Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe LOS ANGELES, Aug. 20 (UPI) -- "Crazy how things change," Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez says of her dramatic reversal of fortune, speaking over the phone from her home in Albuquerque, N.M. "I mean, completely un-effing-believable. Braced for the moment the water gets sloshed in my face and I wake up from this dream." The former journalist's first novel, "The Dirty Girls Social Club," made big news in the book industry when it sold last year at auction for $475,000 to St. Martin's press - a notably hefty sum for an unpublished fiction writer and probably a record for a New Mexico novelist. The book was released in May -- just in time for beach-reading season. Advertisement That the five-day auction took almost as long as it took Valdes-Rodriguez to write the first draft of "Dirty Girls" - which she did in a caffeine-fueled burst of energy at her local Starbucks - has become part of publishing lore, like the movie world's fabled tale of Lana Turner being discovered while sitting in Schwab's drugstore on Sunset Strip. Advertisement What makes the story even more compelling is that just a few months before, Valdes-Rodriguez had hit bottom. She may be an iconic example of beginner's luck now (not to mention furious energy, but not long ago she was an iconic example of career self-destruction. Before she became a novelist, Valdes-Rodriguez was a staff writer on the Latin music beat at the Los Angeles Times, where -- in the fall of 2000 -- she'd sent a remarkably intemperate 3,400-word resignation letter to her editors and a few colleagues (i.e. journalists), the most gossipy people in the world. There's an old saw that you should never put anything in a letter you wouldn't want published on the front page of a newspaper. Valdes-Rodriguez's gassy cri du coeur was quickly forwarded all over the Internet and eventually linked on Jim Romenesko's Medianews.org, the virtual media water cooler. In media circles, having your letter linked on Romenesko is the equivalent of seeing it published on the front page of a newspaper, complete with a headline in 48-point type. "Imagine the whole world judging you on your diary," Valdes-Rodriguez says with a sigh about her ill-conceived letter. This screed - which she now blames on pregnancy-induced craziness caused by extreme nausea - was an object lesson in counting how many racists can dance on the head of a pin. It accused the Times of attempted genocide for using the term Latino to describe what Valdes-Rodriguez insisted are really Native Americans, so that in good conscience she had no choice but to quit the paper (and, in fact, journalism entirely) and move back to her New Mexico hometown to write fiction. Advertisement A year later, this plan hadn't worked out. An unemployed Valdes-Rodriguez felt that she'd been blacklisted because of her notorious flameout resignation and was begging to be taken back into journalism. She pleaded that when she wrote it she hadn't been in her right mind. "I suck at writing books," she wrote in an open letter to Romenesko one year after she'd quit the Times "in case you were interested in revisiting the disaster of me." "I never wanted to talk about this, especially in front of all of you," she added, "because in our industry if there is anything worse than being an arrogant little snot who writes a stupid resignation letter at one of the top newspapers on earth it is being a whiny little woman who blames hormones for her behavior and derails her career to have a baby." But by spring 2002, she'd been hired as features editor at the tiny (circulation: 30,000) Albuquerque Tribune. Even better, publishers had begun asking her agent - who'd been trying without success to sell Valdes-Rodriguez's proposal for a nonfiction book about Latin divas - if she had any fiction manuscripts to show them. After that spell at Starbucks, she did. Advertisement "Dirty Girls" follows the interlinked stories of six Latina college friends 10 years after graduation from Boston University. It isn't fine literature - calling it a Spanish-flavored version of Mary McCarthy's The Group is an obvious comparison and also a bit of a stretch - but the novel is a cleverly written and engrossing example of page-turning women's fiction. Naturally, St. Martin's is marketing it as the Latina answer to Terry McMillan's "Waiting To Exhale." Valdes-Rodriguez's loyal but bickering circle of heroines are Lauren, a half-Cuban/half-"white trash" newspaper columnist (and the alter-ego of the author, who shares the same background); Rebecca, a driven, uptight magazine editor from New Mexico who imagines she is "dethended from Thpaniard kingth and queenth," as Lauren sarcastically puts it; Sara, a Cuban Martha Stewart lookalike with a deceptively perfect marriage; her best friend Elizabeth, a beautiful TV anchorwoman from Colombia who also has a secret; Usnavys, a bossy, ambitious Puerto Rican with a longsuffering boyfriend; and Amber, a Mexican-American pop singer who obsesses about her mythical Aztlan heritage. "I wrote the book I wanted to read but couldn't find," Valdes-Rodriguez explains. "A book about the kinds of complicated, neurotic, ambitious, lovelorn, eating disordered, funny, crazy, successful American women who have been my friends and colleagues for years." Advertisement Or, as the author's stand-in Lauren puts it, in Valdes-Rodriguez's manifesto-style way of introducing her characters: "We're not meek maids. Or cha-cha hookers. We're not silent little women praying to the Virgin of Guadalupe with lace mantillas on our heads. We're not even like the chicks in the novels of those old-school Chicana writers, you know the ones; they wait tables and watch old Mexican movies in decrepit downtown theaters where whiskery drunks piss on the seats; they drive beat-up cars and clean toilets with their fingernails coated in Ajax; their Wal-Mart polyester pants smell like tamales and they always, always feel sad..." So far, the "Dirty Girls" dream continues. Jennifer Lopez and producer Laura Ziskin - Ziskin's "Spiderman" was the top-grossing movie in 2001 - have optioned the movie rights. Latina magazine included Valdes-Rodriguez on its 2002 Women of the Year list. And Hispanic Business magazine named her one of 100 most influential Hispanics. "Who knows? I might never sell another," Valdes-Rodriguez said about her future as a novelist. But she's already working on a second book. She quit her job at the Tribune to finish "Dirty Girls" and to allow her husband, who's been staying home taking care of their young son, to go back to school. Advertisement And she's rather ambivalent about the public perception of her dramatic fall and rise. "I really think there are many ways to measure success and money is only one way," she says. She also wanted to play down the despair she'd expressed when she was unemployed and trying to get another newspaper job. "I'm very saracastic," she says, "so when I say 'I suck,' I'm really glad St. Martin's doesn't." In any case, she adds, she had a thought while recently unpacking some old boxes and coming across piles of stories she'd written as a child. "It dawned on me," she says, "that a lifelong love of writing is not something you lose just because you quit a newspaper gig."
