The Round Tableshot for only four months every year. As Jack’s role was becoming more prominent, he got offered more work on other shows, some of it abroad. I would take Lucy with me most of the time and we’d visit him in Budapest or London or Prague or wherever the work took him. He didn’t like to be away from home for too long.
Jack should have been fulfilled too but he wanted us to have a baby of our own. He had always talked about being a dad. I didn’t want a second child, but I couldn’t say that to him. I knew that second children could suffer from extreme jealousy and Lucy was perfect. Any other child I might have would be envious of her. Also, what if Jack loved his own child more than Lucy? I distracted Jack by saying now wasn’t the right time. We needed to give Lucy time to adjust to our new relationship. Jack didn’t think she needed time – he had been in her life since the day she was born – but he let it go for about six months until he said it was time to try again. I didn’t object this time, but I was secretly on the pill. I was extremely careful about hiding it in places he would never look.
I would pretend to be devastated every month when my period arrived and he would comfort me, or if he was away, he’d send me flowers. He worked out when I’d be ovulating and would come home for a night or two from wherever he was, or I’d go and meet him.
Another six months later, he tentatively suggested a fertility specialist. He was away shooting, and it was one of those late-night calls. I agreed – it was better to get ahead of these things, in case there was anything wrong, I said.
As it happened, I had diminished ovarian reserve, meaning I wasn’t producing as many eggs as the average woman. I was relieved by this news, but then the fertility doctor suggested IVF. It was going to be expensive and the doctor could not guarantee success.
By now we had joint accounts, business in the drama school was up and Jack’s earnings were good. Jack had asked Dad not to give me an allowance any more. Dad’s wedding present to me had been to buy Uncle Dennis’s share of my house and Mom gave up her share to me also. So now the house was in Jack’s and my name, and we were mortgage free.
I had never been wildly extravagant and had never worried about money in my life but now we depended on Jack’s acting income plus the drama school to keep us afloat. We could afford several rounds of IVF but I didn’t want another child. Jack insisted the time was right. He’d been contracted for a third season ofThe Round Tableand had more film offers he was considering. The Academy had turned a healthy profit for the first time since the recession. But no matter what reasons I came up with – it would take a toll on me both emotionally and physically, the invasive nature of the procedure reminded me of the rape – Jack wanted this more than anything. Somehow, I had to prove to him how ‘scared’ I was of going down this road.
It was a Friday morning in September 2011, and Jack was working on a drama series, but they were shooting in Dublin. He’d been picked up at 5.30 a.m. by the production car and driven out to Ardmore Studios. I didn’t know what time he’d be back. The schedule often changed depending on weather, light or unexpected hold-ups. I went out to get hammered. But this time I had an excuse, and IwantedJack to find out. I didn’t call the Academy to say I wouldn’t be in. I dropped Lucy to school that morning and then I went to the supermarket and bought a bottle of wine the moment it was legal to sell it at 10.30 a.m. I drank the bottle as soon as I got home and then decided to drive into town around lunchtime. I left my phone at home. I crashed the car into the pillar at the front gate, so I left it there and walked down to the local pub instead. After striking up a conversation with a gang of women on a bachelorette party, I bought them two rounds of Jägermeister shots. Then one or two of them got a bit hostile and told me to back off, that I hadn’t been invited to join their party. I got angry and slapped one of them across the head. I was then thrown out of the pub by the barman, who was watching. ‘I knew you were trouble the minute you walked in,’ he told me.
I was furious at this injustice. I hailed a cab to take me into the city centre and went to a pub I hadn’t been in since college. The Stag’s Head catered to a mixed crowd, but I sat on my own at the bar, drinking vodka and Coke, chatting to anyone who sat on the stool beside me. I must have been pretty dull because they all drifted away after a few minutes. Eventually, a young guy, rough around the edges, sat next to me.
‘Looking for company?’ he said, and I nodded. ‘Looking for some Class As?’ he added.
It was six years since I’d done any drugs at all but I figured in for a penny, in for a pound.
‘How much?’
‘Hundred and twenty quid for a gram.’
I fumbled in my wallet and took out three crisp fifty-euro notes. He slid a little cellophane pouch on to my lap under the bar.
‘I don’t have any change,’ he said.
I was drunk but I still had some wits about me. ‘Ask the barman,’ I said.
He sauntered away, supposedly in search of the barman, but then disappeared with my thirty-euro change. Maybe my final wits were deserting me after all. I remember going down the stairs to the ladies, clutching the walls, but it was impossibly dark in the cubicle. I knew from AA meetings that bars had started doing this deliberately to stop cocaine use on the premises. There was no surface on which to chop out a line. The cistern was high up on the wall. I dabbed my finger into the pouch and rubbed it into my gums. I felt nothing, no buzz at all. Had I just paid €150 for some ground-up paracetamol or worse? I stumbled back up to the bar, thirsty for more vodka. I surveyed the various guys coming and going, and eventually one older man came over and offered me a drink. I think I told him I was an airline pilot who had arrived in Dublin that morning. I don’t remember eatinganything the whole day. I do remember it being dark when I fell out of the pub and the guy asked where my hotel was. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He led me up a laneway nearby where he slammed me up against the wall and began to tear at my skirt. I screamed and he ran. I cried then. This whole day had been a horrible mistake. I managed to get a cab and remember my address. The taxi driver woke me up when I got home. I tried to fit my keys in the lock, but Jack swung the door open and I fell into the hall. Mom came out of the kitchen. Then I blacked out.
Three days later, Jack agreed that we would not have any IVF treatment. He apologized for pressuring me. I apologized for my relapse. He begged me to come back to AA with him, and I agreed. Nasrin, my sponsor, was happy to take me on again.
41
Erin
By 2011, I was tired of New York. I was a senior editor, but since those rumours had spread about me, despite the complete lack of evidence, I wasn’t trusted or promoted. I was completely unfulfilled in my job and stifled in New York. I was also homesick for Boston, and worried about Dad. I talked to him about it. His solution, as it was to everything, was to pray about it, and he said I mustn’t worry about him. The church had been rebuilt, but he had lost two fingers on his right hand and one on the left. Kathy said he was in more pain than he was admitting to me. ‘At least I still have opposable thumbs, honey,’ he told me.
A week later, God must have answered Dad’s prayers because he came up with a real answer: ‘Come home and start your own publishing company here in Boston. I’ll help to set you up, financially.’ I knew enough agents and had good relationships with them. Most of them also represented fiction writers. I called up my old room-mate, Carla Rivera, from my Harvard days. She was also struggling in New York, trying to pay rent in the Bronx as a marketing assistant for one of the big advertising companies. I put together a proposal for her. She was a Boston girl too, and she was fed up. I knew I could do the editing, but I needed somebody to do publicity, and she had all the contacts from her time in advertising. She knew features editors and some book editors, but she also had contacts for all the major TV shows who might want tointerview a writer. Before I handed in my notice to Schoolroom, I had some lunches on their expense account. I figured it was the least they owed me. I knew that New York was the centre of the publishing world, but it didn’t have to be.
I registered with the latest edition ofWriter’s Marketand placed targeted ads in writers’ groups on the internet. I knew I would eventually need a broad spectrum of books, so I appealed for submissions in fantasy, dystopian, speculative, horror, crime, romance, children’s and science fiction categories. I went for the most commercial genres and the ones in which I had a particular interest. I needed Dad’s money to pay advances and cover the exorbitant rent on an office in Cambridge. The one thing I had learned from my time in New York publishing was that appearances mattered, and Cambridge was a good address. My first publication had to be a great one, and Carla and I trawled through submissions day and night for weeks. I trusted her taste and she trusted mine.
It was a few months before I received a submission I liked enough to publish. Carla was worried we would run out of money and so was I. But I had to be choosy. The author was a medical student in Harvard, and the book was a romance set mostly in the subway of New York city as a young white man and Black woman locked eyes across a subway platform in the early hours of the morning. They then passed each other on subway trains, always missing each other, taking out ads in Craigslist to try to find each other. It was a credible story, charming and sweet, and I felt it would be relatable. I asked the writer, Esha Khan, to fix some timeline issues and character consistency matters, then offered her a $5,000 advance, which thankfully she accepted. I knew that I couldn’t have been her first choice, and she was unagented. Marketing was going to be key and Carla swung into action. She was great at the digital end of marketing and understood the power of Twitter and Facebook.
In March 2012, with seed money from Dad and every penny I had been able to save, Carla and I opened the Cooper Rivera Publishing House. I worried that I’d made a mistake. I had no money to pay for a copy-editor or a proofreader, I did all the work myself. Esha was eager to be published. She quickly made all the necessary changes and then I sent the book out in manuscript form to some trusted reader friends. I was relieved that they loved it as much as I did. I paid a designer to create a cover that would have broad appeal, and I let her and Esha talk together to come up with something they both liked. I used the last of my money to pay for the first print run of 5,000 copies. The whole enterprise had cost me all I had. I was worried sick that the book would flop.
The first review from theBoston Globehurt me so much that I can’t imagine how Esha felt. We wept together and I tried to reassure her and myself that it was just one review.
It is hard to care about these characters and their small lives. It might be more interesting if they had aspirational careers. I doubt that any reader is going to care about a maid and a school caretaker.
The critic could not have been more wrong and, to our delight, I had to order a second print run of 10,000 within two weeks and then 20,000 the following week.Sweet Subwaywent viral across social media, and it became THE book that everyone was talking about. Esha was invited on toGood Morning Americaand was interviewed byThe New York Times.
Suddenly the top agents were sending me manuscripts. My next two acquisitions were children’s books, one about a girl pirate and the other a coming-of-age story about a neurodivergent teen. Both books took off and I was finally established. At the beginning of our second year, I hired an assistant, Ruth, and a copy-editor, Suzie, and found a bigger office. I also needed tosee a therapist because even though my professional life couldn’t have been better, my love life was non-existent. I didn’t trust men. That was when the texts started again.
I could destroy your business. You should have stayed away.
