“When I moved to New York, I had no idea what my literary life was going to be,” Jill Bialosky (left) says once we’ve found our seats at a rooftop bar just down the street from her offices at W.W. Norton, where she’s an executive editor—although the direct impetus of our meeting is her own new novel, The Life Room, published a few weeks ago. Her original background was in poetry (and she has a new collection of verse coming from Knopf next year), but when she read Marilynne Robinson‘s Housekeeping as a graduate student at Iowa, the poetic, character-driven story gave Bialosky confidence that she would one day be able to write a novel of her own (2003’s House Under Snow). For this new story, she says, she’s drawn upon some of her own experiences of moving to New York and pursuing a literary career, but also on many of the writers she’s known personally and professionally over the years.
As a writer and an editor, Bialosky has a unique vantage point on the publishing process, but she doesn’t let her industry knowledge affect her creativity. “I’m very good at compartmentalizing,” she says. “As a writer, if I thought for one minute about my audience, I’d be in trouble. That comes later… If the writing part is like giving birth, then publishing is more like letting go and sending your child off to college.” Keeping her two literary lives separate means that she very rarely turns to the authors she publishes at Norton for advice. “Some of them might even be surprised to know that I’m a writer,” she admits. “It’s not part of the conversation.” That’s not to say Norton isn’t supportive of her outside work; shortly before our conversation, her colleagues had thrown her a party honoring the new novel’s publication, and she’s enthusiastic about the mentorship editor-in-chief (and fellow author) Starling Lawrence has offered her over the years.
And how has it been, balancing her editorial job with the promotional activities surrounding the novel’s publication? Taking vacation days freed her up for the book tour, but that still left some juggling. “It makes me incredibly busy right now,” she laughs, “but it’s better than sitting at home checking your Amazon numbers constantly.”
(photo: Marion Ettlinger)