#33 – 'Pick the biggest one and fire’: A Conversation with the Comma Queen

On her breakthrough piece for The New Yorker, the best writing advice she’s received, her favorite Greek Goddess and much more!

This is My Year With The New Yorker Part 1.

Mary Norris the Comma Queen starts her first book, “Between You & Me,” with a straight-up clarification: She didn’t set out to be a Comma Queen. Her first job, when she was fifteen, was checking feet at a public pool in Cleveland. After college graduation, she started working at the Cleveland Costume Company. Then she got a job driving a milk truck (“The best job I’ve ever had,” she recalls). Then she went on to get a job packaging mozzarella at a cheese factory (“The worst job I’ve ever had,” she recalls). In the fall of 1977, the Comma Queen moved to New York. The following year, she was hired in the editorial library of The New Yorker during the first week of February—the week of her birthday and the Chinese New Year. As she came out of the subway at the City Hall Station during that first week, soft fireworks were going off over the snow at One Police Plaza. A fitting start for the Comma Queen—who went on to spend more than three decades in the copy department at The New Yorker.

Mary Norris the Comma Queen. Photo credit: Josef Astor.

On a cursory glance, the Comma Queen’s “Between You & Me” appears to be a guide for the grammatically insecure. But the book is much more: It takes the reader on an adventure that can be created by the kind of person who has spent decades giving careful and divine attention to the written word in its most intimate essence. The book conjures delight, wonder and delicious curiosity about all things linguistic and literary. The reader is treated to the behind-the-scenes of the editorial process at The New Yorker, finds out who invented the comma (Aldo Manuzio, a printer working in Venice, circa 1490), discovers that, yes, in fact, it was the copy editor who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, tags along with the Comma Queen as she goes to the Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum and learns how Emily Dickinson’s use of dashes has given rise to an entire academic industry. Throughout, the book is infused with the kind of details and compelling stories that has the reader coming for the grammar and staying for the humor. “Between You & Me” is followed by a sibling book, “Greek to Me,”—which Ann Patchett described as, “Mary Norris does for Greek and Greece what Cheryl Strayed did for hiking.”

Between You & Me paperback cover. Image courtesy of the Comma Queen.

Earlier this year, I reached out to the Comma Queen: Might she be interested in being interviewed for My Year With The New Yorker? She said yes! It feels fitting that the inaugural article of this special project about The New Yorker is blessed by an interview with the Comma Queen herself. In this conversation, we talk about her breakthrough piece for The New Yorker, the best writing advice she’s received, the inspiring work she’s been reading over the past year, humor writing, her favorite Greek Goddess and much more! Questions are in an ascending order of fun, and the conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You write in “Between You & Me” that the job of a copy editor is to spell words right, but also to “respect other meaning of spell: spell writer weaves.” What have been some useful guidelines for you as a copy editor over the years to know when to step in and correct a writer’s words rather than let the writer’s words be so as to maintain the voice?

The main thing is not to let your ego get in the way. The piece you’re working on is not yours; your job is to get behind the author, help make the piece compelling so that a reader will keep going, not let in anything that would break the spell, like a typo or a jarring grammatical error. No one really likes having her flaws pointed out, so make sure you really are trying to help, not dominate.

In “Between You & Me,” you recall your first big catch at The New Yorker as a foundry proofreader in one of the Christmas shopping columns. You caught “flower” when the writer meant “flour.” What are some other memorable catches you made throughout your career as a copy editor?

Let’s go with a catch I failed to make as the copy editor at a startup magazine called Wigwag. I missed a reference to someone’s “gait” and it slipped through as “gate.” Homophones are the hardest! Everyone was afraid to tell me. We were trying so hard to make our first issue perfect.

In addition to your celebrated career in the copy department at The New Yorker for more than 30 years, you also write for the magazine. What is one of the most memorable stories you wrote for The New Yorker?

My breakthrough piece was about going to Divine’s funeral. I had a crush on a graduate student who was a big John Waters fan. I came late to John Waters, but I saw everything: “Pink Flamingos” and “Female Trouble” in a trashy Times Square movie house; “Polyester” up at the Thalia. Divine died shortly after “Hairspray” came out, and we drove to Baltimore for the funeral. I wasn’t planning on writing about it, because death had been a taboo subject under William Shawn—he cut a reference to a hearse in the first piece of mine that he accepted. But Shawn was gone, and, after hearing me talk about the funeral, friends persuaded me to give it a try. I remember being slightly feverish when I wrote it, describing the pallbearers and the body, the scene at the cemetery, Fran Lebowitz weeping in a limousine … But it came out well—it teetered on the edge between sad and funny. I got a lot of compliments. It didn’t move the person I had the crush on to requite my love and was maybe even the end of that fantasy, but it launched my career as a writer. The editor, Charles McGrath, said, “Build on it,” and I tried. But it wasn’t the kind of story idea I could look for elsewhere. My ideas often had something eccentric about them: an ecclesiastical autograph collector, a Monty Python marathon, Padre Pio’s Mercedes-Benz.

[here’s a link to Divine’s Funeral]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1988/03/28/divines-funeral

What is your favorite thing about The New Yorker?

My favorite thing about The New Yorker is and always has been the cartoons.

As a reader, I find your writer’s voice in both of your books humorous, frank and beautifully clear. Who are some writers or what are some practices that helped you develop this voice?

My first college English professor, Barrett Mandel, at Douglass College, Rutgers University, told me I should read Thurber. I got carried away, reading every word, and ended up doing a master’s thesis on Thurber. All the while, I was trying to figure out why Barrett had told me to read him. As a writer, I wanted above all to be funny. But you don’t really learn to be funny. Humor is part of the package, a way of seeing things, skewing things, and it differs from wit in that it’s not necessarily conscious. Wit is a punch line. Humor is baked in. Barrett taught me to leave off the deliberate attempts to be funny—I had a habit of adding a sentence to a paragraph that was tantamount to saying, “This is funny.” I have learned to lop those lines off. Humor is in the tone, the dry, taut, understated, self-deprecating tone of Thurber, Benchley, and certain other writers who, if you have heard them speak, make everything funny simply by sounding like themselves. George W. S. Trow did that. Joseph Mitchell did that. Ian Frazier does that.

Humor is part of the package, a way of seeing things, skewing things, and it differs from wit in that it’s not necessarily conscious. Wit is a punch line. Humor is baked in.

In “Greek to Me,” you describe the power of the written word beautifully: “I like to think that the first letters were incised into clay and that writing therefore came from the earth. And because the earliest writing to survive was epic poetry, which invokes the gods, writing connects us earthlings to eternity.” What is something you have read or written lately that has inspired in you a sense of connection with eternity?

I don’t know about eternity, but the thing I’ve been most inspired by in the past year is the early work of Edna O’Brien, “The Country Girls” and its sequels. I had copy-edited stories by Edna O’Brien, and even met her once—at the memorial for Philip Roth—but the early stories are infused with her absolute need to write about the experience of being a smart, brash young woman in hidebound Ireland. Her early books were the equivalent of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” They were funny, and there was something inevitable about them—they needed to be written. Later stories of hers feel more concocted from outside events. “The Country Girls” came from within.

You write that Dorothy Gregory, your Greek teacher at Barnard, is the best teacher you’ve had. What is the most important lesson that Dorothy taught you?

What did Dorothy Gregory teach me? Generosity. The best teachers, like the best cooks, are generous. They don’t hold back. Dorothy was honest with me. She told me that I knew a lot of Greek, but if I wanted to speak it well, I had to focus. I had switched from modern to ancient Greek and was very sloppy. She also taught me that the frozen cheese and spinach pies—tyropita and spanakopita—are just as good as, and a lot easier to prepare than, the ones made from scratch.

What did Dorothy Gregory teach me? Generosity. The best teachers, like the best cooks, are generous. They don’t hold back.

Is Athena still your favorite goddess?

Yes, I am into the goddess of wisdom. She’s also a goddess of war, remember. Nobody defeats the goddess! I maintain a shelf for Athena over my desk—kind of an altar—and invoke her whenever I am feeling overwhelmed.

What is your favorite brand of pencil these days?

The Blackwing 602. I actually got hustled for Blackwings a while back. I made a special trip to a stationery store for pencils to give my brother, and all they had in stock was the original Blackwing, which is blacker than the 602. There were two guys in the store, and one of them got on the phone, supposedly tracking down a rare and precious cache of pencils, convincing me that there was an acute shortage of Blackwing 602s. I could order them and leave a deposit. I don’t know why I fell for it; the Blackwing 602s turned out to be available elsewhere. But I gave them a deposit, asked for a receipt, saw how vastly I was being overcharged for the original Blackwings, and was ashamed to ever go back to that store.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Pick the biggest one and fire. It’s tempting to try out a lot of different ways of saying things, variations on a theme, but in the interests of economy, choose one and let the rest go.

Pick the biggest one and fire. It’s tempting to try out a lot of different ways of saying things, variations on a theme, but in the interests of economy, choose one and let the rest go.

PS: For more of the Comma Queen’s wisdom on language, check out the Comma Queen series on The New Yorker website: https://www.newyorker.com/video/series/comma-queen

If you’d like, you can also buy copies of the Comma Queen’s books through links on her website: http://www.commaqueen.net/books/