I've gotten in trouble with my publicist for having used this space to point out inaccuracies in reportage about my book and my personal life. (Any press, even snarky press, must be viewed as beneficial. To complain is to be viewed as a whiner, a malcontent, an agitator. Now get back in line!)

So, please understand that I think this is funny, and that I AM NOT COMPLAINING! I really just got a kick out of it....

A group of people called The Underground Literary Alliance began, a few years ago, to accost writers at readings. The group believed that all published writers were part of some corrupt, insider's game—and that, if you were not part of the New York literary scene, then you were forever an outsider, someone without hope of being published. (The ULA came to a reading I did a few years ago at the The Whitney Museum for the literary journal McSweeneys, but they didn't throw tomatoes or anything.) More recently, when my latest book came out, the folks who post on Literary Rejections on Display started to insult it—without having read a word of my writing—because they thought I was getting too much attention for it; if I was getting attention, they assumed, I must be part of some literary clique, some shadowy insider. (The people who run LROD are quite nice, actually—and, after the kerfuffle there about my book, they decided to have my novel be the subject of their first online book club—much to my happy surprise and the chagrin of some of the people who post there.) And there's another blog I won't link to—or even mention by name—which has also come after me, for much the same reason, but with more vitriol and less coherence.

So I wanted to address the question: Is there a New York literary scene, and if so, does being a part of it help you get published, no matter your talent (or lack thereof)?

I don't know. I certainly didn't have any writer friends—or any publishing connections—before I published my first book. Still, I did live in New York, and so thereby was able to walk my manuscripts over to publishers and agents, and I admit—I did go to readings, not only for the entertainment, but also hoping to meet people. And now that I am published, I further admit: I do have a lot of writer friends, and even play in a poker game with a number of high-profile authors. (And, yes, the truth is, there is some logrolling in this business. You can trace the genealogy of a number of literary cliques by paying attention to who’s blurbing one another’s books. This is truly a bad thing. To paraphrase the writer Fiona Maazel, whom I'm also friendly with: books that don't win some big-name blurb have a harder time getting noticed.)  

But I think that what's going on is less professional than personal: It's rewarding to be a part of a writers’ community. Cheesy as that sounds, it’s true. There's no water cooler we in this solitary job can go to; shop talk is hard to come by. And I think very few people succeed in this business based on connections. Your work eventually has to find readers, and that has nothing to do with whose friend you are. Publishers aren't going to waste their money, in this economy, publishing someone as a favor to someone else. And again, most writers I know became friends with other writers only after they were published.