Your mum is a smart woman. Do not patronise her. Don’t stick a woman in an Anne Boleyn hood and have her whispering in a doorway with her tits half-out. She will not fall for this. She knows all the old secrets, all the old ways. This woman has been reading books a long time and she cannot, will not, be tricked.
Your mum is a busy woman! Don’t bore her! Get to the point already! Do not recommend her The Fortnight in September or she will text you at 1am to say she wants to ‘murder this idiot family’.
You mum will read the famous memoir up as far as the writer hits about twenty, mainly to judge the parents of the writer, and how they were responsible for their child’s mistakes. “No wonder she sold secrets to the Nazis,” she will say. “With a mother like that. Aren’t you glad you don’t have a mother like that? Didn’t do so badly, did I?”
Your mum will read every book about the wives of Ernest Hemingway. When the publishing industry runs out of wives, it will start creating new ones to sell creative non-fiction about. Oh, what? You haven’t heard of Flossie, the lesbian wife who grew up on a Christmas tree farm, and later became pregnant with Neville Chamberlain’s baby? Boy, do I have the book for you!!!
Your mum loves David Sedaris, but there are only so many David Sedaris books in the world, so it is up to the publishing world to create more books of essays that are funny without being crude; delineate the exquisite nuance of family struggle without rabbiting on ceaselessly about trauma; have an eye for bizarre micro-detail but doesn’t spend seventy pages talking about one curtain rail. Publishers: please help more authors become David Sedaris. No one needs another book of essays that purports to be about just one thing: ‘stories of my life through pies I have eaten’, or whatever. No one needs another book where the author has been forced to confess their personal traumas before they are done processing them, knowing full well that a book about abuse is more sellable than a book about being a human being, and that monetising this abuse is a strategy of leaving it, at least physically, behind them.
Have the confidence to rely on an author’s wit, craft and magnetism to sell the book. Don’t hem people in, or sell people out.Your mum is a sensorial being. She likes the way things look and smell and feel. Don’t be afraid of a good ‘the new lady of the house surveys her grounds’ scene. Maybe you, the editor, think it might be a good idea to cut the scene about the slippery gossamer silks falling out of the battered suitcase, or the furs that are being lovingly stroked by the consumptive handmaid, but please do not! Don’t be afraid of a good textile! Me and my mum like them!
Of all the books I have recommended my mum over the years, Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard was her favourite, because she claimed it was the only thriller she had read about a woman who was in the same stage of life that she was. The world and your mum deserves more plots with middle-aged women at their centre, and by ‘plot’, I mean plot. Not gazing out a rain-flecked window pane, but plot.
If your mum is going to buy a biography of a mid-century starlet and/or It Girl, you better believe you need to have a minimum of ten waxy white page inserts featuring glossy black and white photographs of said star. These will feature, in order: one picture of the star’s parents; one of the star as a child; one of her as a gamine 16 year-old with an awkward face but a coltish appeal nonetheless; at least six of her in her post-beauty pre-fame period, where she’s living in a bed-sitter in Kensington for 6 shillings a week and heating up beans off a radiator; a few behind the scenes shots from premieres and/or parties; one photo of each of her ex-husbands; some mid-life pictures with her children; one photo of her dignified old age.
Your mum likes collections of short stories written by hot men.
Your mum would like a book that will shortly become a TV movie starring Nicole Kidman and the guy from Ray Donovan.
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