A WRITER’S BEST FRIENDOde to a Copy Editor
Writer
THE PRACTICAL65 POETS & WRITERS^M
Y THIRD novel, Costalegre, was unlike
anything I’d ever worked on with a pub-
lisher. The story of a privileged girl who
is shipped to Mexico with a bunch of ex-
iled surrealists by an art-collecting mother at the brink of
World War II, this novel had reasons to give an acquiring
editor pause. An unreliable narrator writing from an epis-
tolary point of view, swaths of text in foreign languages, a
word count perilously close to that of a novella, multiple
illustrations, and fictionalized facts—it’s a testament to the
mettle of Tin House Books that I was able to work with
a publisher on it at all. During my initial phone call with
senior editor Masie Cochran, before we’d officially started
working together, she said, “I have a lot of questions about
this book, and I don’t want any of them answered.” After
I toiled on my last two novels to make every character’s
motivation transparent to both the reader and myself,
hearing permission to keep my writing strange made me
feel untethered and free. During this conversation, I was
sitting on a dock covered in spilled beer and seagull poop,
at a writers conference in Tampa, and when I hung up the
phone, I cried.
In elementary school I had a best friend with whom I
invented a language of hand signals that we could use to
speak to each other during boring assemblies at our girls
school: Cross-legged on a carpet, separated by other bod-
ies, silently, we’d talk. The architecture of our communi-
cation was insular and separatist, the language building
(and the understanding of that language) ours and ours
alone. The first months of the editing process with Masie
were like those Friday assemblies: cloistered, intimate, a
moving work in progress. Because Costalegre is a diary, we
decided that all of the bold text and italics I’d used had to
go—including the sections that were written in foreign
languages. Certainly it would be confusing to readers if
they came upon a foreign sentence in the same typeset as
the English sentence before it, but you don’t use italics in
a diary—you don’t. Any textual maneuver that might pull
the reader out of the narrator’s hallucinatory landscape was
put on the chopping block. The novel had become a pact
colin lanebetween us, and this pact had rules.
COURTNEY MAUM is
the author of the novels
Costalegre (Tin House Books,
2019), To u ch (Putnam,
2017), and I Am Having So
Much Fun Here Without You
(Touchstone, 2014); the
chapbook Notes From Mexico
(Cupboard Pamphlet, 2012);
and the handbook Before and
After the Book Deal: A writer’s
guide to finishing, publishing,
promoting, and surviving your
first book, forthcoming from
Catapult. Her writing has
been widely published in
such outlets as BuzzFeed;
the New York Times; O, the
Oprah Magazine; and Modern
Loss. She is the founder
of the Cabins, a learning
collaborative in Norfolk,
Connecticut. She also offers
consultations to writers
querying agents and names
products for cosmetics and
other companies from her
home in Connecticut. Her
website is courtneymaum
.com.