She interned at a poetry press, and someone there introduced her to Greg, who would become her literary agent. I never met him, but he sounded like another of those young and prematurely jaded guys, just out of school, seemingly everywhere then, whose ranks I didn’t yet know I would be joining. He was still an assistant, but he asked to read Sophie’s stories and started sending them out. He sold one to the Paris Review and another to the New Yorker, guaranteeing Sophie a book contract. Her collection would allow him to give up answering the phone for his boss and take on clients full-time. That summer I began a novel that would swell to a thousand pages before I abandoned it. Now graduated, Max started opening mail and answering phones for the weekly where he still works. He lived with three other guys in a loft on Thompson Street, a big, open space, nearly as suitable as Gerhard’s house for crowded parties, which Max and his roommates threw often. I want to say that this was the summer when all three of us came to see writing as a job rather than just as our way of being in the world.
What do You think about What Happened To Sophie Wilder?
