I
WA S warned that Taylor Street
Baristas would be loud, and as I
make my way through Grand Cen-
tral Terminal and walk two blocks
south on Park Avenue to the specialty
coffee shop and café, I take Emily
Forland’s advice to hope for the best
and expect the worst. Unfortunately,
my fears are realized when I walk in
the door. I believe clamorous is t he
word. So many people talking so close
to one another (the Midwesterner in
me will never get used to tables posi-
tioned this close) that I worry I won’t
be able to hear my lunch companion,
Marya Spence, an agent at Janklow &
Nesbit. As I wait for her at a corner
table in the second-floor dining room,
music is added to the din. I would be
annoyed if not for the playlist (sweet
sounds of the 1970s, “Running on
Empty” by Jackson Browne, followed
by Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose
That Number,” offer an appropriate
soundtrack for this rainy day), and
soon enough my ears adjust and
Marya arrives.
Having studied literature at Har-
vard, followed by an M FA in fiction at
New York University, during which
she had paid internships at the New
Yorker and Vanity Fair— s he a l s o
wrote reviews for Publishers Weekly
and taught undergrads—Marya seem-
ingly could have had her choice of
careers in the editorial or academic
arena. Toward the end of her time at
NYU, she began to look into teaching,
a profession that was familiar to her.
(She grew up on college campuses;
her father is a prize-winning profes-
sor and administrator who taught
at schools across the country). But
while Marya was applying for ad-
junct teaching jobs, the writer David
Lipsky (Although of Course You End
Up Being Yourself: A Road Trip With
David Foster Wallace) suggested she
look into agenting. “I really had no
idea what agenting was at that time,”
she says, but Lipsky knew someone at
Janklow & Nesbit, an agent who spe-
cialized in young adult fiction and is
no longer with the firm, so she sent
her résumé, which floated down the
hallway to another agent, PJ Mark,
who brought her in for an interview. “I
came in, wrote an editorial response
on a manuscript, and we were off to
the races,” Marya says. She started as
PJ’s assistant while doing what many
assistants do: try to build their own
list of clients. “I was working on some
projects of my own...doing that thing
young people have to do in publish-
ing, which is working double triple
time. I was my boss’s assistant dur-
ing work hours, and then I would stay
late editing some manuscripts that I
hadn’t formally signed yet. But that’s
how you get your foot in the door.”
One of the books that landed on
her desk in those early days, in Janu-
ary 2015, to be precise, was Goodbye,
Vitamin, a novel by Rachel Khong,
then senior editor at Lucky Peach, the
irreverent food magazine that would
shutter two years later. The novel,
about a thirty-year-old woman who
returns home to Southern California
for Christmas and ends up staying to
care for her ailing parents, made an im-
mediate impression.
“I read Goodbye, Vitamin overnight,
and I cried on the subway and I cried
at my neighborhood bar, where I
would sit in the corner and they would
pour me tea—it was very romantic,
my life then,” Marya recalls. “And I
walked into PJ’s office and said, ‘Look,
I haven’t asked to sign anyone yet,
particularly one that came to both of
us, but [she pauses] this is my book. It
has to be.’ And PJ was drowning, as
I am now, and was like, ‘Please, you
have more than my blessing.’”
So Marya sent Rachel an editorial
letter—she calls them love letters—
in which she put all of her thoughts
and visions and desires for the book,
comparing her work to Renata Adler
(Speedboat) and Jenny Offill (Dept. of
Speculation), and explaining some of
the editorial work she thought the
manuscript needed, including tight-
ening the pacing in some places and
building up some of the characters. “I
will admit I’m a sucker for romance
or a crush story, so I wanted that to
be built out a little bit more too,” she
says.
Rachel happily agreed, and for the
next ten months or so, the agent and
author worked together on the manu-
script. Meanwhile, Marya made her
first sale: Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman
of Bohemia to Ben George at Little,
Brown, in a six-figure preempt—not
a bad way to start an agenting career.
When Goodbye, Vitamin was ready for
submission, it too received an “over-
whelming response,” attracting more
than a dozen interested editors. Be-
fore the auction, Marya scheduled
what she describes as “a week of
back-to-back, on-the-dot forty-five-
minute phone calls” between Rachel,
who lives in San Francisco, and her
suitors.
I ask Marya what exactly happens
during these kinds of phone calls—
or typically, if the author is in New
York, in-person meetings—before
an auction begins, and whether the
conversations are primarily for the
editor’s benefit or the author’s. “First
and foremost it’s for the writer,” she
says. “Editors’ responses to a manu-
script can range from ‘I’m interested
but with some qualifications,’ in which
case a talk is really important for
them to just speak directly and get a
sense for each other’s styles and per-
sonalities, to ‘I’m just freaking out,
I’m losing sleep over this book, and
special section ▪ LITERARY AGENTS
JULY AUGUST 2019 60
Monday
1:00 PM
Taylor Street Baristas
28 East 40th Street, between
Madison and Park Avenues
▪ Granny’s chopped salad:
romaine, cucumber,
avocado, tomato, feta,
smoked salmon
▪ Smoked tomato soup and
grilled cheese sandwich
▪ Nishi Sencha tea, filter
coffee
.
.
.
