An Alphabetical Life

Eric Miller reviews memoir by Wendy Werris due out in November

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the Business of Books
by Wendy Werris
New York: Carol & Graff, ISBN 0-7867-1817-X Paperback Original $15.95 November 2006

“The whole culture grapples with who is in charge and what can be known, who must be listened to and what must be remembered. As authors, authors sense acutely the complicated relationship they have with authority. ‘Author’ and ‘authority’ – it goes beyond the mere suffix following the word. In the classroom or out of it, what one speaks, what one writes is always seeking a purchase, looking for traction, hoping this word will take.”
-- Michael Martone, Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art, 2005

Wendy Werris has written a corker of a book: a memoir that is a brave, honest, and thoroughly engaging narrative of her coming of age in the book business in 1970s Los Angeles and beyond. We join Werris on her journey from the venerable Pickwick Bookshop of Hollywood, cutting her teeth in an urban melting pot of high glamour and downright squalor, to the 1973 ABA book convention in downtown LA where she scores her first publishing job at a company called Straight Arrow in San Francisco, a subsidiary of Rolling Stone. Werris quickly figures out that an office job in marketing is not for her, and she lands a sales gig with a newly formed distributor called Two Continents Publishing, run by the legendary Leonard Shatzkin. This brings her back home to LA where she hits the road and becomes for all intents and purposes a “young lady salesman.” She joins a commission group, Nourse-McKay, and gets the Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico territory. She has the experience of handling a bestseller —The World According to Garp — for EP Dutton, for which she will later become a house rep. Werris forms her own commission group, I – 5 Associates, with George Carroll and Jack O’Leary. She deftly describes the many eccentric bookshop characters she encounters; my favorite is the proprietor of Anne Chiquoine Books in tiny Ventura, CA, an heiress who runs her shop out of the local Elks lodge and affectionately calls Werris “Poopsie.” It is oddball characters like this one, both famous and infamous, that populate Werris’ memoir that make it crackle with energy.

There is also quite a bit of pathos in Werris’ life story, the decline of her father’s writing career in Hollywood, the diminishing bookstore landscape in her territory, the early death of a close friend, and her own experience with sexual assault. Werris weathers the worst of it with humor and authority, and we begin to see a life that has been sustained through the business of books. Through it all she still has her customers, the lines she is selling, and the new books and personalities she encounters along the way. It’s a rich ride, and I always knew that Wendy was cool, sitting in many publisher sales meetings with her year after year. I just wasn’t sure exactly why she was so cool, and now I know and I’m very glad of it. Werris has blazed a trial with her new book and become the poet laureate of publisher’s reps.

Eric Miller
President, NAIPR