Esther Cohen

Q: What is a Book Doctor?
A: A Book Doctor, which has almost as many entries on the web as Sex or Singles, is someone who helps people with their books. She can comment, edit, rewrite, or just generally help. She can sometimes turn turgid paragraphs into graceful ones. She can connect writers with agents, and help people figure out what a book actually is, and what they want to write. She knows about books. Often book doctors, like other kinds of doctors, specialize in say books about alternative health, or books about food. Arlette Rosen, the Book Doctor here, is a General Practitioner. She knows a small amount about a large range of subjects.

Q: Is Book Doctoring a new profession?
A: Some people in publishing say yes, that it started when editors had far less time to edit, and people from outside publishing houses started helping writers. But I'll bet that some authors have always had help from others--officially or unofficially. It's very hard to write a book: one blank page after another. The page has to take shape, to be compelling in some way, TO SAY SOMETHING, and that's always hard to do.

Q: Have you ever been a Book Doctor?
A Yes. In fact, although it is no longer something I do for a living, I still receive manuscripts in the mail--chapters, a sample page or two. I actually got a manuscript today, about a young woman with a great sex life who Wants More. I only got the opening few pages. All my life, I've loved books, and I've just understood books intuitively. The way other people are about, say, computers or music. I am a book natural.

Q: Your novel is punctuated with query letters. Can you explain?
A: The letters are the book's Greek Chorus, the repeating theme: I Want to Write a Book I Want to Write a Book. I wrote several hundred, and friends helped me choose the 30 best. Because I started helping people write their books years ago, I became a magnet for strangers and friends, who had book problems. Just like other kinds of doctors, people would come up to me at parties and tell me about the books they wanted to write, if only they had the time. Everyone wants to write a book. The desire to tell the story that's ours is part of so many of us. A book is different from say a movie because there is only one author, one creator, one set of hands. The experience of writing books is also very intimate--it's just you and the reader. Ever since I started writing, in sixth grade, I wanted to write a story that was like a whisper in someone's ear.

Q: What about Harbinger Singh, the Indian tax attorney who is the Book Patient here?
A: Harbinger is the hero. I fell in love with him while I was writing. He is free from the usual book constraints: he does not have to be James Joyce. In fact, he's never read him. And he sings, still loves his ex-wife though God knows why, and even likes his job: likes order and being able to do a simple task. He's not caught up in the same sorts of problems as Arlette Rosen, the Book Doctor.

Q: Why did you write Book Doctor?
A: I love books, and that was my beginning. I wasn't sure, when I started, what I wanted to say about them, or why. I write about what I love. My first novel, No Charge for Looking, about Jews and Arabs in the city of Nazareth, also came out of love. The feeling's first, and then the story.

Q: Next?
A I've just completed a novel about Jews and Arabs in New York, called Occupation: A Love Story. It's the story of an Israeli woman from Jerusalem, from a cultivated family--the kind that listens to Bach at night. She moves to New York, becomes a social worker in the South Bronx, and has a stream of affairs with High Placed Officials, Israelis and Arabs mostly. including a famous Israeli dignitary. The book is about her affair with a married middle management Palestinian who lives in Teaneck with his wife and three daughters.