This week’s guest author is Ellen Sussman, editor of Dirty Words: a Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, which is being published by Bloomsbury next week! Her first novel was published … in German! A language she doesn’t read.

I have a hard time answering the question, what was your first novel? Does that mean published novel? Does that mean published novel in English?!

I wrote a novel at age 24 that no one ever saw. I knew it was lousy – it was my practice novel. I didn’t know enough craft – and I probably didn’t even know enough about life – to make that novel succeed. But it helped me develop my writing skills and in the next decade my short story skills improved considerably. I published a dozen stories in literary and commercial magazines. Oddly, they too felt a little like practice – I wanted to reach for the brass ring – the novel.

I wrote another novel in my late 30’s that was good enough to get me an agent and the attention of a few editors. It didn’t sell and now, years later, I can see why. It was too autobiographical and too raw – I wrote a novel about my mother’s death a year after she died. I used three shifting first person points of view. The technique didn’t work – it made the book hard to read and the characters hard to know.

Then I wrote a novel called The Affair, about a middle-aged woman who falls into an affair of passion. I found a new agent and when he sent it out to editors the foreign scouts reported back to their European clients that a hot book was on the market. Yes, Europeans and their affairs! My agent assigned a foreign rights agent to the book and two days later the guy called me and said, “I will make you very rich.” Really. Apparently many European countries lined up to buy the book, but most of them wanted to wait until we had an American deal. The Germans didn’t need to wait – they paid six figures to buy the book.

I was wildly excited. I’d have fame and fortune – truthfully, I had only ever dreamed of fame. But it didn’t quite happen that way. My agent couldn’t sell the book in the United States. We got bizarre responses from editors: I don’t like this woman. How could she do this when she has two kids and a good-enough marriage? I thought about all the books on the market about men who have affairs and I have to wonder: was this a kind of sexism? Could they not imagine that a woman might do this too? My protagonist was not a victim – and I think we hit a time on the marketplace when too much of women’s fiction was about victims.

The other countries backed out of their offers. Only the Germans came through – with the money and the published book. I was thrilled to have finally made real money on my writing – and disappointed that I couldn’t pass the book along to my friends and family and say, “read my novel.” It was translated into German.

Finally, a couple of years later, I wrote a novel, On a Night Like This, and published it with Warner Books. I must have spent months – no, make that years – basking in the glow of that experience. The book hit the San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller List and was translated into six languages. Two years later, I published Bad Girls,an anthology of essays about women’s acts of rebellion. It also hit the Chronicle best seller list and became a New York Times Editors Choice. And next week my book, Dirty Words: a Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, will be published by Bloomsbury. This time the American market seems ready for a book about sex – Dirty Words has gotten terrific advance press from Elle, Oprah’s O Magazine, Self, Nylon, Playboy and Penthouse!

It’s been a wild ride. I needed a lot of years and a lot of learning before I wrote a book that was ready for publication. I teach writing now and I like to tell my students these stories – many of them are in their forties, fifties, sixties. I’m stubborn as hell and I’m passionate about writing – the combination that makes me wake up every morning and sit down at the computer and begin to write.

–Ellen Sussman