DEBORAH COPAKEN KOGAN

The author bio to the left is the sanitized, short version, the one the author uses professionally, to make her sound legit. But real lives, of course, don't fit into two-inch square boxes. The actual story behind her career is a lot messier and circuitous, riddled with wrong turns, roadblocks and no lack of abject failure...

Deborah Copaken Kogan began her writing career as a teenager, writing book reviews and essays for Seventeen. Her dream was to publish a novel.

Those dreams were dashed when she got to college and didn’t get accepted to a single writing class. Really, not a single one. She didn’t get accepted to the school humor magazine or to its literary society either, and none of the poems she composed ever made it into the student literary magazine. She did receive a B- in the one composition class required of all freshman, but that was only because her teacher Sven Birkerts bumped her up from a C+ out of pity.

Crushed but not broken, she decided to write movie reviews for the student newspaper, until she realized she knew nothing about film.

So she took a class in film theory. She liked it. She took some more and made student films. To fill her academic requirements—she was now doing a double major in English literature and film—she needed a studio class in a different medium, and since photography seemed the most closely related, she did that.

Well. Once she stepped into that darkroom, you would have thought the world had stopped. Whole days would pass by, and she wouldn’t notice. She started winning awards, selling her photos to magazines. Her teachers said she had a bright future in photojournalism.

They were both right and wrong. After college, she abandoned her literary aspirations and moved to Paris to find work as a photojournalist. Before long, she was shooting wars, coups, and social injustices in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Romania, the former Soviet Union, and Zimbabwe. Her photographs started winning more awards, garnering exhibits, appearing in magazines and newspapers worldwide, including Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, PHOTO, L’Express, and Géo.

But all that travel, death, and chaos weren’t easy. She and her husband had started talking about raising children together, but she couldn’t figure out how one balanced months on the road covering wars with motherhood. In fact, she was pretty sure the two were incompatible.

She moved to Moscow in 1991, a few months shy of the Soviet coup. When the tanks rolled down Gorky Street, and Newsweek hired her to shoot the story, she and her husband, who was then employed by ABC News, were too busy doing their jobs to think about the future.

Because she missed writing, she kept at it during those chaotic years whenever she could: assignments for Moscow Magazine; essays for Photomagazine and PHOTO; articles that would accompany her photo essays whenever they were sent out into the world for publication. Meanwhile, she was also secretly trying to write a novel about a young, American, female photojournalist living in Paris. The results were sophomoric and unreadable.

In 1992, she moved to New York, where she took a full-time job producing television, first for the now-defunct ABC News show “Day One,” where she won an Emmy, then for “Dateline NBC,” where she didn’t. Though she stayed in television for more than six years, she never really liked her job, and neither did her kids, who cried at the sight of her suitcase. But she couldn’t figure out what else to do to earn a living, and the health insurance was good.

Meanwhile, her urge to write, suppressed for so many years, began to resurface. Actually, resurface is the wrong word. It was more like one of those cartoon geysers Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd try to sit on, only to be thrust into the sky by its force.

In 1998, she took a leave of absence from NBC and began writing Shutterbabe. Back then it was called Newswhore, which might have been a better title. At one point it was called Develop Stop Fix, which no one else thought was a good idea. “Three verbs,” they said. “It’ll never fly.” (Eat Pray Love—an excellent book, by the way—was still years away from publication.)

Shutterbabe (not her title) became a national bestseller. Its critics took umbrage with the book’s title and its author’s sex life, and they called her a stay-at-home mother, even though she worked forty hours a week writing, and her advance had been twice her Dateline salary. She googled reviews of male writers’ books. None of them had been referred to as stay-at-home fathers.

Shutterbabe was optioned for the screen by Dreamworks and Darren Star, creator of “Sex and the City.” Darren took her on a research trip to Paris, and though they ate well on Dreamworks’ dime, the film was never made. It’s been optioned since by others, most recently by Anthony Bregman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Synecdoche, New York), but she knows better than to get her hopes up. Anthony chose an excellent director, José Padilha, winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear, to direct it, so if the book ever does make it onto the screen, it should be good.

After touring for Shutterbabe, she decided to sit down and finally write that novel she’d always wanted to write. She rented an office without wifi, because the internet had become really big, and she was powerless, as they say in AA, over its attractions.

She wrote 175 pages of a novel. They were bad. She wrote 150 pages of a new novel. They were worse. After her third failed attempt, she and her family ran out of money, so she started writing and pitching freelance magazine articles and shooting Christmas card and author photographs to cover the rent.

One of those assignments, in the wake of 9/​11, took her on a humanitarian trip back to Peshawar, Pakistan, where she’d begun her career. She brought her six year old son along, to teach him something about the world and his place in it. People criticized her for this, too. People like to criticize.

In February of 2003, just before the start of the Iraq war, a magazine editor asked if she’d like to go to Baghdad. She went for a run in the park to try to figure out the correct answer to this question. Her kids were still young, but no longer babies. She’d given up on writing a novel.

While deep in thought, running around the reservoir in Central Park, she came across a dead rat lying directly in her path. His blood had seeped into the snow, his guts were everywhere. She doesn’t believe in signs, but it was hard not to read this one otherwise. The image triggered an immediate memory of her childhood friend, the one who’d been murdered by her suicidal mother. Or so she’d heard. Wait, she thought. How could it be that she was thirty-seven years old, and she'd still never found out what happened to her friend?

She'd actually written a sentence about that friend's murder in Shutterbabe, when her editor asked if she'd ever experienced any childhood traumas, but that sentence was cut when they ran out of time to verify the facts before publication. "Besides," the editor had said. "You can't just toss off a sentence like that: My best friend when I was six was murdered. That's a whole book, not a sentence."

She made a decision. She would not go to Baghdad. Instead, she would do research into the disappearance of her friend and write a non-fiction book about the journey.

Non-fiction, however, was not up to the task. She’d filled in the blanks—the who, what, where, when and how—with a trip to the library and a FOIA request, but what she really wanted to know—the why—was unknowable through the normal channels of journalism. She was thirty-eight years old by then, the same age as the mother in question, and her children were six and eight, the same ages as the children in question, and though she’d never committed suicide or killed her children, let's not forget she'd been a war photographer. She knew a thing or two about Thanatos. She also knew about darkness and depression and trying to mother through it. Perhaps, she thought, she could get to a place of empathy, to see the world through this mother’s eyes. Between Here and April, the novel, was born. So, finally, was the novelist.

Well. When she sat in her office, writing that book, you would have thought the world had stopped. Whole days would pass, and she wouldn’t realize it. The passion she’d once felt as a twenty year old in the darkroom was back. She was awed by this and grateful.

She finished the novel in two years and sent it out into the world. It was rejected, over the course of nine months, thirty-nine times. Actually, make that thirty-eight: one editor never called her agent back with an answer. “Marketing wants to know if the mother could just kill herself, not her children,” another editor asked. People were afraid of the allegory. (The novel follows the same structure as Dante’s Inferno.) “No one’s read the Inferno,” several editors said. It was kind of a low point.

One day, her daughter came home to find her splayed out on the living room couch, hugely pregnant and unable to stop crying. “You’re not going to do what that mother in your novel does, are you?” she asked. Clearly, it was time to call in the psychiatric professionals and give up, once and for all, her aspirations as a novelist.

Then, in the spring of 2006, a tiny miracle occurred. Two of them, actually: nine months after the first rejection, a week after her third child was born, her novel finally sold.

She was forty years old.

A couple of weeks after that, another publishing house called to talk to her about writing a book of humorous essays for them, like the one The New Yorker had published about her ambivalence at being a stage mother. (Her son, Jacob, is an actor.) After spending so many years thinking about a mother who kills herself and her children, she thought sure, why not? That book, Hell is Other Parents, will be released in August of 2009.

After she finishes building this website, which everybody tells her an author should have, she will attempt to write novel #2. If she were you, she wouldn’t hold her breath.