“Even though you wrote a disclaimer at the beginning of the manuscript, it is my opinion that the name changes you use could still land you in murky legal waters. When you say, ‘Then Harris Pilton and I did coke off the stripper’s nude ass,’ I feel as if it is fairly obvious which ‘LA pseudo-celebrity’ you are referring to, especially since Harris is, in fact, a male name—not one that would normally be attributed to ‘some dumb, skinny blonde skank whose daddy pays her bar tabs with the inflated profits from his chintzy, overpriced hotel chain.’”
“While your writing did show promise, it was ultimately the section in which you discussed performing an appendectomy on yourself that made us doubt the authenticity of the manuscript.”
“What you may want to consider before submitting it again to other editors is the fact that your random capitalization of certain nouns does not in fact make the story more profound; it just makes it harder to read.”
“We regret to inform you that we will not be reevaluating your piece, even though you sent the second copy in with random accent marks over the vowels in your name. Also, how would it be possible for two different people to author the exact same memoir?”
“Some of Random House’s readers may find it offensive when you discuss your charitable donations by saying, ‘I often gave money to brown people when I was drinking at downtown bars—many of them were even homeless men who had asked me for it.’”
“Though our fact-checkers have yet to get back to me, I refuse to believe that you were once Louis Farrakhan’s right hand man in the Nation of Islam.”
“I know for a fact that you were not the first man to walk on the moon. And furthermore, the entire chapter you dedicate to the ‘the greatest hoax of all time that was the moon landing’ supports this.”
“In response to the section of your manuscript’s cover letter where you ask if you should add a ‘T’ to the end of your first name: No, I do not think you should. Also, is the whole thing about you walking on top of that pond a metaphor? I didn’t quite get it.”
“I have never heard of ‘Guadalapulco, Mexico’ and the names that you give to the brothers that took you in while going through heroin withdrawal—Pepe and Pablo Sanchez—sound suspiciously made-up. And FYI, ‘au revoir’ is French, not Spanish—or Mexican, as you endearingly dubbed it.”
“You are aware that you cannot write about the specific events of your death in your own memoir, correct?”
“It is considered unorthodox to begin your memoir by saying, ‘I was born a poor black boy in Harlem,’ when later characterizing yourself as an ‘upper-middle class WASP: the product of parochial school and cross-Atlantic yachting trips.’”
“How would it have been possible for Jon [sic] Updike to review your book in The New Yorker prior to even being picked up by a publisher? And why would you attach said review with a picture of Kurt Vonnegut?”
“Not only was it immoral and illegal for you to have copy-and-pasted that extended section of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into the middle of your story, but you didn’t even attempt to change the SparkNotes.com font back to the one the rest of your book is written in.”
“Though you could claim in a court that you were using poetic license, a specific, future threat against the president’s life including a call for your readers to join you is still technically considered a federal offense.”
“This is good, but not Oprah good.”
