Fired
“Getting fired is nature’s way of telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place.” – Hal Lancaster
At first, it was almost a relief. Harriet’s treatment of others, especially a chubby senior editor who was embarrassingly eager to be friends, was cruel. Commanded to find a dozen copies of a recent bestseller to give to dinner guests, Barbara would show up at her apartment with these books and never be invited to stay for dinner. My rage expressed itself in several ways, all of them dumb. I cracked a Tiffany teacup and saucer I had given her for Christmas. I took all the mail that had accumulated and threw it away. I subscribed her to several pornographic magazines and filled in her address. And then I left.
For several days I holed up in my apartment, calling people and venting about what a bitch she was, but in fact, I was devastated because I loved her, and I thought she loved me. I went into a frenzy of applying for other jobs in publishing. I decided to be completely positive and say only good things about my time at Bantam, Doubleday, Dell. But during my first meeting with a publisher of a small but mighty press, he started the conversation by asking me, “How ever did you survive working for that c**t?”
This was a shock. I had no idea how anyone else felt about my former boss, but she had many enemies. I resisted the impulse to defend her and spoke in cliches about the rewards of discovering new writers. I was still seeing my shrink, albeit less frequently, and when we met after I lost my job, she was very concerned about how I was feeling.
“That must have been a terrible blow?” she said.
“Because I loved her?”
“Yes.”
“I need to stop loving people,” I said. “They either die or become evil.”
“What would you like to do now?”
photo by Kelly Sikkema
I wanted to kill myself, but that seemed ungrateful after all the good work we had done together. Also, I had no right. My mother was still raging about the extra child, and my father was deeply depressed. I planned to lie to them until I found another job.
“I don’t know. My father thinks I should get a master’s in library science.”
Hazel smiled. “Do you want to do that?”
I shook my head.
“So, let’s not do that.”
Leaving her office, I had a single goal, gelato. I walked over to my favorite place and found the street was blocked off with the outline of a body on the sidewalk. Slipping through the tape I headed towards my destination only to be stopped by one of New York’s finest.
"Hey,” he said, “where do you think you’re going, young lady?”
“To the gelato store,” I said, smiling like the sexy young thing I needed to be.
“No can do,” he said. “This is a crime scene. You just missed Paul Castellano getting popped. See, that’s his blood.”
And so, it was. I knew who Castellano, the head of the Gambino crime family, as my ex-husband was obsessed with all things mafioso. I just wanted my gelato. The way I saw things, what with losing my job and getting divorced and getting sober and my father’s new fatherhood, the only thing protecting me from a complete breakdown was gelato from my favorite place. I saw the look on the cop’s face and recognized I was acting like a crazy person.
As the months followed my being fired, it became clear I should approach publishing from another angle as a writer. While I enjoyed reading other people’s books, I recognized I was comparing my skills to the writer’s, making me a bad editor. Also, I had about a hundred pages written of something scaring me with its intensity and breaking my heart as I wrote about the night I received the call about Catherine. It was fictionalized, but I discovered I could remember every detail about that night.
How cold it was, my running barefoot to the hospital, falling and praying to a god I didn’t believe in to save my sister, the look on her husband’s face in the ER, and the fact that he was shoeless and knowing that the worst thing was going to happen. I never wanted to write about her death, but it was clear I had no choice. I also had no sense I was writing a novel. I waitressed, went to auditions, and tried to avoid the notebook that contained a story about the youngest child in a troubled family who loses her oldest sister and wants nothing more than to follow her into the grave. It was awful, but it was the truth. I wrote as I sat on subway cars and waited for my drink orders from the bartender. When the work was too painful I stopped and plastered a smile on my face so the people trying to have a nice time would not have to deal with their traumatized waitress.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach