I am not a big believer in the maxim that you can’t tell a book by its cover. That idea is a kind of Cartesian split which says that the inner and outer are separate and distinct, but they aren’t. The cover is part of the book and it tells me something about the book, at least it better. I know that publishing houses have teams of experts who decide on the best colors, fonts, foregrounds and backgrounds that will sell the story inside. The graphics and the author’s photographs are all analyzed and scrutinized to create a book that is sellable and appealing and consistent with the message that lives inside the cover.
Titles are especially telling. As of late I have become a bit obsessed with book titles. It started with a fish out of water memoir that I am hesitant to name, not because I didn’t like the book—I did like the book. It is just that the title of the book was wrong and I feel disinclined to openly take the book to task for its bad name and it really is bad. Not that isn’t true, it is a fine title. It just shouldn’t be the title for this book. The problem with the title was that I believed the title and I believed that I was going to get a story that reflected what the title implied. Some may say, “it’s just a title. For goodness sakes, Belette, you said you enjoyed the book. Isn’t that enough? Why are you so hung up on the gosh darn title?” I’ll tell you why. If I go to the store and buy a jar of mayonnaise and bring it home to add a heaping tablespoon of it to my tuna salad and it turns out it was Cool Whip or horseradish I am not going to enjoy my tuna salad. Not that there is anything wrong with horseradish (I refuse to say nice things about Cool Whip) it just wasn’t what was on the label.
Whomever chose the title of the aforementioned book had wanted this book to attract women who like Audrey Hepburn and/or books with Prada in the title. I feel sure it wasn’t the author as the title wasn’t consistent with her voice. I hope that she made an impassioned argument against the title and that she ultimately relented out of promises that if she would agree to their suggested title that she would be the biggest thing since Elizabeth Gilbert, one is liable to make all kinds of concessions with such a promise.
I am not sure if you know this, I don’t think I have ever told you, but I love the title “Thursdays with Igor”. I am pretty attached to it. The title, for me, is part of what gives the book its spirit and its structure and I dread (and highly anticipate) someday find myself in a meeting with powerful people who have paid me money for my book telling me that they want me to call the book “Dr. Freud 90210″ or “The Prada Patient” or worse “Psychoanalysis in a little black dress”. I like to tell myself that this wouldn’t happen and if it did that I wouldn’t cave and yet if someone is telling me that such a title could persuade Sandra Bullock to buy the film rights, I cannot be sure of what I would do ( actually, I am pretty sure what I would do and yet I want to appear to you as if I would struggle with the decision). That said, I know that there is so much about the title that I love. “Thursdays” tells you that this is a ritual. “Thursdays” says that this is something that is scheduled for, planned for and anticipated. “With” tells you that Igor and I are in this together and he isn’t the expert—we both are. And “Igor”, to my mind, tells you a little about him being foreign and how every word he says to me has an accent.
Okay so back to the Prada/Audrey Hepburn inspired fish out of water memoir, the whole time I was reading this ill-named memoir I kept thinking “but where is the girl that they were talking about on the cover? That is not THIS girl.” What I am saying is that for me this title ruined my read. If the book had no title I would have enjoyed this book 100% more than I did.
In opposition to this unnamed/ill-named memoir there are two books whose titles got me through some really hard places in their prose. The first book is my friend’s, Laura Munson’s, This is Not the Story You Think It Is. This is one of my favorite titles ever, it is right up there next to Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (so many of my favorite titles come from authors in Lake Forest. Coincidence? I think not. ). What I LOVE about Laura’s title is that each and every time I made a decision about how her story was going to go or making any assumptions at all, her title would come to me and gently remind me “This is not the story you think it is.” This title changed the way I read her book and for that I am grateful to the title.
I just finished reading Abigail Thomas’ A Three Dog Life. Let me tell you that without the title and without the cover of Abigail sitting on a comfy couch, the kind you can imagine sitting on for hours and drinking tea and eating shortbread, with her three dogs, I could have not gotten past the second chapter and that isn’t because this isn’t a wonderful book—it is—it is just a hard place that Abigail finds herself. As I read Abigail’s painfully beautiful prose describing her life after her husband’s traumatic brain injury that required him to leave their home and live in an institution it was the dogs I would hold onto. Even when they weren’t there, in the early chapters, I would tell myself, “She’s not alone. The dogs are there. She has the dogs.” It took a while for the dogs to find their home in the memoir, Abigail had other stories to tell about her husband’s hallucinations, psychotic episodes and his highly poetic manor of speech. If by page 78 there had not been the dogs I wouldn’t have been able to go on—the pain would have been to much. As a reader I needed those dogs to sit by my feet as I read about the grief, the loss and despair that I felt as I imagined myself in her shoes. That said, I can imagine Abigail’s book without the dogs and I feel sure Abigail would have found a way to go on without Rosie, Harry and Carolina—but there would HAVE to have been another title. If there were just teases of dogs with that title and no real interactions with her pack, I, as a reader, couldn’t have taken it.
***
My father gave me a first name that he considered lacking in gravitas, he told me so. And when he would talk about this he would always remind me of his largess in giving me a middle name that he thought was more serious, “So just in case you ever do anything serious with your life you can go by your middle name.” I would bristle each time he would bring this up. I always hated my first name. In middle school I started threatening to change my name to Blaire-Hamilton. I wanted two first names, names that sounded like I might be the first female President of the United States. I didn’t want a name that made people think of cheerleaders or porn stars. It wasn’t until the summer of my freshmen year of high school when I saw a journalist with my exact name (different spelling) in Vogue magazine that I decided my father was wrong. I could do important things with the name he gave me, even though I would prefer to have a name that immediately makes one think of great literature and not of an archetypal cheerleader.
***
When and if I publish “Thursdays with Igor” I hope that the title will remain. And, I can tell you, that I will not be going by my middle name when and if I publish, so take that Daddy-O. I will be going by my first name that lacks gravitas and my married name that makes me sound like a Greek shipping heiress.
