One of the great privileges of my professional life

Thank you for having me here to discuss Mark’s work and for the bittersweet pleasure that it has been going back over his text messages and email exchanges to put together my piece. I will never have another correspondent like Mark, with his quick wit and puckish humour and just the right measure of pathos, who could have texted me the night Trump beat Hillary in the November 2016 election that the apocalypse seems so obvious in retrospect.

Our association began eight years ago, in August 2016, for which we have our friend Dina Kluska to thank. Mark had just completed a manuscript during the shloshim about his wife Kerryn’s death and he wanted someone outside of his circle to read it to see if it held together, if it was good enough for publication, and to work with him to get the manuscript there – all concerns familiar to writers, who would understand how fragile you feel and how fraught with uncertainty the path to publication is.

He sent me his manuscript, I read it and wrote back a longish email. He crossed the river to the northern badlands, where we met. We talked for hours about his manuscript, about what was working, what could be tweaked, what could be amplified, and that marked the beginning of our editorial conversation and a friendship that would extend beyond the book.

We talked of Susan Sontag’s idea about all of us being born with dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. We’d read the grief corpus: Joan Didion’s Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of All Maladies. And we both had experience as carers of partners with cancer.

We discussed at length the question of a readership, if there would be a market for the book; in my email I had warned that publishers can be chary of downbeat books and books about death, but I have confidence you’ll find someone who’ll get the story. There was also the question if a work such as Thirty Days was a personal piece of writing that did not have the mainstream appeal that trade publishers require, powerful and compelling as it is.

A few elements drew me to the book, chief among them its powerful meditation on the nature of love as it evolves over time; I was captured by Kerryn saying ‘You’ve come back’ in the book, which is so knowing and contains within it all the ups and downs that marriages and relationships are. Or, on page 114, where she said: ‘No one – not even you – knows what’s inside here’. Or, when Mark asks Kerryn: ‘Did I deliver on your dreams?’ –as heartbreaking and as tough a question anyone can ask in a relationship.

I thought the conceit of thirty days worked in a good way: there was great cohesion and momentum to the narrative, which moved along at a great clip, and the cutting back and forth between the past and present versions of Mark and Kerryn helped readers get a fix on their life. There were lovely storytelling touches, and I still laugh at Mark’s flashes of dark humour (the Cabrini biographer, the gigolo factor, the David Jones and husbands line) salted through the narrative.

In Mark, I had the privilege and pleasure of working with a brilliant author who understood narrative. More than that, he had the ability and stamina to work and rework a piece of writing until it achieved the effect he was after. He was self-reflexive enough to write in response to an editorial query: I think I’m going to have another shot at enlivening some of the backstory by somehow linking it to the account of the ten months. It still feels a little flat to me in parts. I reread it today and came up with some thoughts that might help. Don’t want this to be boring so snip away. Mark had no issue with killing darlings.

Mark’s superpower was his way with words. Thirty Days is the result of his attempt to bring Kerryn to life – and back to life – through his power with words, and his abiding belief in magic of the abracadabra kind. He failed, but clever, playful, mourning, blasphemous Mark anticipated that, and put all that in play in his narrative, by challenging even sacred ideas:

A broken ladder will collapse, just as a metastasised cancer will spread, just as a drunken driver crossing the border between Poland and Germany will crash a car and kill my grandmother, just as a murderer with evil intentions will kill an entire village.

So, all that is left to do is pray from the deepest seat of our souls and cry out the holiest of words.

Fuck. (84)

My words would keep Kerryn alive, weave a protective web of stories around my wife, he wrote on page 91. He maintained that link between narrative and life as a throughline in the book because, as he saw it, despite the randomness of events, history does curl back on itself, highlighting how even our unscripted lives carry stories with narrative coherence.

Per the abracadabras, he foregrounds all this to remind us that any work of writing is necessarily an artifice, a construction, even a work that is called “non-fiction”. Kerryn has a voice in the book, but her voice, indeed the representation of her life, is Mark’s creation and a giant act of ventriloquism on his part to understand who she was, who he was, who they were, and to capture, while he could, all he could from Kerryn, who was archivist of their shared history; she was their memory.

Mark may have been the writer, but Kerryn’s biographer is in no way spared in the book; when discussing if he was going to write about her after she died, book-Kerryn gives it to Mark straight: ‘I’m your best subject since your mother. Everyone loves a story about death.’ I really, really hope she said that. What everyone loves more than a story about death is a story about love, a story about the grace to acknowledge a good life led, and a story about dying with grace, which is what Thirty Days is.

The other things we dealt with were standard editorial gardening: losing some of the granular detail by meshing together some chapters to speed things up. Telling the story of the fractured family and the child caught in-between without crowding it with extraneous detail. Quoting only selectively from Mark and Kerryn’s love letters so they were shorter and so that readers didn’t feel like they were prying when reading them. Splitting some chapters.

I asked dumb questions – how ok is it to liken illness with the Holocaust, Professor of Jewish Studies? I am obsessed with endings, and we thought long and hard about where the narrative ended – a question that would endure to the final pages, when the book was way out of my hands. Nor was the title spared – that was changed really early on.

Back and forth we went, with the aim of having as polished a piece of writing as we could muster for submission to Mark’s agent, and via the agent, to publishers. I always tell my authors to bring their work to the defensible stage. That way, any and all feedback that your first readers offer will help you stress-test and develop the narrative further. If you as author know the effect you are striving for, all editorial suggestions and critique can only help you get to where you want to go and sharpen the overall narrative. If you know what you want, you can also consciously unlisten and push back, say no.

At this stage I was an unaffiliated freelancer, and always worked with an eye to knowing that the publisher who bought the manuscript would have his or her vision for it. That meant the manuscript had to be good enough to be picked up but not be so hermetically sealed that there didn’t exist the capacity for further editorial dialogue or to be tweaked so that the book best met the market the publisher was hoping to reach.

Finally, Mark felt ready to show the book to his agent. His first book the Fiftieth Gate was taken up by Jill Hickson, and when she retired, she sold her business, so Mark had a new agent. Fiftieth Gate had been a bestseller and prize-winner, so you’d think a new book by the same author would be cause for celebration.

It was not so straightforward: it had been two decades between books for Mark, which meant to an extent that he was almost starting again, and much as the agent thought well of the manuscript, she also said it was a personal piece that was a challenge for the mainstream market. So, no, she wouldn’t represent him on the manuscript.

We had failed at the very first hurdle. It was devastating. I felt I had let Mark down. Rejections of your professional acumen go to the heart of your sense of self – and who are we without our judgement? But I know the capriciousness of the business and how it works, and my disappointment was quickly replaced by indignation. I made it my mission to send the book out to a very few select publishers on Mark’s behalf, who was by now seriously nervous.

We received two offers of publication, both hugely enthusiastic and who got the intent of the manuscript. With two offers, you’d think we’d have an ecstatic Mark, but a stratospheric viral load courtesy of a mosquito in Ubud had given him dengue fever that put him in hospital.

He was still slightly shaken by the agent’s response and had a bad gut, and was understandably unsure about how to evaluate who he was to go with. Heart or head? I suggested he trust his instinct, and to also check his bookshelves: which of the two publishers’ books appeared more? That may help him choose.

You know how this story ends – he went with Michael Heyward and Penny Hueston at Text Publishing. He liked that Text are a literary imprint, and that they were happy to retrieve the rights to the Fiftieth Gate and issue a new edition. His email from that time gives you an idea of the mulling: What’s your gut tell you. It’s healthier than mine, and more experienced. I know you don’t want to say, but I trust you. Did you know people outside lit circles haven’t heard of text. Doesn’t matter. Just saying.

Every book needs its barrackers inside and outside a publishing house, and he had found his people in Michael and Penny. On Kerryn’s birthday, he said yes, and found himself a home for 30 and 50. He celebrated in characteristic Mark fashion, writing: I can’t think of a nicer way of hiding and coping. I was a bit surprised when looking through our correspondence that only two months had elapsed between when we first met and submission – we had both worked very hard and very quickly!

Publishing is based on relationships and connections. No one publisher can publish everyone, but there is likely a right publisher for you and your work. You have to trust the person who’s going to have carriage of your precious book. In an ideal world, this person, like Joan Didion’s editor Henry Robbins, will give you a sense of yourself to sit down and do the work required, and will have your back through covers, straplines, potential blurbers, last chapters, through editorial, production and beyond.

It has been one of the great privileges of my professional life to help Mark bring Thirty Days to life, his attempt to think through the paradox of writing about the afterlife of love. Only a broken heart yearns to heal the world, as Mark wrote in the Fiftieth Gate. Some of us will stay behind. Fortunately, we have memory, and as long as that endures, we have story.

A Season of Death will be published on October 22 (MUP)

This article is a reprint of the speech given at Melbourne Jewish Book Week.