I'll Be Right Here
[quick praise for a great novel]
My friend Amy Bloom’s marvelous new novel, I’ll Be Right Here, went on sale last week, and I meant to urge you in yesterday’s missive to secure yourself a copy (and forgot).
I was also the novel’s copy editor.
“I’m pretty sure,” a commenter commented, “that if I knew going in that you’d copyedited a book I was reading, I’d be too distracted looking for evidence of your style conventions.”
To which I averred: “A thing I’m proud of is that I have no copyediting tells. If you read something I worked on, you’ll never see me, you’ll just see the writer’s writing. And that was our collective mission when I was at Random House. You’d never see us, you’d just see the book.”
I might have—I certainly do have—more thoughts on this subject, but for the time being: Like I said, it’s a marvelous novel.
Today’s cover photograph: Colette, who figures prominently in I’ll Be Right Here, photographed by Irving Penn.
Copy editors succeed at their job when their work goes completely unnoticed and the book flows like buttah.
A very dramaturgical posture. Although I was once strangely proud of a review in the Baltimore Evening Sun (a dating reference) that said something like "where was the theater's so-called dramaturg when they needed him?"