Your Name Here: The Secret History

Have not written anything on this Substack, but I see people have been signing up for the void.

Meanwhile there have been reviews of Your Name Here, profiles of Ilya and me, and it seems a lot of people have misunderstood the history of the book. It turns out the idea of the radical unpublishable book that no-one appreciated is wildly popular, and the idea that I might back away from would-be agents and/or publisher who would drive me insane is incomprehensible. The other thing that’s incomprehensible, apparently, is that I would keep pushing for publication because I had made a commitment to my co-author and did not want to be a shit.

Anyway, I am now pasting in the insanely long account I sent to the publicist at Deep Vellum. Insanely long, that is, for a publicist’s questionnaire, though savagely curtailed when compared to the messy facts.

Not at all sure this is an improvement on the void. For those who don’t want the saga, here’s a link to an early attempt at an entertaining synopsis: https://helendewitt.com/your-name-here-2

1. We are interested in the story behind your role (translation, editorship, illustration)—as are many reviewers, interviewers, and booksellers. Please provide any helpful background information about these origins. How did your role in this book originate? Did the book involve special research or travel? How long have you been at work on this book?

I met Ilya Gridneff in a queue at an organic pub in London in 2003 before going to New York for a fellowship at the New York Public Library. I had given him my email address on a receipt and later received an email from him that showed an extraordinary gift for language. In 2005, while in Berlin, I replied to this email on impulse. He had been traveling in the Middle East and happened to be on his way to Berlin. We met. I initially thought I could interest a publisher in his writing and help him get a deal, but he did not have a finished MS. In early 2006 I suggested we collaborate on a novel, with the idea that this could both display his remarkable writing and get some money, half of which would enable him to finish his own book.

The idea was that emails from Ilya, some existing, some written for the book, could be incorporated into a narrative with fictional characters. This was hard to pull off, partly because Ilya was doing many other things in Berlin and did not have a lot of time to focus on the book. I thought that if we could get a deal on a partial MS this would give both of us some money, giving him time both to help finish this book and concentrate on his own work.

The agents I approached in the UK were baffled by the text, expecting a coherent plot and relatable characters. I made what seems to have been a fatal mistake. Instead of buckling down to impose coherence and relatability, I thought a radical change of framework would make clear that the book was in part about the impossibility of imposing coherence. So I appropriated some tricks from Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, but using multiple second-person narrators; I initially thought there would be interpolated chapters from a variety of novels, but this seemed to make the book even more fragmented so I used chapters from a single unfinished book, Lotteryland.

This did make it clear (I suppose) that the incoherence was integral to the book, but was not the hoped-for fast track to an agent, and it also meant there was much more text not focused on Ilya. Also, the text got further and further way from the kind of collaboration that had interested me.

In 2007 I sent the text to Warren Frazier, the agent who represents Mark Danielewsky. He claimed to be excited about the book and offered representation. But by this time I had lost over a year, and every time I thought I could get back to my own work there were more interruptions. Warren told me he would get back to me with more detailed comments “by the middle of next week at the latest” and then kept having to postpone four weeks in a row. So he was obviously the kind of person who had driven me to a breakdown during the publication of my first book, someone dangerous to deal with.

It turned out that he had been trying to work out how the book fit together, and had spent all this time drawing up a color-coded diagram of all the chapter headings. He said he did not mind initial confusion but he liked order to emerge. I said it was not that kind of book, it belonged to the category of works of art in which attempts to impose coherence only led to escalating chaos (roughly); we should look for an editor who liked If on a winter’s night..., Adaptation, Tristram Shandy, 8 1/2, Ariadne auf Naxos, this kind of thing. (See below for works with which the text has affiliation.)

Warren was unconvinced, so I did a lot of research on the box office results of Charlie Kaufman’s films. (In 2007 Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were still new and trendy and exciting.) Will not dig this up now, but my argument was that Kaufman had reached an audience of millions; if you had a cover alluding to Malkovich or Adaptation, you could guarantee that more people walking into a bookstore would recognize this & instantly get the kind of book that it was than would have read the kind of writer who might offer a blurb. So we could provide an editor with data of the size of this market, and the editor could best reach this market by commissioning the kind of cover that would be recognized by fans of Kaufman. Warren said it didn’t work like that. People would not discuss marketing at the acquisition stage; the editor had to fall in love with the book.

He thought with some editing the book could be made more commercial. I said I did not care what was done, as long as it was acceptable to Ilya, but any editing discussions should be with Ilya. I had done my part not only in collaborating on the text but on dealing with agents and editors; an editor could do whatever s/he liked, but should do it with Ilya. Warren said this would give the impression that I was washing my hands of the book. In other words, the editor would feel snubbed if not allowed to deal with the Name. I pointed out that if I focused on finishing my own work I would get 100% of the income, whereas I naturally only got 50% of revenue from YNH, so this was a staggeringly expensive way to make the editor feel loved. (NB, it had nothing to do with improving the book; it was purely a matter of giving the editor an entitlement to the time of the Name.)

Warren suggested a compromise. He had planned to submit the book to 6 editors. Instead he would send it to 3, on the understanding that I would not be involved in editing. He did send it out, and one editor quickly showed interest. But all this time I had been trying desperately to get back to my own work, and Warren had gone on being muddled and inefficient and chaotic, and I couldn’t deal with it. I thought I might get through this if Warren also dealt only with Ilya, but this also did not work, so I had to stop.

So it probably is the case that if Warren had been professional and businesslike we could have found a publisher for YNH back in 2007, but I could not stay sane long enough to see this through.

Mark Greif of n+1 asked to see YNH; they were all very excited and wanted to publish an extract. I thought this might help to find a publisher, so I agreed. n+1 are notorious for being inefficient timewasters, so this took eve more time from my other work. Unfortunately Mark wrote an intro to the extract that gave the impression the book was so radical it had been unable to find a publisher, which was not really the case: the agent had restricted submission when I did not want to be involved in editing, and I had not been sane enough to hold out while he dealt with the people he did submit to. Mark’s piece triggered a flood of inquiries from indy presses who referred to “your homeless book.” Nightmare.

The publisher of Atlantic Books, Miranda July’s father, read the text and wrote expressing enthusiasm and offering to publish; he could not offer an advance, but could offer a better royalty than usual. But he kept sending long, waffling emails about his fascination with Hopi ideas of space-time. The whole point of publishing was to get money so Ilya could write, so this looked like a bad deal in any case, and I did not think I could stay sane if dealing with someone wandering the realm of Hopi space-time. So I politely declined.

Other small presses - McSweeney’s, others I forget - expressed interest in the “homeless” book.

Jenny Turner published a review of YNH in the LRB - she persuaded them that it counted as published since I had sold some copies off my website. I thought this was an amazing coup and would help find a publisher. It didn’t.

Markus Hoffman, Sheila Heti’s then agent, offered representation. Not necessarily a great prospect, since he had failed to find a US pubisher for How Should A Person Be, but I agreed in principle. We were in the middle of discussions when he suddenly vanished unannounced to go on a romantic vacation. (The information was gleaned from an OOO email.) I could see I would not be able to stay sane so wrote explaining that I could not go on.

In 2008 Evan Lavender-Smith read YNH and offered to publish it through Noemi Press, a small press associated with the University of New Mexico. This would obviously not offer the quick financial benefit I had hoped for, but I did not think I was able to keep dealing with agents; perhaps there was something to be said after all for getting it in print. So we agreed to this. ELS was horribly inefficient - sent a contract full of garbage that had to be cleaned up, disappeared for long stretches - but I was trying not to let yet another deal fall through.

In 2009 a reader recommended the agent Bill Clegg, a former crack addict who had crashed and burned and made a come-back to WME after destroying the agency of which he’d been a partner. Was not sure about this but Clegg persuade me to accept representation. I’d hoped he could get me an advance on a partial advance of one of my unfinished books, but he was set on selling LIGHTNING RODS, which he then failed to do. Clegg read YNH and was appalled. He wrote after reading 100 pages to ask whether it was possible to get it back from Noemi - he thought it would be a disaster to publish it. I explained that it was under contract and in any case I could not back out of my undertaking to Ilya.

Things went badly wrong with Clegg for other reasons which I won’t go into. I had failed yet again to find an agent who would find an editor who was a good intellectual fit for my best work. In October 2010 I went to NYC with the idea that perhaps I could talk to as many people as possible and find someone who might understand the kind of thing I wanted to do. Unfortunately I met Jeffrey Yang of New Directions, who asked to see LIGHTNING RODS and then wanted to publish it; this turned out to be trickier than expected so I brought in the agent Edward Orloff to run interference.

Noemi Press handed project management over to Mike Meginnis. He found it easiest to work on the document in Mellel, the word processing software I had used, but then found it would be prohibitively expensive to take this to a printer. They talked to various printers, who were baffled by the challenges of the text (I think perhaps they did not have access to InDesign ME). In late 2012 he wrote to say they could not afford the kind of high-end printer who might handle the text and would understand if we wanted to take it elsewhere.

I talked to Edward Orloff about the possibility of offering it to New Directions. He thought the advantage of publishing with Noemi was that it would be a quiet publication that would not attract much notice. (!) If ND took it, which they might well, they would want to make a splash with it as THE NEW HELEN DeWITT. So it would then not be possible to go to major publishers with a new book, ideally bundled with right to reissue THE LAST SAMURAI, with the draw of publicising this as THE NEW HELEN DeWITT. My real concern was that I would have to go straight into seeing another book into print with ND, when they had just swallowed up a year with the much simpler LIGHTNING RODS. So this would be yet another year of being unable to focus on my own work. Since Noemi seemed to be out of its depth, I thought perhaps it would be better to wait until I could publish a major new book, and then either sell YNH to its publisher or use the blaze of publicity to attract indie publishers to YNH. There did not seem to be much point to a quiet publication, when the point of publishing YNH was to bring attention to Ilya’s writing. Perhaps I should have pushed to publish with ND, but I was desperate to write my own work. Ilya agreed to this, though I’m sure the endless delays were frustrating.

I then spent close to 3 years dealing with a stalker in Vermont, misguidedly tryimg to use the criminal justice system rather than simply walking away. So there wasn’t a major new book. But there was a setback: in 2014 Artists Space invited me to do an installation in November in NYC, The Library of Helen DeWitt. I had parted ways with Edward Orloff, but he visited the show and said he thought he could get me an advance on a partial MS, bundled with Samurai. I was desperately worried about money (thanks to the stalker) and thought money would buy time to finish work in progress. So we put together a submission with three partial books. But because ND had an option they had to see this first; they offered $20,000 for a 2-book deal (one of which would be a Samurai reissue), with options on the other MSs. ND had a visceral horror of contact between author and production people, so it would be impossible to do the new books with them. Edward said we were entitled to look for a better offer elsewhere. He got no offers - so his only achievement was to make ND feel snubbed.

I went to London to take part in an installation at Raven Row. PDFs of YNH had apparently been bought online and passed hand to hand in the design community; when I gave a talk there was standing room only from fanatical readers of YNH. The fiasco with Edward was too like the mess with my first agent; I was worn out by the stalker and did not have energy to manage Edward as well. So I said I could not go on. I wrote doubtfully to ND asking about the offer (did not have a problem with giving Edward a commission, simply did not want more emotional labor in dealing with publishers). Barbara Epler said they had gone out on a limb with their offer of $20,000; if their enthusiasm had met with enthusiasm they would have taken the risk, but now they did not feel comfortable. (NB after years dealing with a stalker I was not really up to mustering enthusiasm.)

An artist-designer, Will Holden, wanted to publish YNH as an art project limited edition (which he thought would get around permissions issues); he had a lot of contacts with museums and galleries and their bookshops, so would have access to places to sell outside the normal bookselling outlets. Again, it meant not getting an advance, but the crowd at Raven Row suggested this might be a good way forward. We agreed. Months went by. A member of Will’s family had a medical crisis; Will was unable to move forward with the project.

Later in 2015 I wrote to ND asking whether they would be interested in reissuing Samurai (was desperate for money). They agreed. I asked whether they might be interested in YNH, explaining why Edward had thought a later release might make more sense. Barbara said they would be happy to reissue Samurai, but would prefer one of the books included in Edward’s submission to YNH. Not sure whether they would have wanted YNH if they had seen it first, but it did seem to be a casualty of showing other possibilities.

In 2018 I asked again whether ND might be interested in publishing YNH. I was told people liked some parts but not others and on the whole they would prefer a book written entirely by me.

In March 2020 my mother had a medical crisis; my sister thought she might not survive. I flew to DC, the last flight out of Berlin before US was closed to travelers from Europe. My mother came through, but it was not safe for her to stay in the rehab center. She came home; I stayed providing home care. During the year I exchanged emails with Monika Woods; had to explain I could not talk about new work while looking after my mother, but perhaps she could find a publisher for YNH. Unlike Warren Frasier, she was happy to work with Ilya on edits for submission, and did not think publishers would be offended by being asked to deal with Ilya. In spring 2021 she sent YNH out on an exclusive submission, followed by a wider submission, and then a wider submission. A common reaction was that it would be very hard to sell a collaboration. (A couple of editors were enthusiastic about the book, but this was the dealbreaker.) In April 2022 she had an offer from a new publishing house whose founders were very enthusiastic, but who had a rather strange deal structure. While we were discussing this Will Evans made an offer of publication with Deep Vellum.

It seemed to me that the reputation of DV would be better in establishing Ilya as a serious writer, so I voted for DV. I suppose it’s bad form to say so, but it’s conceviable YNH would have been better off with a small new house giving the book its undivided attention. DV did something admirable in taking on the backlist of Dalkey Archive, but it does seem to have meant that staff were spread very thin. Given the choice between publishing in 2023 with a new publisher and publishing in 2025 with DV, we might have chosen 2023 - but at the time DV seemed to plan publication at roughly the same time as the other publisher. It’s a tough old world.