My unbrilliant career

Kliatt, March, 2005 by Meg Rosoff

I know from experience that careers do not always arise from a deep sense of destiny. My seven-year-old daughter, for instance, was set on a career in veterinary medicine until someone mentioned she'd have to put her hand up a cow's bottom. Now she wants to be a dog walker, which is a great relief to us financially.

She comes by her changeable nature via the maternal gene. My first career ambition was to be a spy, more Casino Royale than Mata Hari, but then I also wanted to be a boy. Spies were cool in the early seventies; we had the Cold War and the nuclear threat to inspire us, not to mention the Napoleon Solo/Illya Kuryakin debate, and the Ian Fleming version of James Bond. In 1972, I dutifully marched against the Vietnam war, dreaming of telephones disguised as cigarette packets and amphibious fountain pens.

At university, surrounded by hordes of students headed for Wall Street and Harvard Law School, I applied for a job with the National Enquirer--possibly the least prestigious journalistic job on earth-because, I reasoned, at least it didn't reek of Ivy League respectability. My application was never acknowledged, so I moved to London and spent a year at St. Martin's making execrable sculptures out of rusted steel and driving around Camden in a small rusting sports car.

When my visa expired, I returned to New York and succumbed to the fate of all bookish, overeducated girls: the Publishing Job. Refusing an entry-level interview at the newly created Self Magazine (cover girls? so uncool) I opted for a grim academic publisher in not-yet-chic downtown Manhattan. There, I edited Personality Disorder Monthly, while my sociopath MD sat, feet up, clutching a prototype of Cigar Magazine and dreaming of half-naked Cuban babes. I lasted an impressive eight months.

At ArtNews Magazine's new book division I worked 60-hour weeks accomplishing nothing at all, until the day my boss straightened his toupee and suggested I seek employment elsewhere. Which I did, at People Magazine, where even entry-level jobs came with a bottomless expense account.

Ever alert to the possibilities of downward mobility, I followed my People boss to West 43rd Street and The New York Times, in those days still a romantically masculine, heavy-drinking bastion of high ambition and old-fashioned journalistic values. What I remember best from that year were the delicious canteen bagels, and my friendship with a drug-addled Book Review editor who occasionally left gifts of opium in my pencil drawer.

And then one day, tired of Times Square, I sold my soul for 20% more than a pittance and moved cross-town to Madison Avenue. There followed a succession of advertising jobs, most of which I departed under a cloud, a particularly insulting fate given how little intelligence it takes to write ads.

In 1989 I moved back to London, refashioned my portfolio, and wrangled an ad agency job reporting to a capriciously sadistic creative director. Two years later, I was fired again, and in my down time wrote a London guidebook for a small American publisher. The research proved exhausting, and I could never solve the mystery of why anyone would visit Madame Tussauds, much less queue for hours in the rain to visit Madame Tussauds. Evidence that I lacked the common touch continued to mount.

Next I thought about having a go at Archbishop of Canterbury, redressing the population's general indifference to religion by removing "god" and "godliness" from the brief, but getting hold of a job application was harder than you might imagine.

At the next advertising job, I lasted less than six months--my art director suggested it might be due to insubordination of an extremely high order and a general aura of contempt for my chosen profession, and was I planning to continue in that mode?

At which point, in a sudden flash of the blindingly obvious, I realized that advertising was not for me. By the time I reached this stunning epiphany, I was 42 and figured it might be fun to dedicate myself to another challenge, like leaving a job of my own volition. So I set my sights on something easier than selling instant coffee to housewives and decided to write a novel, knowing of course that you couldn't just Write A Novel, and especially that you couldn't make a living doing it.

Thus followed a picture book featuring four bad-tempered wild boars (write what you know), and an auction for the rights in New York. The agent who agreed to take on the boars was not particularly interested in picture books, but in an act of extraordinary faith set her sights on the as-yet-imaginary novel.

What happened next almost made up for all those years sitting in conference rooms discussing the finer points of panty liners. I wrote a novel. Four months later there was an auction in the UK. Another in the US followed, and suddenly How I Live Now was selling for substantial amount on both sides of the Atlantic.

Three hours after the US advance was settled, I quit advertising, without even stopping to fill my pockets with pilfered office supplies.