Fresh and new. That's what literary agents want from debut authors.
There's plenty of Holocaust memoirs out there already. That left Herman Rosenblat with no other choice but to make his version of events fresh and new.
So he did.
He got caught.
Lovely that he met his wife on a blind date, but that's so ordinary. He changed things a bit, all in a bit of marketing wizardry meant to appeal to the literary agent and the publisher and even Oprah herself.
We met when she tossed an apple over the fence, he said, over the fence of the concentration camp. After the Jews were liberated, we were married and life is beautiful and we don't believe in hatred etc. etc.
Okay, so they were introduced in New York City. What agent would take on such a boring client? No publisher would buy memoirs without a heart-tugging hook.
Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't used the title Angel At The Fence. Maybe if he hadn't played it as a love that survived brutality and horror. But then the memoirs wouldn't have sold and Mr. Rosenblat's story wouldn't have seen the light of day.
Once again, memoirs have proven to be fiction, but fiction is such a hard sell that the author pretended the plot was pure fact, rather than fact-based. A novel about a concentration camp inmate being aided by a woman outside the fence would make for a charming story, but Andrea Hurst might not have picked it up and Mr. Rosenblat wouldn't have the platform he built when he first made up the tale in the 1990's.
It's not about the writing. It's all about the marketing, and what an author can get away with for the sake of being published.
No comments:
Post a Comment