A Chat with the Comma Queen

Author Mary Norris has worked at The New Yorker for over thirty years, proofing, copy-editing, and upholding the high grammatical standards for which the publication is known. Norris will discuss her debut book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, at the Louisiana Book Festival on October 31 with writer John Pope.

We recently spoke with Norris over the phone about her unexpected celebrity as a copy editor, her decades of writing on other subjects besides commas, and her love of language.

Country Roads: We love your video series [“The Comma Queen,” available on newyorker.com] and I’ve really enjoyed Between You & Me. Would you call it a memoir? Or a grammar lesson?

Mary Norris: What it says on the back is that it’s a writing reference book but with large components of memoir in it. Somebody at a bookstore in Martha’s Vineyard called it a “refoir.”

CR: How do you feel about these portmanteaus and these evolutions of language that stray pretty far from the old ways?

MN: Oh, I am in favor of it! It’s not as if you can stop it. I find there’s a lot of creativity in it. A lot of people have asked me how I feel about texting abbreviations and language, shortening things for tweets. I like YOLO. It’s for people who didn’t know what “carpe diem” meant. FOMO—that’s one I heard recently that I like. I’m pretty backwards about them. Somebody has to tell me what they mean, or I have to Google it and find it out. I don’t use them myself so much, but I like knowing what they mean. I think they’re funny.

CR: I’m sure with the video series and the book that you get into a lot of conversations or arguments about the importance of spelling or of grammar rules. Do people approach you often to talk about that?

MN: I do get a lot of e-mail from people, sometimes things that are generally addressed to “Copy Editor at The New Yorker”—sometimes to answer, but sometimes the woman who receives that mail just thinks I’d be interested, and I am.

Among my own friends recently somebody said, “There sure are a lot of commas in The New Yorker,” and it surprised me. I’ve been at the book events, too, and of course people want to talk about that all the time: serial commas and the like.

There’s some effort at the office right now to get me to do videos on “that” and “which.” That’s going to involve commas and get kind of complicated, so I’ve been avoiding it.

CR: Did you ever anticipate that you’d become such an ambassador for language? The Comma Queen?

MN: No, never. I wanted to be a writer. Copy-editing was my day job, and it still is my day job.

But what surprised me is that there was any interest in this stuff. When I first wrote about commas for The New Yorker’s website, they had to twist my arm to get me to do that. I thought, I’ve written about much more interesting things than commas! Why don’t you publish those things?

So I was really overwhelmed by the response to that. I got a book contract after trying to sell a book/write a book/have a book published for thirty years. To finally succeed with commas bowled me over.

In fact, it still does. There are just not a lot of celebrity copy editors. It’s an anonymous job! It’s a shock and, I think, to some extent a pleasure to be kind of “outed.”

CR: Since the recognition and fame and the video series, have you felt additional pressure in doing the job or is it the same as always?

MN: I have felt additional pressure. I’m always aware that somebody might think I’m slacking off, because I have other things to do now besides my job. All the while I was writing my book—and since I added the promotional events where I will do what the publisher asks me to do and go where I’m invited—I’ve been very aware that I have to carry my weight at work, and there is a more intent gaze on me to see if I’m rushing or if I’m giving everyone my full attention.

So I would say that because I feel that responsibility, I have doubled down on my efforts.

CR: It’s as if you were the returning champion to an event. You’ve got to live up to the previous performance! Now you talked about how you’ve been a writer for years and years. Fiction? Non-fiction? What did you enjoy writing?

MN: I tried writing a bit of everything. I tried travel writing. I wrote a novel, which was a coming-of-age story in New York: a woman who saw a lot of doctors in an attempt at self-improvement from the inside out. I had an agent for that, but we didn’t succeed in getting it published.

Actually, by the time I was going to revise it yet again, my heart was not really in it, I don’t think. But then 9/11 happened, and it just seemed completely irrelevant. So I put it in a box under my desk.

And then I tried to write a memoir about having a transgender sibling. That was the book that I really thought was going to make it. I thought there’d be interest in that. I guess I just never got it quite right. I also couldn’t find an agent for that.

I kept a blog too: The Alternate Side Parking Reader. You can still find it online, but it kind of ended. I park my car on the street. You know, in New York it’s very hard to have a car, and it’s kind of crazy to have a car. But I got one because I had to travel back and forth to Ohio a lot when my mother was failing. But I enjoy driving, I enjoy having a car.

So I would park it on the street, and we have this elaborate system of street parking where you have to move your car twice a week to make way for the street cleaners.

That was a kind of colossal bore to do that. I was trying to make a virtue of necessity. I’d write about my parking adventures, but I’d write about anything ancillary that turned up. That actually kept me in practice for several years, because I had stopped doing Talk of the Town stories for The New Yorker. Too many people on staff whose stories they had to publish—and I’m sure they wanted to publish them too! But you know I’ve just gotten older. I wasn’t as eager to hustle as I had been earlier. Young people are better at hustling than—well, middle-aged people. I hesitate to call myself old.

Anyway, I had written about all that before I turned to writing about commas.

CR: Since Between You & Me, is there the opportunity to revisit some of those books? Especially the book about your sibling?

MN: I was hoping to do that. That was my original idea, that I would use this comma book as a stepping stone to get somebody to publish that memoir. So when I was working on the book, specifically the chapter on gender [which delves into the oft-illogical applications of gender in language] I used personal material to illuminate that subject.

Dee [Norris’ sibling] and I had an agreement. She knew I was writing about her, and the deal was I could write anything I wanted to as long as she didn’t have to read it.

But then she was so happy for me when the opportunity to write the book about grammar and usage came along, and she wanted to read it. So when my editor wanted me to put more about Dee in what we’ll call the gender studies/pronoun wars section of the book, I was reluctant. Dee wanted to be able to read the book. I didn’t want her to feel betrayed or to hurt her feelings.

So we talked about that. We had an overnight email exchange. She told me exactly what bothered her—I told her I wanted to use it. We came to the point where she knew exactly what bothered her and she believed I could write around it. She understood the material was not that personal.

She was all right with it in the end, and I was glad we talked about it. But that left me with a new sensitivity to how much it can hurt people to have their gender differences described in a detached way or in public—to have something so personal made public. So I lost interest in publishing that memoir because I didn’t want to hurt my sister.

Also it occurred to me that although I’d been very determined to publish it over the years—and I might still find a way to try to do it—maybe what it was all along was just my way of coping with the situation. And it did. It helps. Dee and I have a lovely relationship now. I don’t want to damage that.

CR: What do you read for pleasure when you’re not on the clock?

MN: This past summer I went on a Richard Ford kick. That was a lot of fun. I’m reading now Ann Patchett—Bel Canto. I was inspired by her most recent book of nonfiction, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. It made me want to read Bel Canto, and it also made me want to go to her bookstore [Parnassus, in Nashville].

I also started reading more James Salter after using some examples from his books in my book and having a correspondence with him over commas. I started reading more of him after he died—I was already reading his work, but his dying intensified that. I wanted to read Burning the Days, now I’m halfway through that.

I listen to audio tapes on long car trips. Now I’m listening to what everyone else is reading: All the Light We Cannot See, the Anthony Doerr book.

CR: When you read, do you find yourself struck by language or structure? What really gets you with a book?

MN: I think it is language. That’s what got me into Richard Ford. I found out he is dyslexic. When he was young, it took him a long time to learn to read. He learned to read a bit later than most kids—I think he was in third grade. He had difficulty with it, but he finally realized that he could do it if he didn’t rush. He read slowly; he just needed a lot of time.

When I found out he was dyslexic, I realized that the wordplay that goes on when he writes is really playful and intense because every word for him, the letters move around in it. It’s kind of a three dimensional object, a word. So there’s a lot of correspondence from word to word in a sentence, from sentence to sentence in a paragraph, from paragraph to paragraph in a chapter. It’s a sculpting. SO when I started reading him knowing that, I’d see all the interplay between the words and the shapes of the words. I’d have to read each paragraph twice! Once, I’d take in the information. Then I’d read it again for the pleasure of how the words bounced off each other.

The language really is most important to me. I do appreciate structure—I’m not very good at structure myself. So I’m always curious about it.

I’m not good at analyzing it , though. I get caught up in language and in story. I always forget to analyze anything. It’s like looking at a painting —people who know art think of technique. I see a picture of a landscape—and I think “Gee, I’d like to be there.” It’s a naïve response, but it’s all I’ve got.

CR: What do you think is lost when people ignore or abandon the rules of grammar? These standards? When they think it doesn’t matter whatsoever?

MN: Well, there’s two different forms of that, of course. There’s people who know the rules and play with them. They always say that about poetry, because maybe there’s some lapse of grammar, but it’s done deliberately by somebody who knows what she’s doing.

The other is being sloppy or not caring. Arrogant. Who cares? That attitude. I know there are people who just hate what they call grammar Nazis. They don’t like to be told what to do. They say the point is to communicate. And that’s true. But if you want to make an impression, you should show that you care about the language. You don’t have to study rules and memorize things or study the grammar of English necessarily. I only know English grammar because I studied Greek and German. But the way to learn how to use English is to read, to read good stuff: the classics, James Joyce, I’ll say Richard Ford. Read the people who care about the language and who know how to use it.

CR: I think if you do just abandon the rules entirely, you lose the history of the word.

MN: Exactly. Well, that’s why I think all of us have those things that are important—the traditions, the conventions about usage and spelling—because it gives us a link to our traditions and past. It’s important.

In literature, yes, every age speaks to the ones before it. It all ends up feeding the same appetite, giving the same satisfaction. All our writers are speaking to each other over the ages.

Mary Norris will appear at the Louisiana Book Festival on October 31. Read more about the all-day event here.