At the age of 30, I became an editor. On my first day, while I was at lunch, a colleague tossed a photocopy of an essay onto my office chair, with a passage underlined. She'd highlighted a quote from a letter that Harold Ross, the founding editor in chief of The New Yorker, wrote to Katharine White, who ran the magazine's fiction department: 'An editor's life is certainly a life of disappointment.' My colleague presented me with that morose aphorism because she wanted me to know that I was crossing a bridge. No longer would I be the one generating the words. Now my work would be to sublimate the ego: to squeeze the best writerly selves out of staff members, to give them ideas, to kill their infelicities and rescue them from their errors, to soothe and to prod, often in the same breath. After several years, I realized that wasn't me. I missed my own byline, the ability to prosecute arguments that were my own property. What I lacked was the gift of self-effacement. This week brought...
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