I used to love going to my agent’s office. On a nondescript block in New York City, the office was cozy with overstuffed couches and floor-to-ceiling books by the agency’s clients. The bookshelves also showcased oversize animal slippers belonging to the senior agent’s famous authors: lion slippers for one luminary, dolphin slippers for another. A pair of slippers for in-office use had not been bestowed on me—yet—but no matter; every time I entered that sacred space my status as a real writer was confirmed. I was there doing business with my agent. I never got tired of repeating this to myself.
The last time I visited the office I was offered a cup of tea, which I sipped while updating my agent on my projects. She’d read the memoir I’d been working on since the start of the pandemic, and she’d recently sold a personal essay of mine to Oprah Daily, but I hadn’t told her how far I’d gotten on the new novel. When I described it to her—“midlife crisis, queer goat farmer, love story”—she got excited. “Should we try for a two-book deal?” she asked. It had not occurred to me that some editor might want both of my new books, which would mean going through the excruciating submission process only once. My first novel had taken rounds of submission and revision to place with a publisher, my agent optimistically and doggedly by my side the whole time. A two-book deal sounded like a dream.
Over the next few months, I sent her portions of the novel, and she replied with comments. “Fantastic,” she’d write, and “I love this book so much.” Of course she had critical and constructive comments as well, about the occasionally awkward use of present tense, say, or needing more development of my protagonist’s husband. She said she wanted to see new material as soon as I finished it. But then she stopped replying. It took her a month to acknowledge receipt of a set of revised pages, and when I e-mailed to suggest we talk, silence bounced back.
A couple of weeks later, I got an e-mail, the middle of which read like this:
I’m going to be making some changes in my career. I’m not sure yet what they’ll look like, I’m working that out now. As a result, I need to step back. I think it would be best at this point for you to find new representation. You have an incredible memoir, and the beginning of a powerful, beautiful novel. This is a good time for you to get a new agent who can push these books, and your career, forward.
When we spoke later that day, she told me she was burnt out and unsure of her next steps—she thought it likely she’d leave the industry. Not long afterward she landed at another agency and signed new clients without a word to me. After ten years of working together, she’d dropped me like a bad habit.
How had we gone from “I love this book so much” to “I need to step back”?
Was the subtext here that she didn’t love my work, as she’d claimed? Was she tired of me and my writing? And had she truly planned to leave the industry, or was that just a line that made it easier for her to drop me? I had no answers.
I won’t lie; I didn’t take it on the chin. I cried a lot. Tears of rage and shame. In an industry as unstable as publishing, with editors moving constantly between houses and massive mergers followed by layoffs, I had come to rely on my agent as the one fixed point. No matter how many rejections I racked up, I had a strong, empathetic agent on my side.
Now she was gone.
I felt worse than the last time a boy had broken up with me, because my writing meant almost more to me than my personal life. Having an agent had made me official, allowed me to define myself as a writer. But now mine had jumped ship, out of the blue.
Over the phone, as she uttered her parting words, my agent—former agent—had blithely told me it would be “painless” for me to find new representation. But when I asked what I should tell prospective agents about why I was looking for someone new, she grew defensive. “Why do you have to tell them anything?” She didn’t want me to say she was leaving the industry, or anything about her at all; she hadn’t told her boss about her plans to depart, and she didn’t want to get caught out. Her self-protectiveness put me at a disadvantage, and I was angry at her callous disregard for the uphill climb ahead of me. Still, being the good student I have always been, I threw myself into query letters. Many agents requested the new novel, but none offered to represent it. When I took a step back and reread the manuscript with their comments in mind, I realized I’d been too hasty. I shouldn’t have followed my former agent’s advice; the book wasn’t ready to send out.
What you forget when held by the safety net of representation is that while you can show your current agent a hot mess, the book has to be near-perfect to secure the backing of someone new. I felt embarrassed and paralyzed. I had been demoted from Writer to Aspiring Writer, and my previous accomplishments now mattered for nothing. I’d been drop-kicked back to the beginning of my career.
Most writers, when we are starting out, carry around some version of imposter syndrome, a carrion-eating bird that hovers like a dark cloud and pecks at our flesh whenever we dare to have a good idea or smidgen of success. This ugly bird was banished the day I had secured my agent. I needed that external validation to drop the Aspiring qualifier.
I knew the publishing industry could be capricious. Just because a publisher had enthusiastically promoted your first book didn’t mean they would also publish your second. Mentors had told me about writing books that didn’t sell or auctions that no one showed up to. But through it all, their agents fought for them.
My humiliation ate away at my confidence. I set my goat farmer novel aside. What was the point of working on it if no one would ever read it?
Months later my husband and I went on vacation to Savannah. The sweet weather and delicious food were a balm. The city’s layered history was darkly eye-opening. One highlight was our visit to the childhood home of Flannery O’Connor. A narrow house in the old Catholic quarter of the city, it’s where she raised chickens in the backyard and wrote her first stories. From the time she could read, she also made pronouncements about other works of literature, calling Alice in Wonderland “the worst book since Pinocchio.” How had this odd woman developed such a clear sense of self and judgment at such a young age?
Traveling often lifts my spirits—new tastes, new vistas, new languages—but this trip was especially distracting. The night before we were to leave, as we drank cocktails at a rooftop bar underneath the twisted branches of live oaks, I bemoaned going home.
“Why don’t you stay a few extra days?” my husband said. He had to return to campus to teach, but my job as a literary magazine editor was more flexible.
“Stay?” Of course I wanted to, but I don’t change directions quickly. Where would I sleep? What would I do about my flight?
“Those are just logistics,” he said.
The next morning he moved me into a historic inn a few blocks from our Airbnb and then left for the airport. I sat on my plush four-poster bed listening to the soft spring rain and wondering what to do with myself.
Soon a pleasantly familiar force began to rise in my chest, a feeling of work to be done. I located the inn’s printer and ordered another ream of paper online. I knew my book was good, but it wasn’t yet good enough. I had notes from a writer friend who’d read the most recent version and had suggestions for streamlining the novel’s opening. I would start there, at the beginning.
I worked all morning and most of the afternoon. The inn’s breakfast provided me with eggs, bacon, some kind of just-baked pastry, and fresh fruit. Coffee and tea were available in unlimited quantities. If the weather was fine, I wrote outside on the porch; if it was cool or rainy, I took my laptop and my papers inside to the dining room. When I called my husband to excitedly report on my progress, I could hear him smiling through the phone. “This is why I suggested you stay. I hoped you’d get back to your book.”
In a Savannah sprint, I finished overhauling the book in four days. Immersing myself in the small-town world of my novel was revitalizing. Slashing chunks and moving scenes and delicately revising sentences—it felt like what I was supposed to be doing. When I finished, I thought about where I might be able to send the novel without an agent.
From my work as a literary magazine editor, I knew a few editors at independent presses, and I started with them. Whatever small amount of control over my career I could summon, I needed to exert. One of the presses I submitted to was Delphinium Books, the publisher of my first novel. I hadn’t been in touch with my editor since the paperback of The Limits of the World came out in the second month of the pandemic. My editor was pleased to hear from me and receive Surrender, the goat farmer book; he also reminded me that Delphinium had an option on this novel, which I didn’t know. I didn’t even have a copy of my contract—that had been my agent’s concern. I began to wonder what else my agent hadn’t told me.
A few weeks later my editor texted with good news.
You might think the acceptance of my novel would have buoyed my confidence. But mostly what I felt was relief. I guess I’m not such a loser. I couldn’t help thinking that by bypassing agents and sending to my old editor directly, I’d cheated.
Not long after returning from Savannah, I had the good fortune to go on another trip. My mom and I traveled to Greece together and spent a week in Athens and a week on Corfu. On the flight home I thumbed a few notes into my phone: “Woman sleeps with best friend’s husband before leaving on a two-week trip to Greece with her mother. While away, texting the lover and the friend and also trying to forget about them both. Mother and daughter have to help each other.”
When I got home I bestowed names on the mother and daughter. I put them on the page and in conversation with each other. This novel would be short and sexy. Fun. I set myself some structural parameters to break down the writing process into digestible chunks. What I was discovering—rather, reaffirming for myself—was that I had to write. I couldn’t leave Surrender alone when I knew there was more I could bring to it. And if I had an idea for a new book, I was compelled to see where it led.
I began to show chapters to my writing group when we met over Zoom. They responded with virtual high fives. The mother and daughter characters were clicking for them, the pacing was swift, the themes of betrayal and longing were landing. Really? I thought, It’s not too slow, the characters not too unlikable, the prose not too flat? My anxieties about my worth as a writer, ballooned by the departure of my agent and kept afloat by the subsequent agent rejections, had completely overtaken my confidence. I couldn’t believe my friends asked eagerly for the next installment.
If the first lesson I learned in the wake of my agent breakup was that I couldn’t stop writing even if I wanted to, the second lesson was to lean on my writer friends for emotional and creative support. They propped me up, reminding me of the hard times each of them had gone through publishing their sophomore novels. Two other friends’ novels had been inexplicably canceled by Big Five imprints. I began to realize that an invisible wreckage of rejection and crisis trails nearly every writer’s career. This made me feel less alone, less like a failure. Perhaps my luck had been worse than some (and certainly better than others), but being a writer means weathering the industry’s vicissitudes just as much as it means publishing books. My stamina, my determination, is one aspect of my career that is under my control.
I don’t think writers ever make a clean escape from the carrion-eating birds; they will always circle, casting dark shadows and threatening to lash our skin and defecate all over our best hair days. But we do have choices about how we define ourselves. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke begs his young protégé to cease seeking external validation: “You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now.” He presses the point by urging:
Ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? ... And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple ‘I must,’ then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
The esteem of others sure is nice, but no writer consistently trying to make art is consistently praised or well-received. The motivation must be internal.
When left to my own devices at that Savannah inn, my body and mind reminded me how dead I would feel if writing were stripped from my life. What would I do with all those thoughts and emotions bouncing around in my head all day? I simply had to be strong enough to endure whatever the industry threw at me because I could fathom no other way to live. If I didn’t write, didn’t try to be published, I’d be breaking with myself.
And so I crowdsourced a title from my writing group for my Greek vacation novel—we came up with Appetite—and I again collated a list of agents. I sent query letters and then the whole manuscript to a handful. Happily I have found a new creative partner. But while I take her judgments seriously, I won’t let her, or anyone else’s, opinion define me. I write because I must.
Jennifer Acker is author of the debut novel The Limits of the World (Delphinium Books, 2019), an honoree for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her short memoir “Fatigue” is an Amazon best-seller, and her second novel, Surrender, is forthcoming in April 2026 from Delphinium. Acker is the founder and editor in chief of the Common, based at Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest.
Thumbnail credit: © Zoe Fisher