Barely out of her twenties, Adrienne Miller is a remarkable standout in a field where failure is common as grass and success makes you an instant phenomenon. The fiction editor at Esquire, she’s just produced her first novel, The Coast of Akron, arousing much critical notice. Now everyone wants to know: Where did you come from? What’s your secret? Just who are you?
Adolescence tends to speak with a single narrative voice. Thronging with melodramatic cadence it’s on a continuous dissonant loop full of jittery intrigues and glamorous fictions, which are inevitably accompanied by bad hair, lots of lunging from tables and rooms and occasionally, as in the case of Adrienne Miller, some pretty awful poetry.
Stuff she bravely offers up and recalls with no small horror.
the moorings are taut
oh, what a dismal convenience, to be stuck in pre-set thought!
T.S. Eliot once observed that there is no bad poetry—if it’s bad, he said, then it isn’t poetry. So maybe Miller wasn’t writing poetry at all, maybe she was simply expressing her early longing for authenticity and the freedom to speak with a voice uniquely her own.
An only child, her early years were spent in a rural town about thirty miles northwest of Columbus, Ohio. Living on a farm until she was nine, when her family moved to Northeast, Ohio, she learned, in typical country-kid fashion, to entertain herself, indulging an imaginary life more vivid than anything real life generally has on offer. Now she thinks that redolent time represented early training for the heightened solitude that characterizes the novelist’s life.
“My parents, while very bright and educated people, are not especially big fiction readers. So, in a lot of ways, I’ve always felt like a bit of an autodidact – although I’m probably not smart enough to qualify as a true autodidact – because I’m largely self-educated. Pretty much everything I’ve read and found significant, I’ve discovered on my own. I realize now what a great gift that is, to have felt that thrill of self-discovery.”
Solitary and shy in the extreme—not the kind of traits that earn you Prom Queen status at high school—Miller has come to appreciate, if not always feel entirely comfortable with her introspective nature.
“But this ability, to be alone in a room with yourself, is probably the main character trait necessary if you want to be any kind of artist. I was a goth-band-listening geek in high school. I was such a geek, looking back on it, that I didn’t even know that I was a geek! And I wrote a lot of really terrible, pretentious poetry …My God, it was truly awful stuff. Anyway, I don’t know if I exhibited an early talent in writing, but I definitely exhibited an early interest in it.”
Miller always knew she wanted to be an artist who expressed herself through writing fiction, but having no firsthand experience of artists or writers she didn’t know how to go about becoming either. Her entrée into publishing occurred accidentally.
“I was intending on going to grad school and getting an MFA in fiction. I was an English major – what else was there for an aspiring writer to do? But I had the great good fortune to find out about a job opening at GQ, through a professor of mine, when I was still an undergrad. So that’s how my editorial career happened. But my writing career has been somewhat more fought for…When I saw the chance to pursue an editorial career, I seized the opportunity. But that meant I got a bit sidetracked in my dream of being a writer.”
Although she knew no one in New York City, Miller made the move and the attendant leap of faith. Alone, broke, suffering occasional bouts of depression, shy to the point of debility, she began an era of serious dues-paying, buoyed by the sense that her hard work and sacrifices would eventually pay off.
“I do realize I’ve been incredibly lucky in my career, and lucky in many other areas of my life, but I do feel that I’ve missed out on some fun because I’ve been working so hard for so long! I think it probably has been worth it, though, because I don’t know what else I’d want to do with my life. This is one of the benefits of having only one talent: there’s nothing else competing for your attention.”
Championed by people such as David Granger, the editor-in-chief of Esquire—“If it weren’t for him, I’d probably still be in Ohio,”—and a few influential teachers along the way, Miller is strong in her belief that mentors are of critical importance to young people.
She’d be the first to admit that it also helps to be obstinate.
“I’m very fortunate that I’m such a stubborn person…although I do realize that my stubbornness might often be difficult for those closest to me to deal with sometimes. Publishing is difficult, yet I don’t entirely attribute whatever I’ve done within the field to my own essential stubbornness, tenacity, and my inability to accept ‘no’ as an answer. Let’s be honest here: luck and timing are both necessary factors in success.”
Despite the persistent shyness that leaks into all aspects of her personal life and encounters, Miller is, not surprisingly, given her experience, unyielding in her confidence as writer and editor. Her position as Esquire’s fiction editor gives her enormous influence over writers and their careers, but she tries to remain open-minded and open-hearted—Miller is one New York editor who can still feel empathy.
“I think I’m a tough but fair editor. Unlike a lot of other editors, my heart sinks when I have to write rejection letters – it’s actually a heartbreaking thing to have to do, especially now that I’m on the other side, too, as a writer. Maybe it’s good for writers to hear that there is at least one editor who takes absolutely no pleasure in rejecting their stories!”
Given the choice, she’d rather write fiction than edit and would rather edit than write non-fiction.
“I bore myself when I’m writing nonfiction. I guess I find facts boring. But writing your own stuff is much more fun than redlining someone else’s work.”
Style and character are the two literary values that most compel her own personal taste in reading but her experience as an editor has helped to broaden her literary sensibilities.
“This probably sounds pretentious, but I’m reading A Sentimental Education by Flaubert right now. I have a real obsession with Flaubert. He was a perfect, perfect writer. I also love mid-career Martin Amis, Nabokov, M.F.K. Fisher, Wodehouse. I like high style, humor, and crazy, unforgettable characters.”
Not just writing but reading fiction can nourish the human spirit in obscure, vital and transforming ways.
“People should read fiction because it reminds us – if, in fact, we ever knew— what it’s like to be a human being. Fiction gives shape to life, and it’s absolutely necessary for one’s own emotional survival. I’m not sure if I’m able to identify many literary trends, but I can say that there seem to be far more aspiring fiction writers these days, yet there seem to be far fewer readers of fiction. It often seems to me that everybody’s writing, and nobody’s reading.”
The Coast of Akron (available at Amazon.com) is richly endowed with the style, characterization, wit and humor prized by Miller, however, what we so readily identify in others, is not always evident in ourselves.
“I wonder if any writer feels he or she had succeeded. I don’t know if I achieved whatever artistic ambitions I had for my novel when I began it five years ago. I mean, like every parent, you hope your novel will be a brilliant over-achiever, go to Cambridge, and be publicly recognized as a Stephen Hawking-level genius, but, finally, you’re just happy if your novel can get it together to move out of the house!”
The toughest thing about writing a novel, according to Miller, is letting go.
“As a writer, you have such an intensely personal relationship with your novel – as cheesy as this sounds, you really do have a passionate relationship with it; it feels like a love affair. It gives meaning to your life. It’s been enormously difficult for me to understand that my relationship with it is over, that it no longer belongs to me.”
Despite having a job that others would gnaw off a limb to attain, Miller is adamant that work takes a backseat to what’s truly important.
“Anyone who says their job is their life is a very sad individual indeed. You can’t let your identity be determined by other people, or, worse yet, by a corporation.”
Grateful to be involved with “a wonderfully supportive partner who provides the peace I need to be a writer,” Miller’s greatest desire is to have a career as a novelist.
“Given how difficult it is to make a living writing novels, and given that the readership of literary novels is ever-dwindling, this is a very ambitious wish.”
When all is said, written and done, maybe it’s fair to consider that sweet moments at home outrank sweeping bows on the world stage. It seems like a thought Miller would be willing to entertain—the appeal of something that sometimes purrs, other times pounces, something soft that disturbs the furniture, gives you the occasional playful swat, and is always happy to see you return home.
“I’m really obsessed with my animals – I have a rabbit and a cat, and I’m almost disturbingly attached to them. I love my boyfriend. I love my family. Above and beyond work and love, what else, really is there to life?”