Successful Queries: Hayley Steed and “I Did Something Bad,” by Pyae Moe Thet War

Welcome back to the Successful Queries series. In this installment, find an unusual situation. Instead of the author querying the agent, the agent reached out to the author. Find here a response letter to agent Hayley Steed from Pyae Moe Thet War that would start an agent-author relationship that eventually led to the novel, I Did Something Bad (St. Martin’s Griffin).

Pyae Moe Thet War (Photo credit: Josh Sullivan)

Pyae Moe Thet War is the author of the essay collection and Malala Book Club Pick You’ve Changed. Born and raised in Yangon, she holds a BA from Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and MAs from University College London and the University of East Anglia. She currently shares a home (and her food) with her dogs Gus and Missy, and is studying for a PHD. I Did Something Bad is her debut novel.

Here’s her original (not quite query) letter:

I was thrilled to receive your email; thank you so much for your kind words regarding my piece in the anthology! I’ve put a synopsis for my book (tentatively) titled How to Talk About… below.

I’ve also attached three essays/chapters of the essay collection I’m currently working on; one note — I’ve labeled each piece 1, 2, 3, as I’d like them to be read in that specific order since the end of one sort of leads into the beginning of the next. I’ve also attached the full version of A Me by Any Other Name; I actually wrote “A Me” before I started writing pieces specifically for the book (hence why there is a paragraph that overlaps between “A Me…” and “How to talk about Language”), and while I’m still trying to figure out how it will fit into the series of essays, I’m very proud of it and definitely plan on including it in the final collection.

Synopsis:

As in most Myanmar homes, my family has always viewed “difficult” topics like death and religion and sex as socially unacceptable in everyday conversation. Growing up, we never talked about anything that was sad, painful, and/or just downright complicated. Talking about “feelings” and “stuff” was viewed as a weak, sentimental Western habit.

How to Talk About…, an essay collection of approximately 40,000 words, juxtaposes my own family’s history alongside the Myanmar culture attitude of refusing to talk about anything that makes us uncomfortable. The end of each essay leads into the beginning of the next, so that the whole book reads as one large ongoing conversation. Each essay title is broad (Death, Language) or even mundane (Laundry), but I want to examine how something so simple can have a ripple effect and play a large role in my culture and everyday life. We’ve never really talked about my uncle’s death. We’ve never talked about God or religion. We’ve never talked about how embarrassing it is that I am more comfortable speaking and writing in English than Myanmar.

My high school history professor told me that Myanmar used to be “talked about like North Korea.” It’s also from his comment that this book draws its name. The Myanmar of my childhood was viewed by the world, particularly the West, as an isolated no man’s land that only existed in Kipling’s stories. In recent years, more writing has come out of Myanmar, but these stories are still most often told through male and/or white lenses.

As a young Myanmar woman, I am able to take apart aspects of Myanmar culture from a perspective that is still rarely published, particularly in the English language. Fluent in both Myanmar and English, I have the advantage of being able to read pre-existing texts and conduct research and interviews in both languages. I try to approach my essays with humor to help soften the embarrassment of making public mortifying confessions that aren’t even acceptable at our family dinner table. Part of me would rather not have these conversations, but I know those are exactly the conversations that should be had.

In “How to Talk About Laundry,” I talk about feeling like I have betrayed my roots as a result of my feminism being at odds with the Myanmar cultural belief of “hpone”, an innate superiority that men supposedly possess (and translates to Myanmar households never mixing men and women’s laundry).

In “How to Talk About Language,” I talk about becoming fluent in the language of my ancestors’ colonizers, to the detriment of my mother tongue.

In “How to Talk About Saying No,” I juxtapose the Myanmar language’s lack of the words “no” and “yes” with my history of saying no to things young Myanmar women should say yes to, such as marriage, children, and bras.

How to Talk About is part of a growing wave of fiction and non-fiction books by women of color straddling two or more cultures: Scaachi Koul’s One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Mindy Kaling’s Why Not Me?, Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. Readers interested in diving into Myanmar-specific culture will, of course, enjoy this book, but so will readers of literary memoir or feminist essays in general.

How to Talk About acknowledges my own privilege of being born into a middle-class family and the opportunities that were presented to me as a result of my foreign education, and I don’t intend this book to be some sort of research-heavy “definitive” study of Myanmar culture. But I want to untangle the still-persisting narrative of Myanmar being a “mysterious” or “savage” country. With each essay, I hope to add a humorous, feminist, and painfully-but-necessarily frank perspective on both the wonderful and the ugly of my own culture.

Please let me know if you’d like to read anything else, and if you have any further questions. I look forward to hearing from you!

Best

Pyae Pyae

Check out Pyae Moe Thet War’s I Did Something Bad here:

Bookshop | Amazon

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Agent Hayley Steed’s Thoughts:

Pyae and I met in a slightly more unusual circumstance than the query trenches. I read a sample of her writing in an anthology from UEA (University of East Anglia) where she’d just finished a masters, and could not stop thinking about it for days, and weeks, to come. So I sent her an email asking if there was more I could read. Pyae replied not long after, so perhaps her reply could be looked at as a query, in a way, though I was already hooked on her writing from the snippet I’d read, and so the dialogue was open.

I loved how she’d already thought about an order to her essays and considered a narrative that strung them together. I loved the idea of delving into topics that were ‘taboo,’ alongside ways to look into the depth behind the more mundane, things that we ignore so often in our societies, and the way Pyae had used those topics to expose the differences in culture she’d experienced living around the globe. I felt I hadn’t read anything like it, and yet it felt so universal in the themes it touched on. 

Most importantly, Pyae’s delivery blew me away—I actually read her samples twice before I got back to her, because I was so absorbed. When I replied, I found myself reeling over her beautiful writing, a turn of phrase with a lyrical quality that was immersive and evocative. I felt like I knew the family she described in her essays—the dynamics, the culture, and their personalities—and had pulled out specific lines I loved, which made my heart ache with poignancy. She’d also clearly thought about where it sat in the market, and was a huge reader, and partnering with someone with their own clear vision for that side of the creative process felt really exciting.

We met to discuss representation in a quaint Mayfair townhouse, the setting of my previous agency, and discussed what a collection would look like. From there were a few months of editing, putting together a proposal, and ultimately finding a brilliant home with Catapult (US) and Dialogue (UK), where the book went on to become a Malala Book Club Pick.

My favorite part of our relationship though was when, having written and published a gorgeous literary essay collection, Pyae popped up, out of the blue, asking if I’d be interested in a romance novel. It was the last thing I expected, but wow, what a treat. That book didn’t actually find a publishing home, but there was a side character Pyae had a story planned for too, who kept pulling both of us in—and that’s what became I Did Something Bad, a rollicking read for romance and adventure fans alike, that will have you turning the page for more sizzling chemistry, and to solve the mystery too.

Mine and Pyae’s relationship is a great example that not every querying journey happens the way you think it does, and that a good partnership comes from loving someone’s voice, their style, their work, for more than just that project but what it’s saying, and for the person behind it. Pyae and I are not just agent and author, but friends too (I hope), and I think that has brought about a relationship of trust, understanding, and alignment, meaning she could write a 700-page fantasy trilogy, or a 30-word picture book, and I know I’d love it. 

Our relationship shows that your query doesn’t have to be picture perfect for an agent to connect with it, and see potential, and that partnerships can be found in all kinds of ways.

*****

Hayley Steed is an agent at Janklow and Nesbit (UK).

___________

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