A Publicist Is Reintroduced To A Favorite Author

Off the shelf

By Ariele Stewart    |   Friday, June 20, 2014

After my sophomore year of college, I interned at HarperCollins. That summer, I discovered and fell in love with a book called Vince & Joy. Through the remainder of college, a first job, a layoff, a move – it lived on my bookshelf at home, collecting dust but keeping its place in my book-nerd heart. In 2010, my first year at Atria, I was assigned a book called After the Party by Lisa Jewell. I read it and loved it; I knew this author had more emotional depth than most, and vowed to do my best to get some notice for it. 

On a trip back home, I was scanning my old pals on my bookshelves – there was F. Scott, Lewis Carroll, tried and true Jen Weiner, my sociology textbooks – and a galley of a book called Vince & Joy by – you guessed it – Lisa Jewell. It was an amazing moment in which I felt a real sense of gratitude at how my life had turned out. THIS was the same Lisa Jewell for whose work I was now a publicist! How lucky could I be?

From her very first novel, Ralph’s Party, which was published in the States way back in 1999 Lisa has consistently written stories that are unputdownable (After the Party, thefirst book I worked on at Atria, was an astonishingly perceptive and honest novel about the realities of married life, parenthood, and the power of starting over. I loved it so much, and I was nowhere near the stage of life in which I’d become a parent. But that’s just Lisa. Her characters are undeniably relatable, and every situation she writes about seems pulled from a gossipy lunch with friends (“Did you hear about that woman whose husband left her for LA a few months after their son was born!?”).
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