Not much remains

As my friends know, for a few years last decade I had the honor of being represented by a real literary agent. However, my novel Make Nice failed to sell; then my agent quit the agency and the business, leaving me high and dry without an agent -- a state in which I still find myself. (I recount the tale at greater length here.) A little while after that, the agency's most famous client, David Foster Wallace, killed himself.

Now comes the news that the founder of the agency, whom I recall having met very briefly in my one and only visit to the office, has died.

I was so dumb when I was a client of the agency that I didn't even know Wallace was a client. And I had to read the founder's obit today to know about other well-known clients. I'm not sure what to do with this fact -- that the agency was better known than I realized at the time. It didn't do me much good in the end, though my agent was successful in getting my book looked at by major publishing houses. Maybe they recognized the name of the agency, maybe that's the reason they looked at it. Anyway, realizing all this years later just makes me feel stupid.