Remembering My Friend and Agent, Richard Parks

Over the past few years, I’ve received many handwritten letters from my former literary agent, Richard Parks, who retired in 2015 and moved from upstate New York to South Carolina to be near his sister. “How are the girls and Jim?” he’d inquire in his increasingly spidery hand. “Do you have a new book? Do you have a new agent?” When he first moved, he used to email me, but he was struggling with dementia and other health issues and computers were hard so eventually he switched to snail mail.

Sometimes months would pass without a letter; then three would arrive in a week, repeating the same questions but with occasional cogent additions: “I’ve made arrangements to donate your books to the library in Salem after I’m gone.” Or, “I’m rereading your books.”

I wrote back, but maybe one letter to his five (it was hard to keep up). I’d answer his questions, tell him I missed him. I sent holiday cards, a paint set, Valentines. Then his letters slowed down, until there were hardly any at all. In April, 2023, after I published a new novel, I sent him a copy, and while he wrote to thank me, he didn’t say that he had read it or was planning to—a small loss that I registered quietly inside the wider ones.

Sometimes I reached out to his sister Diane to check in and arrange a phone call. Richard’s voice on the phone was always much as I remembered it: polite, even gentlemanly in an old-fashioned way, and kind to its core. “I’m well,” he’d say. “I’m in a wheelchair now. Is your father still with us?” (my father had died in 2010; Richard attended the funeral). “It’s good to hear your voice,” I’d say. “It’s good,” he’d echo, “to hear your voice.”

Richard “found” me in 1989, when I was only twenty-five, after he read my first published short story in Story Magazine. Several other agents approached me around the same time, but when I admitted that I had no novel in the wings, not even an idea for one, they hung up fast. Richard, in contrast, told me he’d be glad to see more stories—it was a form he loved. I signed on to work with him, and after my story collection was rejected by all the big New York publishers, he told me about a contest for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which I entered and, to my astonishment, won. The prize came with a $10,000 purse, but Richard refused to take the standard agency commission, despite having led me to the award and negotiated my contract with the press.

When we started working together, I was in grad school in St. Louis and he was in New York, so we corresponded over the phone or through letters, Richard’s typed on pale gray stationary with “The Richard Parks Agency” printed in slanted black script at the top. Eventually, after I moved back East, we met for the first time in person. Twenty-four years my senior, Richard was tall and white-haired, his manner restrained. I remember that he seemed very clean, pink and scrubbed, with delicate hands and a deep, velvety voice that belonged on the radio.

In time, I wrote my first novel. He sent it out. It got rejected twenty-five times. He told me not to despair and offered (more) suggestions. I took it back and revised it for another two years. He sent it out again. One editor wrote, in bizarrely poetic detail, that my novel was like a sweater you might spot at a crafts fair, try on and recognize as beautiful but realize just isn’t for you. Eventually, it found a home with a wonderful editor, who went on to publish three of my subsequent books.

Early in our relationship, Richard signed his letters “Best” or “Cordially.” Then one day in the mid-90s, over lunch in Union Square, he told me that he had a partner, Jim, whom he’d been with for many years. “I’d like you to meet him,” he said. After that lunch, he started signing his letters “Love,” even when the content was all business. We never spoke of this change—we were both close readers, both a little shy—but we never turned back. “Love, Elizabeth,” I wrote.

Elizabeth Graver and Richard Parks. Courtesy of the author.

The Richard Parks Agency was a one-man operation except for an occasional part-time assistant, and Richard ran it with the utmost patience, responsiveness and attention to detail, representing a talented list of writers, including Jonathan Lethem, Jessica Treadway, and Susan Straight. Most stayed on with him for years. If anyone left, he took it personally and sometimes shared his hurt with me.

An editor once told me that Richard was both the nicest and the toughest agent she had ever worked with. In a letter he sent me in 2000 with a copy of a book contract he was negotiating, he wrote, “I apologize for the delay . . . I’ve asked for everything I can think of, including the kitchen sink, and we won’t get everything I asked for. But you never know what you will get till you try, and the more of this we do get, the better you will be protected.”

The publishing world can be a harsh place for a writer, and having Richard as my protector was an extraordinary piece of good fortune. Eventually he gave up his New York City office and moved full-time to the hamlet of Salem, New York, where I used to visit him and Jim at the old pig barn they’d converted into a sprawling, antique-filled house. They knew everyone in town and had lavish holiday parties, with a giant Christmas tree touching the rafters and editors, artists, writers, farmers (who were sometimes also writers), carpenters, antique dealers, and librarians as guests. Jim, as voluble as Richard was restrained, was a gardener who grew lilies of many different types, volunteered at the rose garden at nearby Yaddo and cooked gourmet meals while Richard tended to his writers. When Jim’s health started to fail, they got married. All told, they were together for over forty years.

I visited them at the pig barn in 2015, a few weeks before Jim died. Richard had been sending regular email reports on Jim’s health and his efforts to care for him, in which he was more forthcoming and emotional than I’d ever seen him before. The house, I remember, was chaotic, trash cans overflowing, Jim’s hospital bed in the spot where their dining room table used to be. Richard looked pale, too thin, and he may have been drinking too much, but when I asked, he said he was okay. As I got ready to leave, he pulled me in for a hug and told me I was like a daughter to him. Then he packed me a snack for the road.

On March 21 of this year, Facebook pulled up a 2013 photo of Richard and me in front of the Corner Bookstore in New York, where I’d had the launch reading for my novel The End of the Point, the last book Richard sold for me. I texted the photo to his sister and said I’d like to arrange a phone call, and she wrote back that Richard was under hospice care and had been put on morphine that very day.

On April 23, 2024, Richard Julian Parks, born September 25, 1940 in Jacksonville, Florida, died at the age of eighty-three. In June, his nephew Julian, a teacher and hiker, will travel to Salem to join Richard’s ashes with Jim’s on the hill behind the pig barn and donate my books to the Salem Library. If Julian doesn’t mind, I’d love to meet him there to say good-bye.