How to cope with professional humiliation

On shame, survival, and the long work of knowing.

Pretend for a moment that you are a fictional person named…Cranna.

Let’s say you, Cranna, are a fake literary agent who writes a newsletter about book publishing and feelings. You’re speaking at a made-up annual conference for about 100 people who focus on practical matters within your industry, and your worst professional nightmare is about to come true.

Ha ha. Ho ho. This is a hypothetical, okay? IT’S A HYPOTHETICAL.

Prior to going onstage, you’re already nervous. This is an “in conversation with” event, see, and the subject of this conversation is…your newsletter. While honored, you’re also not sure what on Earth these people will get out of this. They aren’t the authors and editors to whom you usually speak; they’re methodical, detail-oriented B2B types, many of whom have worked in publishing decades longer than you have. What are you going to do, monologue at them about the importance of ego death? Help.

You climb on stage anyway. You tell yourself: this’ll be fine! Surely these people just want to hear something fun and non-technical at the end of a long day. You can do that for them, right? Plus, you’re wearing a cool Fran Lebowitz outfit: brand-new brown blazer, silk turtleneck, Levi’s. No one could be socially awkward in an outfit like this.

You break the ice with a warm aside; polite laughter follows. Relief floods your body—oh yes, this will be fine.

And then the host asks you about your Unhinged History of American Publishing series. She loves those posts (aw, thanks). She wonders why and how you started writing them.

You gamely tell her the story: how you realized you’d been selling books for nearly two decades but didn’t know anything about the companies to whom you sold them. How you challenged yourself to read some books and write up little vignettes based on what you’d learned. How at first, what you wrote was pretty straightforward, Wikipedia-esque—but then you found yourself zeroing in on little evocative moments, little details and asides, spinning vaguely psychoanalytic candy floss from their sugar. For example…

…At this point commences one of your life’s more unfortunate dramatic ironies.

You unspool a colorful little yarn about a 20th century publishing legend we’ll call Bucky Dufresne. It concerns Bucky’s childhood trauma and more or less adheres to material you read in his memoir back in 2023.

You enter a flow state, prattling on. You don’t stop to issue any caveats about what you might or might not be misremembering. (Was Bucky about to turn fifteen or sixteen when all of this happened? Oh, I’ll just say sixteen.) You are really cooking now; the room is rapt, listening. You can feel yourself leaning into the story as you go, enjoying the arc. You are perhaps a little high on your own supply.

You bring it all home with a neat, confident insight—something along the lines of: and once I read all that, I couldn’t unsee it. The rest of Bucky Dufresne’s career suddenly made sense as an attempt to repair his mother wound. His hunger for love, his desperation to be adored, his—

A hand shoots up in the audience.

You are confused but still smiling. Wow: questions already!

“Yes?” you say.

Other people turn to see who’s talking. There is scattered tittering: “ah, the biographer…” “been working on that book for more than twenty years…” “something like one thousand pages…” “just came out Tuesday.” Above it all, you swear you hear a single, excited “uh oh.”

This person takes a deep breath, then announces—with clarion volume and palpable annoyance—that everything you have just said is wrong.

At this point, the two medications you take for (womp womp) chronic shame kick in, brooming you into a mercy brownout. Everything you hear thereafter is not so much an exact transcript as a series of warped funhouse fragments: Bucky Dufresne was a fabulist and an exaggerator…lied in his memoirs. Absolutely EVERYTHING you said…wrong. Wish you had talked about anything else. Read your post on him too; whole thing is wrong. Wrong! Wrong! Wrongedy-wrong wrong WRONG.

And then there is silence.

Of all the conferences in all the auditoriums in all the cities on the planet in which to tell your little half-assed anecdote about Bucky Dufresne—an anecdote into which you’ve projected more than a little of your own psyche—an anecdote about a man whose name 99.99999999999% of the people on Earth do not know—you’ve gone and done it face-first into the world’s foremost Bucky Dufresne scholar. In front of a hundred-plus witnesses for whose respect you long. And scattered publishing media. And a videographer.

Oh, GOD.