When we learned last week that novelist/memoirist Molly Jong-Fast had become an agent, we got ourselves invited to Vigliano Associates to find out what had prompted the change, and soon found ourselves in her new office in the back corner, which had been used as a storage space by her colleagues—she was still clearing out cardboard boxes and extra computer keyboards.
“In a way, I’m not really crazy enough to be a writer anymore,” she confessed; after writing a novel based on her drug addiction and recovery process and a memoir based on growing up in a family of writers that included Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast, she had married into a family that really didn’t want to find themselves starring in her next book. “And I just don’t have the emotional constitution,” she added, recalling how her grandfather, Howard Fast, had laid in his deathbed worrying aloud about why the NY Times Book Review didn’t like him. It was not, she said, the kind of life she wanted for herself. (She does have one more book under contract to Random House, which she plans to finish soon, though the fact that her editor, Bruce Tracy, was a victim of last month’s editorial purge only intensifies her resolve to move on.)
“I was always so frustrated at the ways publishing didn’t work, even in the boom years,” she said, “and I thought, why not get into the business and find out why things weren’t working? But I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t come here.” Jong-Fast had known Vigliano for years; her first editor, she said, had frequently bought books from him, and the agency had also represented her father. “I really like David a lot,” she observed, describing how the agency’s emphasis on celebrity-driven projects matched her own goals, including her aspirations to bring in “really smart” writers to help shape those public figures’ lives into books. She was already laying the groundwork for a political memoir and a health book, she said, as well as two other “really big” projects she didn’t feel comfortable talking about just yet.
“I’m trying not to do too much literary stuff—which is not to say I’m not taking smart things,” she told us, “but there’s a certain type of pretentious novel that I just hate, that I’d spent most of my career trying to write away from… I want to represent books that will actually reach people.”