The Book I Am Writing Now Has an Agent

I am pleased to announce that my new nonfiction novel exploring midcentury moral panics through flying saucers and the life of movie star James Dean has been picked up by a New York literary agent, who will be representing it to publishers. My agent also represents an Oprah Book Club selection and several award winners. In the coming weeks, we will be working together to sharpen the book proposal for submission to some of the larger publishing houses. Of course, this means that I actually have to stick the landing on this one and bring the story to a satisfying conclusion. Up until now, that was a theoretical concern.

My agent liked my approach, telling the story in novelistic form, using models drawn from midcentury. I’m employing the alternating perspective model and some of the tone and technique of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s pioneering nonfiction novel, for example, though I have restricted myself only to truth, while Capote was much less limited. (I know it’s slightly late for the period I’m covering, but so be it; Capote wrote of the 1950s in 1966, so it’s not unprecedented.) I’m folding in echoes of classic midcentury works like The Haunting of Hill House and Catcher in the Rye and trying my best to confine my language to the words used in the 1950s. Fortunately, when I was young, I read all the midcentury classics, and a lot of the trash, too. My parents had their old books from their younger years, and I picked up stacks of paperbacks from books sales for a quarter or a dime apiece back in the day, so the idiom comes naturally. Come to think of it, perhaps I shouldn’t have been reading Tropic of Cancer or A Clockwork Orange when I was twelve or thirteen, but the past is the past.
 
So, I am excited that my work has representation and eager for it to have the widest possible audience.