how i wrote a book, part 1

the first "no"

In June 2019, on an extremely, unseasonably warm Los Angeles night, I wore a black turtleneck to meet my then-agent for dinner. We hadn’t seen each other in years — since my first book launched in 2017 — but I’d been trying to get on his calendar for months. I wanted to talk about writing a second book. I had an idea.

Earlier that year, at a conference in Ireland, I’d given a speech about re-thinking how we approach our careers. The talk had gone well, but, more than this, it was the first time I’d felt excited about work in longer than I could remember, a half decade, if not more. I thought there was a book in the talk somewhere, but I wasn’t sure where. So I sent the video to my agent and asked what he’d thought. Weeks passed without a response. Finally, he let slip that he was coming to town in June. I asked if I could see him. Now, on this dusty-hot-sweaty night, here we were.

I was 46 and — to the outside world at least —flailing. I’d been fired from a big job the year before and hadn’t sought another. My first book hadn’t performed the way my high-powered agent wanted it to, a fact he never attempted to disguise — not on the day it came out, when I met him for what I thought was a celebratory lunch (“The numbers are not good, Jenn,” he explained gravely over now-sad burgers) and certainly not in the years since.