Bookworks Presents Shelf Awareness for Readers: Lucky in Publishing

The first time I was fired from a publishing job I was devastated. The second time, I was elated. When the first one happened, I felt like I'd been stripped of my identity, which was tied to my fancy titles of v-p, executive director of publicity. (It wasn't based on how much money I made, which was wise, because this was book publishing.) I also loved the prestige and respect that comes from making books happen, from working with authors. Publishing is an industry about which many outsiders are in awe. "Oh, I'm just a lawyer, but you get to work with writers like Wally Lamb and Mary Karr. How lucky you are!" Like many people in publishing, I had a semi-secret desire to be a writer. However, working with writers won't make you a writer any more than drinking with plumbers will make you a plumber.

I didn't immediately see that first firing as the gift it was: a wake-up call to get sober. Six years later and four years sober, I was fired from my next job in a round of corporate layoffs. I immediately saw that firing as a gift, because I had developed an identity outside of the company. I had become a writer. I was two years into writing Dangerous When Wet, a darkly comic memoir about my two most important relationships: booze and my Texas tornado of a mother, Mama Jean. I was also in a position to take decades of professional experience and contacts to not only find an agent for the book, but to start my a lecture bureau for authors, which gave me the freedom to set my own hours and finish my book.

Through the earned advantage of working for a quarter of a century in publishing, I was able to be bold and ask authors like Lamb and Karr to read my book and gold-dust it with their endorsements. When people say I'm lucky, they're right, but to be lucky you have to have done the work when opportunity arrives. --Jamie Brickhouse

Brickhouse's memoir, Dangerous When Wet, was just published by St. Martin's Press.