Lounge
The boozy, glamorous world of publishing parties
Summary
Publishing parties are the liminal space where relationships between editors, authors, publicists and agents are forged in a variety of ways—and with a lot of wine
There would be plenty of boozy lunches, I was told. On workdays. And parties. Evenings filled with glamorous and frightfully intelligent people that would be the talk of town for days afterwards. Not to forget the adventures of fishing gems out of the “slush pile", being surrounded by books all day, every day.
As far as USPs go, my boss couldn’t have sold the job better because the pay was abysmal. Delhi it was, I decided, and moved to the city on a salary that just about covered the rent and kept me fed and clothed.
I had turned 30 that year, that age when people start settling into professional monogamy, building a vision of a “career". Instead, there I was, throwing caution to the wind, shifting gears from media to publishing, daring to start an affair when I should have known better.
Unlike some of my colleagues, I didn’t have the security of family heirloom that came in the form of three-bedroom flats in Jor Bagh or Defence Colony, but I had the all-consuming love of reading to justify my place in the pecking order.
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It proved to be a torrid and short-lived fling in the end. How many summers can you survive in Delhi for love without being able to afford an AC? One day the penny dropped and I found out that a love of reading didn’t make you fit for the business of publishing, a non sequitur if there ever was one.
My brief stint inside the bubble of English language publishing richly compensated me with sentimental education I couldn’t have anticipated, though. “Your most important KRA will be to meet three new potential writers every week," my boss had told me at the outset. And so, into the glamourised world of book launches, festivals, talks, and after-parties I dived. It was the way to do business—meet new authors, poach others, find out the next hot trend.
In the 2010s, big publishers had enough liquidity, or at least enough pull to draw sponsors, to ensure that an assortment of intoxicating liquids flowed generously at book events. One of my first gala events in that category was the launch of Jeet Thayil’s debut novel, Narcopolis , an evening spent in a haze of smoke, alcohol fumes, winter smog, ending with a reading of a stream-of-consciousness passage by the author, that left me with a giant hangover.
Then there were the festival parties, especially the daily drinks and dinner at Clarkes Amer hotel during Jaipur Literature Festival, to say nothing of the exclusive gatherings hosted by publishers, a hotbed of disgruntled writers comparing notes on deal sizes and sales (both shrinking), while sneering at the rise of upstarts like Rupi Kaur, even as the targets of their condescension swanned around trailing thousands of screaming and hooting fans.
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For a commissioning editor hungry to discover new voices, these dos were my hunting ground, though little did I know how hard it would be for nobodies like me to be seen by said bright young talent at first. The first few months I braced myself with a drink or three, before I tried to work the room—only to meet with tight smiles and shifty eyes that kept darting around the room in case a “more important person" was around and deserved attention than a newbie from Kolkata. But soon enough I had cracked the code.
All you needed was to be loud and brazen about flaunting your job title and before long, someone desperate would attach themselves to you, begging to have their—or a kin’s —manuscript to be evaluated. Soon enough, I was tiptoeing around parties, afraid of running into writers I had rejected, ghosted or alienated through some obscure slight.
On the bright side, I may not have been as lucky as the protagonist of Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year, but at least I had some pretty incredible experiences, such as a chance to declare my undying adoration to Helen Fielding and her books in a fit of inebriation at one party.
Literary parties of yore were sites where myths were made. In 1966, 540 people showed up at Truman Capote’s infamous Black and White masked ball, ostensibly hosted in honour of publisher Kay Graham. In the 1970s, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal got into several fights at parties, which became as much part of their reputations as their books.
The closest to such a lore-in-the-making I had witnessed was at a cosy sit-down dinner for a literary grande dame organised by a socialite, where I had the unenviable luck to be seated between a lapsed journalist (the hottest thing that season for taking down a slimy plutocrat turned self-help writer) and the victim of his poison pen himself. You could have cut the air with the steak knife.
Speaking of knives, there was the other time when no one could, it seemed, cut into the lamb chops at a dinner thrown by a publisher who self-avowedly described herself as the “best party giver" around town. Even as she tried to persuade a heartthrob heroine from the 1970s to write her memoirs, the regal lady tut-tuted at the meat and kept scraping the roast tin to serve me the vestiges of the gravy with maternal concern so that I wouldn’t choke.
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Around the same table that evening were three leading literary lights, all men of a certain age and (premature) eminence, talking at cross purposes to impress each other with. Two of the wives (the third wasn’t married still) listened on impassively, one of them a brilliant social scientist whose field work probably amounted to far more than the sum everything the men had done so far.
Looking back, I wonder what those hours of drinking, eating, flirting, wheeling and dealing amounted to? Building social capital? Or was it intellectual capital we sought? Did we, the wheels of the publishing industry, bask in the momentary whiffs of (misguided) power that came from being gate keepers of quality and opportunity? What does any of it mean now that trade publishing itself is in decline, self-publishing isn’t a declasse word, and anyone can make their career, rake in fame and glory, thanks to the levelling power of the internet?
Of course, we had some good conversations, made acquaintances who became friends, and had some wild times, too. But some of us did it all, outside these cloying bubbles of privilege and gate-keeping. Writing and, by extension, forming lifelong relationships with agents or editors is mostly a thing of the past now—a good, bad and unavoidable thing.
But the best in the business continue to build these foundations in their own styles. Some drop off the “circuit", shun the limelight of parties, while embracing the reclusive life of the mind. Others still troop around the sweet chai and cold samosa served in poky seminar rooms of fuddy-duddy institutions in these inflation-ridden times.
Like everything else, literary parties were always a bit of this and a bit of that—unevenly balanced, unevenly rewarding—and continue to be so even as their stars keep waning.
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