"Dear Edna Sloane"

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here. She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Gotham Writers Workshops, Catapult, Story Studio Chicago, The Resort LIC, and the Yale Writers' Workshop. Shearn's work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Coastal Living. She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Shearn applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Dear Edna Sloane, and reported the following:

On this page, Seth Edwards is speaking directly to Edna Sloane. Up until now, he has mostly been writing and posting elsewhere, trying to piece together what happened to her and how he might find her. He sends her, here, a kind of a plea: He articulates that he wants to write something as good as her novel someday, and he also asks her to do an interview with him, which he thinks will be good for his career in media. Then he shares a memory of reading her book on a grassy hill in Iowa City, where he went to graduate school, and describes how the book took over his reality in that moment, and also how thunderstorms feel in Iowa.

This page is an uncannily accurate microcosm of the book as a whole! Like honestly weirdly so.

We have on this page a portrait of Seth’s warring desires – he wants to tell Edna how much he appreciates her work, and at the same time is urging her to do the very thing she has clearly avoided on purpose for nearly 30 years, which is to curate a public persona. And we see the germ of when Seth started to develop both his obsession with her novel and his idea that he somehow deserves literary greatness just because he’s gone to the “right” MFA program. He thinks he understands her so completely, because he relates to her novel’s protagonist. But in this letter, he is proving that in some ways, he’s totally bought into exactly what she’s resisting, i.e. the literary-industrial-complex of it all.

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013).

Q&A with Amy Shearn.

My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane.

--Marshal Zeringue