, as well as recipes and remembrances from her family. “We don't want it to happen to us,” Puopolo said. “But you can kind of live it vicariously through somebody else.”
Browning, 54, who was editor at House & Garden for 12 years, applauded the string of books examining the personal effects of the financial downturn. “I think it's terrific that there are books coming out about this,” she said. “We need to focus on the human toll this is taking,”she noted, adding, “It’s a very human conversation about depression, loss of self, loss of pride and loss of bearings, and those are individual stories.”
Some of these books have been written by authors who held very lucrative positions and had the resources to help them through their financial downfalls. Some booksellers wonder if the average reader will be able to empathize with them.
Indeed, early in Browning's memoir, she contemplates a trip to Brooks Brothers to buy a pair of pajamas for better lounging. And in The Bag Lady Papers, Penney writes of having to sell two of her three homes and describes how a friend takes her to the Four Seasons Grill Room for lunch to commiserate.
“I don't know that a lot of people are going to be relating to a Dominique Browning or an Alexandra Penney,” said Karen Corvello, adult buyer for R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn. “A segment would, but not that broad a segment.”
Lauren LeBlanc, a senior editor at Atlas & Co., who edited Browning's book, said that even if readers were in different financial straits, they should be able to relate to the shock of losing a career. “Obviously she's not destitute, like a lot of people end up being,” LeBlanc said of Browning. “But at the same time a lot of the experiences she goes through are something that a lot of people will feel sympathetic to.”
Loss is loss, said Ellen Archer, publisher of Hyperion, the unit of Disney that is releasing The Bag Lady Papers. Even a person who has a lot of money to begin with suffers when it is gone, and goes through a lifestyle re-evaluation.
“It makes you think, ‘What if that happened to me? What really is important to me?’” Archer said. “I think it's a very relatable question.”
Some booksellers suggested that for those who were actually living through the experience of layoffs or the loss of a home — or who had friends or family members who were — reading about it might not be their first choice for leisure time.
“I would say that more readers are looking for something to not think about such things,” said Rona Brinlee, owner of the BookMark, an independent bookstore in Atlantic Beach, Fla. “For the moment, our customers are looking for good literature and escape.”
So far, the appeal of memoirs of the Great Recession has been limited. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 per cent of sales, Cherries in Winter, which was published in November, has sold just 3,000 copies. Puopolo noted that Cherries had been selected by Indiebound, a trade group representing independent booksellers, as a notable book for January.
Some publishers figure that novels with recession-resonant plot points are another way to lure readers. “We thought there would be a lot of books out that were nonfiction,” said John Glusman, who edited Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You for Shaye Areheart Books, a Random House imprint.
Shine said he enjoyed the freedom of writing fiction. When he originally conceived a nonfiction account, he had planned to track the post-layoff lives of colleagues who also lost their jobs. But once he began writing fiction, “I could decide their futures rather than waiting to see how it would pan out.”
Then again, his publisher “could have said ‘I want to turn it into a musical,’ and I would have said, ‘Hold on, I’ll get my harmonica,’” noted Shine, who has written two nonfiction books. “I was just so desperate.”
Brown, who has been a freelance contributor to The New York Times, started out writing a novel about a couple trying to buy a house. But after writing about 120 pages and showing them to her editor, Julie Grau, publisher of Spiegel & Grau, another Random House imprint, both agreed that it wasn’t working, and that times had changed. So Brown began a new novel about a couple in the process of losing a house.
As for other memoirs and novels mining the current economic climate, Brown said she wasn’t the least bit surprised. “We live in an age where things get from news feed to news story to book to movie very, very quickly,” she said.