On the Rare Decency of
Susan Kamil

In the mid 1990s, the headquarters of Bantam Doubleday Dell publishers resembled a space-ship docked on a dark star. As a new editorial assistant, drowning in manuscripts, I’d come in weekends to catch up on submissions. The low intergalactic air conditioner hum made it a great place to read. It was returning one of those reader’s reports—in a memo, printed out, this is how long ago it was—I discovered a light glowing from one of the corner offices.

Hello? I said, poking my head in.

Hi doll, it was Susan Kamil, publisher of Dial Press, sitting in her catbird seat over Times Square, feet on the desk, manuscript in her lap. Black Prada boots, black jeans, black sweater. She took off her glasses and sat up. We’d never met, but in those days everyone with a pulse around Susan who wasn’t obviously a jerk was a doll. If she knew you and liked you, it was doll-face. Everyone else in the company ignored us, the editorial assistants. We were like ants. Susan asked me what I was doing.

I told her I was reading, and then she asked me what I liked. I told her I’d just finished Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House, which she’d just published at Dial that June. I’d actually walked to work for a month holding the book an inch from my face, entranced. She leapt up and pulled a copy of Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry? from her shelf, she’d published McCracken’s debut three years earlier at her previous venture, Turtle Bay. These are fabulous, she said. Then she handed me Susannah Lessard’s memoir, The Architect of Desire—you’ll like this too. It was the first time in months that an adult had treated me like a reader—even though I spent dozens of hours a week reading.

From that day on, Susan treated me like a person with a brain. I wasn’t alone in receiving this regard. Every one of Susan’s assistants had gone on to become editors. She regularly asked those of us at the fringe of the room what we thought. This was unusual. Editorial meetings in those days were harrowing. Not long after I’d started my job, I had to learn to duck at things which might be thrown at me by the editor I assisted, Marjorie Braman. No one in the office ever talked idly about books, or what was worth reading. It was assumed you’d read what needed to be read. I was so desperate for guidance I’d taken to reading longitudinally through the list of National Book Award winners year to year. When I met Susan I had reached 1956.

Susan was flagrantly generous. When I returned McCracken’s book and found out I was reading Giovanni’s Room, she handed me Just Above My Head, which Dial had published in 1979, the year she got her start. She gave me an impromptu history lesson of Dial before she relaunched, back when EL Doctorow ran it and Norman Mailer’s books were coming off the press once a year. She felt like a figure from that era. Most weekends she was editing. One Sunday she motioned for me to come around behind desk and showed me what she was doing. It was as if a surgeon paused an operation to show a college first year how to clamp an artery.

Her trust in curiosity was so wild it seemed almost reckless. But it was a warm, patient and amused belief. Not in a million years would I call it mentor-like—she was simply decent. Kind. A fanatical supporter of the people behind her. And she made this way of being seem not at all at odds with her stylishness. Susan’s pantheon of writers was small and contained, but her manner suggested it was open to all to read and admire. I had never met an editor so willing to make what she did so transparent—who was so public with her love.

In the years since, I lost touch with virtually everyone I then worked with, but Susan was always there. Every time I saw her—at one of her book launches, at dinner, at an awards ceremony—it was like I’d simply stepped back into her office, one week later. Always, she had new books she was crazy about, stories by Hannah Tinti or Patrick Ryan, a novel by Hisham Matar, the latest debut which one of her junior editors, Noah Eaker, had acquired, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger Wife. She took immense pleasure in other people’s success.

I’d never had a godmother, but Susan came to feel like one. When something good happened, she wrote. If something good might happen, she’d write on your behalf to urge it along—often without being asked. When something bad occurred, she’d call you up. She was discrete, trustworthy and deeply loyal: capacities that made her the best distant friend I’ve ever had. She never gossiped, nor did she retrieve whatever grievances or gripes she must have had and pull them out to polish. Even if we hadn’t spoken in a year, if I wrote, she wrote right back.

When Susan became editor in chief and then publisher at Random House, her responsibilities must have quintupled. Yet that response rate never dimmed, and I know I wasn’t alone in this: part of what made Susan herself was her ability to be absolutely present for a wide variety of people. She didn’t mess around in the weeds, if you went to dinner: she went straight to the heart of the matter. If something had gone poorly, she didn’t agonize morosely about it—those were just the breaks. It made her passions seem almost practical: when she sent a book, of course it was good.

Decency. It’s such an unstylish virtue. It’s so often practiced behind the scenes. If it’s real, it’s also often spread so widely as to seem of little value—when in fact, in a world knit by relationships, being a spendthrift with it is the best proof of its authenticity. Susan was its cackling, kind, black-clad avatar. She was fair and she was decent and she didn’t need to be seen being so. When I heard she died Sunday, I wanted to look for photographs of her and found just a few online. I know that probably would have made her happy, because it means we’d be thinking or speaking of the books she published instead.

The last time I saw her was at a book party for Gary Shteyngart’s novel, Lake Success. There she was, standing in the corner, taking up no space at all, the most powerful person in the room, talking to Gary’s agent, Denise Shannon. We chatted briefly and caught up, she gently guiding every exchange back to Gary, to his work, to the new novel. I am just overjoyed she said, and she meant it, you could see it. Happiness lit her like a lamp. I’ll publish anything he writes, she said. God I wish she was here to do it.