By the Book (Meant to Be #2)(3)
Oh, she also had to send a slightly different version of the email she sent every two weeks to Beau Towers. Beau Towers: former child star, son of two celebrities, famous first for being a teenage heartthrob, then for his general rich-kid dirtbag-type behavior—fights in nightclubs, crashing sports cars, smashing paparazzi cameras, etc. And then there had been the multiple screaming matches he’d gotten into during and after his father’s funeral; they’d been all over the tabloids.
Almost immediately after the funeral, Marta had given him a splashy book deal for his memoir. But well over a year ago, Beau Towers had basically disappeared. He was definitely still alive; his agent periodically sent emails swearing Beau was working on the book, though his deadline had long since passed. But Marta had told her to email him regularly to check in, so she sent him an email every other Monday at 9:45, like clockwork. He never emailed her back, but she’d stopped expecting a response long ago.
She reread the email that she’d sent two weeks ago. When she’d first started sending these emails, they’d been polite, professional, earnest queries asking him to check in with her, or with Marta, or to reach out if he had questions, or offering to set up conference calls with potential ghostwriters—all basically ways of saying, “Please, please, please email me back!!!” without actually saying those words. But after many months of sending the messages with no response, and as everything in her job got more and more stressful, she’d cracked.
Now she had fun with these, since she was certain no one but her read them—not Beau Towers, not his agent, and not Marta, whom she always cc’d.
To: Beau Towers
CC: Marta Wallace, John Moore
From: Isabelle Marlowe
Mr. Towers,
Happy February! February is the shortest month of the year, along with being Black History Month, American Heart Month, National Bird Feeding Month, and National Snack Food Month! (I knew about the first two, but not the second two—we learn something new every day!) I hope the transition to a new month is treating you well! I just wanted to reach out again to check in and say I hope the writing is going well, and that if you need any assistance as you work on your memoir, you shouldn’t hesitate to email or call me. Please let me know if Marta or I can help you with anything at all.
Kind regards,
Isabelle Marlowe
Editorial Assistant to Marta Wallace
She let herself grin at that. Look, she had to find her fun where she could in this thankless, stressful, overwhelming job, okay?
She put her fake cheery email persona back on and typed Beau Towers’s email address into the TO box.
To: Beau Towers
CC: Marta Wallace, John Moore
From: Isabelle Marlowe
Mr. Towers,
Have you read any good books lately? I’ve read a number of excellent celebrity memoirs in the past few months—Michael J. Fox, Jessica Simpson, and Gabrielle Union all have fantastic memoirs out! People insist on giving me books for Christmas, even though I work in a place where books literally fall out of the sky, but I didn’t have any of those books before and was both surprised and delighted to find that I was absorbed by them. Just in case you’re struggling with anything in your memoir, I thought maybe you could read one of those for inspiration! I’m happy to recommend more books to you at any time, or offer you any other assistance that you need. (FYI, Barack Obama’s is far too long, though Michelle’s is great! But really, would you want to edit a former president?) Looking forward to talking to you soon!
Kind regards,
Isabelle Marlowe
Editorial Assistant to Marta Wallace
She almost laughed out loud at that last line. She didn’t think that she’d ever talk to Beau Towers, let alone soon. She’d probably be sending him progressively more and more unhinged emails every two weeks for years to come.
The thought of that made the smile drop from her face. How much longer could she do this?
Her first year at TAOAT had been hard, yes, but still new, exciting, thrilling every day to work with books all around her. But as certain parts of her job got easier, other parts got harder and more overwhelming. Marta gave her more and more work to do—more details to manage, more manuscripts to read, more authors to talk through their work with, cheer up, or get to chill out. And all those new responsibilities were great, and she felt like she was good at most of them, but they were all in addition to her regular work, and sometimes she felt like she was drowning. And since she was one of the few employees of color here, on top of everything else, she was always getting pulled in to give advice about diversity this or inclusivity that or to meet that one Black author who was visiting that day. She had to put a smile on her face and do it all, but it was exhausting.
Plus, what really mattered was whether Marta thought she was good—and when it came to that, Izzy had no idea. She tried to remind herself every day that Marta was brilliant, that she’d learned so much from watching her and listening to her, that she was lucky to have this job. But while that was all true, it was also true that Marta was hard to work for—often curt, not at all friendly, not particularly encouraging, and she rarely, if ever, gave out compliments. What Izzy wanted was to get promoted to assistant editor, and then, eventually, to editor. Not immediately, but someday. After all, Gavin had been promoted after two years, and her own two-year anniversary was fast approaching. But Marta hadn’t dropped a single hint to her that promotion was in the cards.