was launching myself on a series of adventures with small and large publishers. The writing was me alone in a room with ideas, sources, and the English language, which went well, overall. The publishing was me negotiating with organizations that always had more people and more power and sometimes acted as my advocate and collaborator and sometimes as my adversary.
One winter evening not long ago, my friend Tina and I went to see The Post at a little movie theater out in the west of San Francisco, where the sky is darker and the wind is stronger and everything seems a little dreamier. The movie told two intertwined stories, about the Washington Post’s decision to report on the Pentagon Papers, the material leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to make it clear that the Vietnam War was based on a lie, and the way that Katharine Graham, who had recently taken over as publisher when her husband died, simultaneously seized hold of her business and herself, sweeping aside the men who condescended to her as she swept aside her own self-doubt about her qualifications to take power and make decisions with world-changing consequences.
We enjoyed the drive, and the crisp night air, and before that the popcorn and the vintage Republican decor and wardrobe of the cinematic Ms. Graham and the scenes of printing presses running. When we exited into a very black night, I somehow found myself talking about my own early struggles with publishing. It had been a long time since I’d recalled how bitter my early endeavors to put out books were, in their own small way, or rather how fervently men had sought to prevent me from publishing. I was lucky in that I overcame the obstacles they erected, but I presume others did not. And now I can see how white the world of publishing was and is, and that though some doors slammed because of my gender, others remained open because of my race.
Some of the damage was funny in its own way. There was an editor who one day changed things at random in the manuscript of my first book, so the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle became Niki de Saint Paul, iconic to ironic, 1957 to 1967. The reason for this desultory sabotage I do not know, but when I fought it I was treated as though I should take random errors inserted into my manuscript more in stride. Another editor, I recall, wrote me a scathing note about that book’s inconclusive ending; he’d lost the last chapter of the manuscript, but did not imagine the error was his. The process of producing the book dragged out an extra year because of my inexperience and inability to advocate effectively for myself against odd interventions like that.
And then there was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the figurehead of that publishing house and enterprise. It is now more than thirty years since I signed a book contract with City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, and during those first few years I was very often in the editorial offices in the back of the top floor of the bookstore, which I’ve returned to often as a browser, a friend of some of the staff, and occasionally a reader at events. In these decades Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who floated around there regularly, has never spoken a word to me, including under circumstances where speaking to me would be the normal thing to do. I was never sure whether it was that he wouldn’t or he couldn’t. Sometimes I thought that he might possess a sort of Venn diagram in which City Lights authors or historians were not a group that intersected with young blondes, so that I was categorically nonexistent.
Once, when I had been working with City Lights for more than two years, Ferlinghetti came with City Lights’ editor in chief to a book party I’d helped organize for my friend Brad Erickson’s activist handbook. A week later Brad and I met at City Lights and Ferlinghetti came down the little staircase next to the famous bookstore’s front door and looked at the two of us, one he had met once briefly, one he was publishing and had crossed paths with dozens of times over the past few years, and said to us, “Hi, Brad.” I didn’t particularly want to be pals with him, but it is normal for your publisher to say hi to you. Thinking back,