I got a request for an author photo from a publisher last week. That’s one aspect of the writing life that always makes me shudder, and I’ve made it a rule politely to decline these requests. Don’t get me wrong: I recognize why author photos are important to publishers. They help sell books, if only because readers seem to feel a greater personal connection to any author who gazes off wistfully into the distance on the back cover of his latest novel. I’ve stood in bookstores and watched people pick up books, glance quickly at the cover, then flip them over to check out the author’s photo. And if you’re Jonathan Safran Foer or Louise Erdrich, a photo might help close the deal. If you’re me, not so much. But that isn’t why I refuse to include a photo. My feeling is that most author photos too easily slip into a celebration of — or a sales pitch for ??? an idealized authorial persona that we construct for the world. Writing offers us a chance to transcend the self, but the author photo makes an implicit ego claim: “Gaze upon my world-weary eyes and invite me to your party. I’m charming and roguish, and I haven’t eaten for days.” It’s the authorial equivalent of a stroll up the red carpet. (“Who are you wearing?”) And let’s face it: nobody looks like their author photo anyway. I can’t help feeling that by going along with the charade, we become complicit with publishers’ efforts to turn writers into celebrities, authors into brands, and books into commodities.
The next time I’m asked for an author photo, I’m tempted to send them this guy:
If you plan to be at the Associated Writing Programs Convention this week, stop by our booth at the book fair and meet him in person.
In fact, with AWP starting on Thursday, I find myself actually looking forward to some of the perverse pleasures that such conferences offer: the free-flowing currents of ego and anxiety, the dense fog of ambition and disillusionment that hangs in corners of every room, and, oh yeah, the writers. Actually, my favorite AWP entertainment is a game best played among the publishers’ displays at the book fair, which I like to call “Author Photo Affective Disorder.” The basic principle is simple: find the author browsing the stalls who looks least like his or her publicity photo. It’s a challenge, because the average author photo reflects what I like to call the 20/20 rule: he might have looked something like that once, but it was 20 years and 20 pounds ago. So that gives us the first rule of our game: find the author with the most out-of-date photo. Is it the poet in her late 60’s whose publicity photo ??? backlit and windblown — looks vaguely like Stevie Nicks? Is it the novelist who began cultivating a grizzled bad-boy look when his first book was published and has been sitting at that same table in the White Horse Tavern, nursing the same glass of Irish whiskey, in the same evocative cloud of cigarette smoke, for almost four decades? (He’s tenured now, and we’re happy to report that he’s been on the wagon for years.)
But let’s not limit our cruelty to the old and successful. One can play this game where the young writers graze as well. Find a spot in the hotel bar and observe the fierce mating rituals of the MFAs. Now look for the writer who most seems to be posing for an author photo while he waits for his Rolling Rock. Is it that angry young fiction writer with the Jonathan Franzen glasses gazing pensively off into the distance? Or the willowy poet who keeps shaking out her expensive hair? Watch for ironic sidelong glances and hands resting casually near faces. At AWP, or KGB, or any of the other alphabetical locales where writers gather, the young often seem to be in a hurry to become an author photo, if only in their own minds, while older writers play out some kind of anxious Dorian Gray fantasy in reverse, as the photos on their books remain fixed in some distant moment of perfection or promise, even as their real selves age into hard-won wisdom. When I see this, I’m tempted simply to do what I do at readings: close my eyes and just listen to the words, which represent, for most writers, the true self behind all the posing.