If Tolstoy was right and ’all happy families are alike and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’, it follows that all happy folk must be similar, while their opposite numbers are unique in their misery. I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t, only recently, encountered four individuals battling rejection-triggered sorrow—in strangely singular ways.
I must mention here that the rejections were vastly different too. The first was “jilted by yet another man fleeing from commitment”; the second, a senior executive, turned down for a job with a company after four rounds of interviews while the last two, members of India’s over-populated Wannabe-Authors Club, were also bona fide members of the Rejected-By-All-Publishers Club.
Anyone familiar with the literary world knows that withering rebuffs form the first chapter of most authors’ life story. Margaret Mitchell had Gone With The Wind rejected 38 times before being published. Kipling was told he didn’t know how to use the English language while John le Carré‘s first spy novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, was passed from one publisher to another with the line, “You’re welcome to him; he hasn’t got any future.” Last week, writer JK Rowling tried to cheer up rejected writers by posting on Twitter the many rejection letters she got for her first Robert Galbraith novel. In the past, she has shared the snubs she’d got from publishers for Harry Potter—yes, the same one with sales of over 400m copies worldwide. Rowling said she had decided not to give up till every publisher turned her down. “I had nothing to lose and sometimes that makes you brave enough to try.”
Of my two writer friends clutching rejection slips, one clearly belongs to the Rowling camp. She is upset, of course, but refuses to be crushed. Hers is the ‘get back on the horse’ strategy, and nose out a new path to success. If she can’t find any publisher willing to take her on, she will publish her book herself, and her success will “show the fools” what they lost, she says, belligerently. Her fellow-writer, an older man, has little of her spunk and seems to be feeling the sting of rejection extra-acutely. He doesn’t plan to show his manuscript to anyone else. “I knew I would be rejected, and I was,” is all he says before retreating into silence.
Physical activity as distraction is the modus operandi of the woman nursing romantic loss. She is running in the morning, playing tennis in the evening, and has joined a Zumba class. “Exercise is addictive and, unlike other addictions, good for me,” she grins. Perhaps she’s sobbing into her pillow at night, but at least her activities keep her in the moment and outside of her pain. The approach adopted by the fourth character is equally interesting. He’s using old situations when he’s rejected people professionally to maintain perspective and cope with his own rejection. “Those candidates were not bad people and neither am I. It’s usually the timing that’s wrong,” he says.
Are all my friends (’cept the brooding writer) extraordinarily strong or has the world finally learnt there’s no gain without pain? Maybe it’s a mix of both. Perhaps folks realize that dwelling on the past is just as bad as living in it and soldiering on is the only way to get the job done—whether you’re scouting for a job or love, or your name on a book spine.
shampa@newindianexpress.com