TWO SHADES OF AGONY

Achtung! You VILL read ze book!

I don't make a habit of Googling my name, because I already have a rough idea of who I am, what I've done, and why it's not worth the time to look it up. 

But once in a while I'll type it in and see if anything new appears. And it never does. Until last week.

Unlike the usual sites where my name can be found, like this one and those that publish my freelance work, Google Books was entirely unexpected. Especially since I was credited for writing a German novel, Die Qual der Wahl, in 1985.

While I've never boasted of having a photographic memory -- mine could best be described as sketchy -- I definitely would have remembered writing a German-language novel, even if it was four decades ago. 

I had an idea of what was going on, though. But first I needed to see what the title meant in English. Another trip on the Google machine translated Die Qual der Wahl to The Agony of Choice. 

OK, now I knew I never wrote anything with a title more overheated than a Starbucks venti. But in 1984 -- a year before Die Qual der Wahl's publication -- I had written a "young adult romance" novel, a genre that likely doesn't exist anymore. Unlike today's more serious y.a. books, this kind was light and frothy, without the sex, illness, and drugs prevalent in these novels today. 

My masterpiece, which I titled Two Shades of Autumn, was about a teen girl in a small town who starts dating an older, local "rock star" who writes a song about her -- all the while becoming friendly with the perfectly nice boy in her class who has a crush on her. Sounds like the agony of choice!

Berkley Publishing's Caprice subsidiary changed my title to the rather prosaic Love Notes, a stab in the back eased by the then-princely sum of $3,000. At the time, these y.a. novels were all written by (or credited to) women. While my name remained on the copyright page, I asked my editor to credit Love Notes to Leah Dionne, which was the Hebrew name of the girl I had just started dating. Understandably, she was quite proud of being a muse of sorts for a soon-to-be-published first-time author. 

The cover that launched
a thousand sighs.

By the time she read the advance copy of the book several months later, our relationship was becoming badly frayed. In a ridiculously fervid exchange, my girlfriend -- the kind of high IQ type who probably read Notes from Underground in 2nd grade -- decided that Love Notes was not the kind of dreck she wanted her name attached to. I sarcastically promised that she had nothing to worry about -- her in-te-lek-shu-al friends would never lay their eyes on it anyway. 

Ironic how the Love Notes controversy proved to be one more nail in love's coffin. Further adding financial insult to relationship injury, Caprice's three-book deals given to other writers came to a screeching halt when it came to me -- despite my editor informing me Love Notes had quickly become their best-selling y.a. novel. 

I don't know how much a used copy of Die Qual der Wahl is going for these days. But if you're strictly an English-language reader, you can find Love Notes on Amazon for $16.01 -- a 611% jump from its original price of $2.25, an increase rivaling anything on Dow Jones today. Grab it while you can so you can resell it in another 40 years. Your grandchildren will thank you, even if the real Leah Dionne won't.

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