Fall and Rise
Media Circus: How one reporter's flameout at the L.A. Times led to her resurrection as a nove
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez may be an iconic example of beginner's luck with her new first novel, The Dirty Girls Social Club, which she sold last year at auction to St. Martin's Press for $475,000. (The book hit stores just in time for this summer's beach-reading season.) But before that she was an iconic example of career self-destruction. Media-watchers may remember that, almost three years ago, Valdes-Rodriguez, who was hired because of her name at the diversity-obsessed Los Angeles Times under a program called the Latino Initiative, sent an infamous 3,400-word flameout resignation letter to her bosses and a few colleagues (i.e., journalists, the most gossipy people in the world) that was quickly forwarded all over the Internet.
Among the letter's complaints: The Times was guilty of attempted genocide for using the term "Latino" to describe what Valdes-Rodriguez insisted are really Native Americans, and that, furthermore, this kind of genocide is worse than "old-fashioned murder and relocation efforts." One memorable grievance was that Valdes-Rodriguez's editors hadn't allowed her to publish a commentary comparing the animated children's film The Road to Eldorado, set during the Spanish exploration of the New World, to the Holocaust, even though "by some estimates the Spaniards killed 10 times more people than the Nazis did."
But, rattle-headed as this gassy manifesto was, at no point was it boring. Valdes-Rodriguez may be a world-class overreactor but she always had talent, and Dirty Girls is a fine example of page-turning women's popular fiction. The book follows six Latina college friends 10 years after graduation and has a Boston newspaper columnist as its unifying narrator. (Valdes-Rodriguez was a Globe staff reporter when the Times brought her to L.A. as a pop music writer in 1998.) She was raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant professor father and "white trash" mother, as she describes her alter ego's background in the book - and that's where she's been since quitting the Times and returning to her hometown.
But the real fun in Dirty Girls is seeing how its author uses fiction to settle old journalism scores. Valdes-Rodriguez writes that one newspaper editor has "the intellect of a newborn hamster." The Boston Globe's disgraced columnist Mike Barnicle becomes Mack O'Malley of the Boston Gazette, author of "right-wing screeds on things like why women shouldn't work and why we should do away with affirmative action."
Hmm, sounds like someone's still mad. Dirty Girls may not be fine literature, but I stayed up until 2 a.m. to see how it turned out, thinking of how many journalists far more accomplished (as journalists) than Valdes-Rodriguez produce wheezy stories with annoying puppet characters when they turn to fiction. The expertly interlinked plots of Dirty Girls sometimes strain credulity: An episode involving a local gossip columnist who cruelly outs a lesbian anchorwoman imagines an alternative-media universe completely innocent of libel laws, and it's hard to credit the notion of lesbians shocking anyone in Boston, gateway to pottery-riddled New England women's colleges and probably the capital of comfortable shoe weather. But never mind. Fiction runs on the suspension of disbelief, and Dirty Girls has an engine that runs.
I also realized that there may have been something else besides the lurid nuttiness of Valdes-Rodriguez's career implosion that fascinated media rubberneckers: She has a supreme gift for narrative drive. Long, angry rants about the office normally become tedious very quickly, but that notorious 3,400-word screed was riveting all the way through. Equally riveting was a second, lesser known letter - 3,200 words this time - that an unemployed Valdes-Rodriguez sent a year later to Jim Romenesko's virtual media bulletin board, apologizing for the first one and begging to be taken back into journalism.
"I was 10 days without food at the time I wrote the letter," she wrote Romenesko, explaining that she'd been suffering from extreme, pregnancy-induced nausea at the time. "I took issue with Chicano/Hispanic/Latino/Indian/Mexican/Aztecdancer/Godknowswhat identity politics, a topic that before and after hyperemesis bored me to death." Well, not quite. Valdes-Rodriguez has a history of railing against white male racist institutions while at the same time railing against stereotyped perceptions of Hispanics as a unified ethnicity - which, in any event, as she regularly points out, is white in her case.
This bee is still buzzing angrily around her bonnet in Dirty Girls. A character involved in Aztlan, the fringe identity movement inspired by mythical notions of the Aztec empire, complains about "a new animated film designed to destroy what is left of our history" - again with The Road to Eldorado! - and "those uppity Xicanos who work at the Los Angeles Times who don't want to acknowledge us ... We'll produce our own version of The Road to Eldorado, and this time we will tell the truth." Such as the truth that Aztecs practiced human sacrifice - some historians estimate 250,000 murders a year - on a scale unknown to any other society before or since? Or that the Spanish defeated Montezuma with the help of other Indians who disliked having their hearts ripped out while still alive? That would be a neat cartoon.
Romenesko posted Valdes-Rodriguez's plea on November 16, 2001, but removed it after an hour, worried about her emotional stability. Three months later, though, things began looking up. Valdes-Rodriguez's agent, who'd been shopping her nonfiction book proposal about Latina singing stars, said publishers weren't interested in that but wanted to know if she'd been working on a novel. She hadn't, but seized the moment and said that she had, promptly writing the first draft of Dirty Girls in six days at her local Starbucks. (Or in two weeks, or a few months, according to later versions of the story she's since told while on book tour.)
But even the six-day version is believable to anyone who's encountered Valdes-Rodriguez's furious energy. I wonder, in fact, how often she writes less than 3,000 words at a stretch. She once sent me eight angry emails in three hours. (Yes, I timed it.) And it turned out that infamous flameout letter hadn't caused her to be totally blacklisted after all: She got a job as features editor at the Albuquerque Tribune shortly before selling Dirty Girls.
"We knew about Alisa's work history when we asked her to join our team," Tribune editor-in-chief Kelly Brewer told me. "She's bright. She's brave. She's bold. She says what she thinks. We value that here, but it isn't valued everywhere, which we took into account when considering that dust-up in L.A."
"I mistook the challenges of the job market with a personal vendetta," Valdes-Rodriguez said over the phone. "The only place that told me they wouldn't hire me because of the letter was the Times." That's right, she tried to go back. "But they were very nice," she added. "[Times editor-in-chief] John Carroll gave me tips about getting back into the job market."
I am sorry to say that I have heard from a few journalists expressing bitterness at Valdes-Rodriguez's improbable rise after her fantastic fall. This annoys me for three reasons: One, plenty of people dig themselves into pits, but hardly anyone has the guts to climb back out. Two, she puts the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald's inane notion that there are no second acts in American lives. And three, what is it with journalists, of all people, who can't appreciate a great story when they hear it? Especially the L.A. Times, which so far has pretty much ignored the saga that it, of all papers, should own?Published: 08/14/2003
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