Successful Queries: Daniel Kirschen and “How It Works Out,” by Myriam Lacroix

Welcome back to the Successful Queries series. In this installment, we’ll look at a query by Myriam Lacroix for her book How It Works Out, recently published by Harry N. Abrams.

Myriam Lacroix

Myriam Lacroix was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father, and currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LBGTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing.

Original Query

Hi Daniel,

I recently spoke with George Saunders, one of my mentors at Syracuse University, who told me you were a great agent and reader, and that he thought we might be a good fit. I graduated from Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MFA in the summer of 2020 and recently finished my first book, a 56,700-word linked story collection called How It Works Out.

In How It Works Out, each story offers an alternate outcome to the relationship between Myriam and Allison. Deviating from autofiction’s trademark realism, the stories in How It Works Out hop from one wildly different reality to another and reinvent the characters of Myriam and Allison each time. The book follows the characters from the fantasies of early romance – two young anarchists find a baby in an alley, a dog and praying mantis fall in love – to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy. Myriam, who is writing her graduate thesis on the cycle of abuse, finds that the only cure to her trauma-induced depression is eating Allison’s flesh. When Myriam and Allison’s relationship falls apart, Allison splits in two: her angry side and a gentle, blue-skinned alter ego who performs at the local burlesque club. In “Anthropocene” – a novella-length story about Allison, the call center employee of an air conditioning company profiting from global warming, and Myriam, the company’s morally questionable CEO – an office BDSM affair raises questions about the way society treats, and punishes, its “bad women.”

How It Works Out shares qualities with some of the most original and acclaimed books in contemporary American literature – the examination of a destructive queer relationship in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, the hilarious, self-deprecating autofiction of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, the strange and character-driven stories in Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World, and the precise attention to sentences in Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. The collection’s formal and narrative audacity, as well as its determination to tell its story on its own terms, is sure to satisfy readers and publishers who, increasingly, hunger for works by marginalized writers that aren’t limited to traditional otherness narratives. How It Works Out has already garnered interest from industry professionals such as Zackary Knoll, Editor at Abrams Books. Zack, who read the book in its early stages and is currently reading the completed manuscript, has said How It Works Out is the type of work he’d love to be publishing more of and that he hopes to have a more formal conversation once I’ve found representation.

Born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father, I currently live in Vancouver, where I moved over a decade ago to complete a BFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. In Syracuse, I was Editor in Chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing. My fiction has appeared in The Rupture (previously The Collagist), Litro, and Blue Mesa Review.

I hope you will consider representing me and my work.

Sincerely,

Myriam Lacroix

Check out Myriam Lacroix’s How It Works Out here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

What Daniel Kirschen liked about the query:

For starters, a referral from someone I know and respect who also knows my taste—that is always going to stand out from the pack. That it was George Saunders in Myriam’s case certainly didn’t hurt. So, yes, a great first impression, but from there it’s all Myriam.

The synopsis is intriguing and succinct. I’m not sure which of those is more important to me, but together they are a powerhouse.

Then, great comp titles from contemporary authors. Note too that Myriam didn’t just list these but also included why each one specifically is an apt point of comparison. Few people do this, or they do it in too general a way (e.g. “X is also a novel about a dysfunctional family”—not very helpful). Myriam conveys a number of important things in that third paragraph. For one, she’s clearly well read in her literary ‘space’ and knows what her contemporaries are up to. She also demonstrates an engagement with modern publishing, further underscored by her mention of the editor Zack Knoll (who went on to acquire her book!). So while it’s clear now that Myriam is a mastermind, at the time she just came off as savvy and plugged-in—which was still plenty impressive. 

Finally, what stood out to me above all was the assured way in which Myriam talks about (and contextualizes) her own work. That is an exceedingly rare thing from any author, let alone a first-time author.

The goal of any query is simple: Get the agent to read the book. Any one of the above factors may have been sufficient in achieving that end. To have them all on display made it a no-brainer. And then it’s up to the book to speak for itself, which—spoiler alert—boy does it ever.

*****

Dan Kirschen is a Literary Agent at CAA. He represents authors and journalists working across many genres, with a focus on literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir, and pop culture. Kirschen began his career at ICM Partners, where he worked for 12 years. A native of Rochester, NY, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife.

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