Letter from the Publisher

It is so hard to get attention for books these days. Publishers lament that space for book reviews in print media is at a premium, but the situation is more dire: there is no space, or vanishingly little. And magazines have cut back on the book-related features—excerpts, essays, author interviews—that once made them lively venues for literary discourse. To get even their “big” titles noticed, publishers have to drill deep into the Web, where bloggers and Internet journals—The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Slate, Salon—carry on the tradition of writing about books. For those of us who’ve devoted our lives to this precarious but spiritually rewarding trade, it’s what they call on Wall Street a “challenging environment.”

It was all the more gratifying, then, to open the New York Times one day in August and find splashed across the front page of the Styles section a startlingly large color photograph of Millicent Monks, the author of Songs of Three Islands: A Story of Mental Illness in an Iconic American Family, accompanied by a lengthy profile.

The family is the Carnegies, and the story is a harrowing one: generation after generation torn apart by alcoholism, severe emotional disorders and, in the case of the author’s daughter, a new diagnosis: borderline personality disorder, an affliction that has been for the whole family what her father, Robert Monks, the distinguished founder of the corporate governance movement, calls “a life sentence.”

Songs of Three Islands came with the testimonies of three renowned figures from three very different worlds—Glenn Close, Deepak Chopra, and Kay Redfield Jamison—and we were grateful for this bouquet of praise. But it wasn’t until the Times piece appeared, two months after publication, that it began to find its audience. Its author, Lisa Belkin, is a well-known writer herself, the author of five acclaimed books, including the ironically titled Life’s Work: Confessions of an Unbalanced Mother. (A more balanced journalist would be hard to find.) Belkin got the book. Noting that it’s a beautifully written memoir, she recognized its wider social value. “If I can do something worthwhile to help people with children who are mentally ill,” Monks told Belkin, “I would think that was something worth accomplishing in my life.” I feel the same way about publishing this book.