An Evening at the Moth: Mary Norris

(applause)

It's 1985, and my brother is driving a taxi.

He picks up William Shawn.

He says, aren't you William Shawn,

the editor of The New Yorker?

Mr. Shawn allows, as how he is,

and then Dee says, my sister works for you, Mary Norris.

Mr. Shawn says to Dee, not only does your sister

do her job very well, but she's also a good writer.

Dee whips around and says, well then why don't

you publish her?

That was my first literary agent.

I am a copy editor.

On the copy desk we change misspellings,

we impose New Yorker style on other spellings,

we spell theatre with an -re, instead of an -er.

We put a hyphen in teen-ager, and we put

a diaeresis, those two dots, sometimes taken

for an umlaut over the second O in coordinate

and preexisting.

Sometimes we tinker with the punctuation,

maybe poke in a serial comma, but nothing

anyone is going to notice.

It's an invisible job.

In fact, nobody ever notices you until you make a mistake.

But it's a great job, and I'm really lucky to have it.

It took me years to claw my way up to the copy desk.

But what I really want to do is write.

I had some success.

Mr. Shawn bought a few talk stories,

I like to think on the merit of the writing

and not because he was bullied into it

by some cab driver, but most of the time

my stories would come back with a pink slip attached

that said on it, not right for us.

I began to feel as if that would make

a good epitaph for me, not right for us.

I couldn't help but be a little envious

of the writers that I copyedited,

and I tried to tamp that down,

envy is a great evil, but I couldn't help but notice

that for other people at the magazine

on the editorial staff, the copy desk was a stepping stone.

They went on to become writers or editors or both,

and for me, it was this vast plateau.

It was still a great job.

One of the benefits was that there was a night shift,

so I had days free, and I could take classes.

I studied languages, I took Greek and Italian,

and I had time to write, so I embarked on a novel,

was about a woman who worked at a magazine,

oddly enough, and she had many eccentric coworkers,

and she studied languages, mostly Greek and Italian,

and she felt stuck.

I had a title, it was called Sophia Rampant.

I found an agent, but I did not succeed in publishing it.

After many years, I became an okayer, an okayer is

a copy editor, a proofreader, a line editor

and a query proof reader all rolled into one.

Working on the copy desk is to okaying

as the comma is to the semicolon.

Okaying is subtle.

A lot depends on it, see.

You get to have your own opinions.

You get to make suggestions and your job

is to manage the piece through to the printer

making sure no mistakes are introduced

during the editorial process.

Some of the writers are very appreciative

of what we do, some of the other writers,

maybe wish we'd lay off a little,

but it's okay, you have to know when to stop.

I'm plugging away as an okayer,

and I'm trying to revise this novel

when something happens that's stranger

than anything I could make up.

My brother, who you may remember drove a taxi

back in the '80s, and for the past several years

has been working as a church organist,

announces that he wants to change gender.

Dee has always wanted to be a girl.

This came out of nowhere.

I wasn't ever expecting this, and it happened

really fast, within, seemed like, days

Dee was taking hormones and putting on lipstick

and earrings and wearing a tutu.

She quit the church job and started riding

around the village on a gigantic tricycle

with a concert harp attached to the back,

playing the accordion and singing Shirley Temple songs.

Some of you may have seen her, you may remember her,

she was a legend in the village, the Fabulous Baby Dee.

I'm sorry now that I didn't understand better

what Dee was going through at that time.

I could have written about it,

but I was just too angry.

See, I'd always been the only girl in the family,

and I was always jealous of Dee for being a boy,

clearly they got a better deal.

I was instantly sure that Dee was going to be better

at being a girl than I was.

She was certainly trying harder.

After awhile, Dee went to Europe and that was a relief

because we were estranged, but while she was

in Amsterdam, she had a spiritual awakening

or something and decided to go back to Cleveland,

our hometown and take care of our parents

in their old age.

How could I not appreciate that?

I started to accept Dee, and I began to see

that that person I loved was still in there,

and once I was no longer angry

I decided now I can write about this,

and I embarked on a memoir.

It was about our shared childhood,

Dee's transformation and my reaction.

I was sure this was going to be my big break.

I had a lot invested in it.

Several agents looked at it, and they all passed on it,

for one reason or another, no, not right for us.

I was beginning to get discouraged.

I'd never lost the desire to write,

but I had been a copy editor now

for about 30 years,

so it looked like maybe that was it,

maybe I was just going to be a copyeditor.

It made me think of my father.

My father was a fireman in Cleveland,

and I had this insight about that

when I was in college, that when dad

was growing up, he hadn't had any burning desire

to become a fireman.

He had a family to support, he took a job,

it was a good job, he stuck with it,

and 20, 25 years later, that was it.

He was a fireman.

Maybe being a copy editor was like being a fireman.

That's where I was in the spring of 2012,

when two young women from the magazine's website

came to the door of my office.

It was a nice office with a window looking out

on the Empire State Building and they tell me,

some guy has written a piece for the New York Times

that makes fun of New Yorker commas,

would I write something about commas?

I thought, commas, you want me to write about commas?

Then I remembered, oh yeah, I'd been a copy editor

for 30 years, and I should probably

know something about commas.

I have on my desk this artifact from

a legendary New Yorker proofreader, it's a canister

with a lid that has perforations in it

and wrapped around it is brown paper

with commas drawn on it in pencil

and the words comma shaker.

This was her comment on New Yorker style,

that we sprinkled in the commas,

but of course, there's a reason for every one

of those commas, and I suddenly saw how I could do it.

The piece ran on The New Yorker's website.

It was called, In Defense of Nutty Commas,

and it went viral.

I had been writing a blog on alternate side parking

for the last couple of years,

(laughs)

and I had a devoted audience that numbered in the tens.

That comma piece was read by thousands of people.

Somebody wrote on Twitter, The New Yorker

is blogging about commas, it's like Christmas morning.

I realized I had broken a taboo.

The New Yorker has always been famously

darted and snobbish about its editorial practices,

but once I had opened that door,

all these questions came gushing in,

what is it with the diaeresis?

Why do you put two Ls in travelled

and put an extra S in focussed?

Why do you write out numbers that are not

large and round like 433,226?

The short answer to that is we like words

better than we like numbers.

Suddenly I had a column, and I wrote about

profanity in the magazine.

I wrote about semicolons.

I wrote about a character in the Old English

alphabet called the thorn.

It was going pretty well and I was kind of ...

Oh, I also wrote about pencils.

I still use pencil on paper,

and I'm a terrible snob about pencils.

I like a nice soft lead, and it turned out,

who knew, there is a huge online community

of pencil fanciers.

All this was very encouraging, and I got back

in touch with the last agent to have passed

on my memoir and asked him if he thought

there would be any interest in a book

on pencils and punctuation.

He was very enthusiastic.

He helped me put together a proposal,

and he sent it out in August of 2012,

and within weeks I had a very heady series

of meetings with editors and publishers

in their offices, and it went to auction.

I felt like a prize heifer.

I got a book contract, finally.

(applause)

Right.

Finally I was recognized as a writer.

One of the people who was so happy for me about this

was my sister, Dee.

She started sending me links to silly cars

that I could squander my advance on.

I ended up buying a 2005 MINI Cooper convertible,

and I call it the car that commas bought.

(laughs)

Dee was also very good at exhorting me

to keep my eye on the prize, and that this was all,

the great thing was at the end of this,

there was going to be this book.

I wrote about commas and semicolons

and who and whom and the subjective

and the objective case and dictionaries

and dangling participles and the grammatical

meaning of the word gender.

Dee, by the way, is now married

and living in the Netherlands and has an album

coming out in the spring, so she'll be touring

Europe at the same time as I'm on the book tour here.

Something else amazing happened as a side effect

of all this.

I'm not envious anymore.

(applause)

Except of people in the new offices who have

an office with a window.

(applause)