blogYou can call your book Heyday, too
A friend became one of my very very best friends yesterday when she sent me a note of fulsome, apparently sincere praise about the new novel. (She’s a fabulous cook, and said, among other extremely pleasant things, that Heyday contains “the book version of umami.” Maybe she says that to all the guys, but I’d never seen unami used to describe anything except sushi and fried pork.)
“Do you know,” she asked, “about William Spackman’s first novel, also called Heyday?” Embarrassingly, I did not. I thought An Armful of Warm Girl, which he published at age 73 in 1978 (and which I loved), was his first novel. But it turns out that Spackman published his Heyday in 1953. It’s about a group of Princeton graduates in New York in the late 1920s
A different friend, a novelist and playwright, had told me last week of yet another novel with the same title, also about young men and also set in glamorous 1920s New York: Heyday: That shocking novel of New York’s Nite Club Set. Amazingly — given the recherche subtitle, and its self-description as a book that “takes us inside the little-known gay subculture of the Lost Generation, where a forbidden passion grows into undying love” — it came out only a couple of months ago.
The only Heyday I knew about when I named mine (and only because a friend obsessed with old Hollywood told me about it) was the autobiography of the late screenwriter and mogul Dore Schary. In glamorous 1920s New York, Schary worked as a stage actor.
The first half of my Heyday is set largely in glamorous 1840s New York. I’d thought about calling the book Wonderstruck — but didn’t, in part because that’s the name of a children’s science show on Canadian TV. The moral: I need to decide whether to call my next novel Tuesdays With Morrie, The Great Gatsby, Freakonomics or The Bible.
Kurt, um, you know there’s this crazy thing called “Google” and an even crazier thing called “amazon.com” where, if one is crafty, one can type in the proposed name of one’s 640-page novel and find out, you know, whether somebody else has already used said name. I’m surprised your publiser, at least, didn’t at some point bother to do some rudimentary research like that. But, hey, I work in publishing and I see magnificent oversights like this all the time. Next time: google it.
Comment by Christian in NYC — March 1, 2007 @ 5:09 pm
Thanks, but I’m not (quite) that stupid. My friend told me about Schary’s book early on, when I was thinking about a lot of different titles, and I decided I didn’t care. Spackman’s out-of-print Heyday wasn’t listed on Amazon when I started focusing seriously on titles, and the new “Nite Club Set” one appeared after I’d already decided on Heyday (and wouldn’t have stopped me even if I’d known about it). I guess my larger point is that almost no title hasn’t been used before, and if most people aren’t familiar with the earlier uses, it doesn’t really matter so much. For instance, I published a book of essays years ago called The Real Thing, which I knew was also the title of a Henry James short story; and when Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing appeared two years after my little book, my earlier use was irrelevant — Stoppard’s, obviously, became The Real Thing that everyone knows.
Comment by kurt — March 3, 2007 @ 12:34 pm