"He must have known," Florence later muses, "that sleeping with a young assistant who worked for him had the potential to destroy both his career and his family." But when Florence tries to parlay their connection into a book deal, it is she who ends up losing her job. "She knew that, whoever she was, she was an outsider, like Florence herself." Later that night, Florence ends up in a hotel with her editorial director, who happens to be married to a famous actress. Everyone would know the name Florence Darrow.An ambitious aspiring writer gets a dream job working for her favorite author.Īndrews' devilishly clever debut opens at a publishing-house holiday party in a New York bar where editorial assistant Florence Darrow and her colleagues are debating "the question asked in countless magazine articles, online forums, and publishing lunches all over town": Who is the author behind the pseudonym Maud Dixon? Someone says they've heard it's a man! As one of the millions of fans of Dixon's debut novel, Mississippi Foxtrot, Florence dismisses the importance of the author's gender. She could never quite see the words on the screen, but she knew they were brilliant and would prove once and for all that she was special. When she looked into the future, she saw herself at a beautiful desk next to a window, typing her next great book. All she had to do was become a writer, and her alienation would magically transform into evidence of brilliance rather than a source of shame. Admittedly, she spent more time scrolling through photos of Joan Didion in her sunglasses and Corvette Stingray than actually reading her, but the lesson stuck. But without a doubt, Florence’s Bible was Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She devoured the diaries of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, who were far more glamorous and doomed than any of their characters. Soon, however, her fascination shifted from the women in the stories to the women who wrote them. She had a penchant for stories about glamorous, doomed women like Anna Karenina and Isabel Archer.
Florence had haunted the library, desperate for glimpses of lives unlike her own. “voracious reader, and it dawned on her that a corporate job in Tampa or Jacksonville was not, in fact, the be-all and end-all.
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