This letter was first published on the Berkshire website in 2015.
On Friday evenings, we eat at home in New York, lamps low as the sun sets over the Hudson. We catch up on what’s happened during the week: the news from Beijing and our far-flung children, the meetings we’ve had, new projects started, funny stories from work. It’s a simple meal, usually fish and salad, a time of peace and companionship and love.
On one of those evenings, I started crying on the second bite of salad.
It was a single teardrop at first, hovering at the corner of my eye. I tried to ignore it. I don’t cry, for heaven’s sake. And I didn’t want to ruin the calm of the evening; that had been business, and was behind me now, I told myself.
But the tears kept welling up, until I had to rub my eyes to keep them from rolling down my cheeks. I kept my head down, and pushed the fork around my plate. He didn’t say a word, and kept eating, but slowly now, waiting.
The tears fell. “It’s all uphill,” I sputtered, dabbing my eyes, “all the time.” Then I began to choke out the story.
I had gone that afternoon to an office off Union Square to meet an agent who had, supposedly, been representing Berkshire Publishing at international book fairs for the past six months. She wanted to introduce me to the firm she had joined, which would, she said, now be our agents.
“We see potential in some of these new titles,” she said, pointing at a print-out of a list I’d emailed that afternoon. She had no reports of her own to give me, no paper, no pen. Her new boss gave me a history of his company and waved his arm at the walls, at the posters of book jackets and bestseller lists with their titles circled in yellow.