Thin, Rich Bitches

Janet Eve Josselyn really likes school.  She graduated from Colby College, Harvard Graduate School of Design and Boston College Law School. She is an attorney and an architect - and also an author. Her novel Thin, Rich Bitches is accurately described as "an uproarious romp through the minefield of female one-upmanship."  In today's book blog post, she responds to the prompt I've been having fun posing to my writer friends: tell me about a book that had a significant impact on your life...  

The Verdict (1980) written by attorney and author Barry Reed (and made into a movie nominated for 5 Academy Awards, starring Paul Newman) was a novel about a down-on-his-luck trial attorney who takes on what appears to be a losing case against two prominent doctors whose negligence may or may not have caused a pregnant woman to go into a coma. 

At the time I read the book, I was practicing as an attorney in the city of Boston working with a large team of lawyers trying to recover the cost of every railroad tie ($700 each) on the Northeast Corridor from Boston to D.C. After the case dragged on for a couple of years in multi-district litigation, our client (the MBTA) entered into a settlement with the defendant and we all went out to dinner to celebrate. A month later, we were all laid off, as the partners in the firm were unable to secure enough new clients to keep us all on the payroll.

So I hunkered down in my Back Bay apartment and read a lot of legal mystery novels and novels about trial attorneys. Although I enjoyed them (as a distraction from the depressing task of job hunting), it occurred to me that I could write a legal mystery novel and so I labored at it for the next six months. Conflicts of Interest was the first novel I wrote and I was anxious to get some feedback on it. I called Barry Reed’s law office (also in Boston) and asked if I could speak with him. The answer was no. So I wrote to him and sent him the first 3 chapters of my novel, not knowing if he would ever read it or get back to me. A month or so later I received the three chapters back with a hand written note that simply said that, “It needs more sex.”

Say what? His acclaimed novel, The Verdict, had only a few sex scenes, and frankly, they were embarrassing lame ones that seemed inserted as afterthoughts, so I was confused. Nonetheless, I decided to put some sex scenes in anywhere I could. That’s when I realized that writing from a male point of view was a mistake for me. If my heterosexual main character who was a man was going to have sex with a woman, then I was going to have to write about what it was like to have sex with a woman which I had never done and didn’t want to do. Thank you, no. So I couldn’t do it and didn’t do it. The manuscript just took up space on my computer until the computer eventually died.

Soon after I finished the manuscript, however, I started working as an attorney for the City of Boston. Working in the public sector was the most interesting job I’ve ever had and between my new job and my new marriage, and a year later my new baby, I was too busy to do any writing.

Still, I always wanted to write another novel - but with a female protagonist. A couple of years later we moved out of the city so I had to give up my job with the City of Boston Law Department due to residency requirements. We moved to a suburb west of Boston where I found myself surrounded by moms who “used to have careers” but were now competing to be “the class mom” of their kid’s elementary school class (a high honor).

All of a sudden I had thrown myself out of the competitive, professional working world and into the competitive, stay-at-home mom world. But I realized that I wanted to write another novel and this time I was going to write about something I knew about from my own perspective. So I wrote Thin Rich Bitches, which I perhaps foolishly set in the town I actually still live in (Dover, MA). Well, that was brave of me, and for the most part, the book has been well received in my town - though not by all!

So I credit Barry Reed and his novel, The Verdict, with teaching me a valuable lesson about writing about what you know. Since that simple lesson encouraged me to write my only novel on Amazon, I would say that that book had a profound impact on me as a writer, albeit indirectly.

For more about Janet Eve Jocelyn and her work, link to and "like" her Facebook author page.

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