More on yesterday's anonymous Salon piece, The Confessions of a Semi-successful Author. Says a reader: "Anne Lamott! Some of the details were changed, and I think it may have been about her offspring's gender. I do think that Bird By Bird's success may cancel this out, although it does include a lengthy section on the let-downs of publishing. Also: former/present columnist for Salon.com??!! Next choice: Joyce Maynard, also known for book-publishing-bitching."

And another reader: "What about Andrea Barrett?" (Answer: doubtful.)

And:

I don't know who it was (though it couldn't have been Anne Lamott because there wasn't anything about God in it—the piece lacked the quirky epiphanies of her style). But if you analyze that Salon piece, the woman was her own worst enemy because she was so blinded by the romance of artistry and a rigid sense of self. She actually did make some money and rack up sales when she was willing to do a commercial book, the one with the celebrity. If she had been willing to do it again, she probably could have put her name on the cover the second time around and fund her more literary ventures that way. She apparently also didn't use her fiction as a springboard to a career in writing articles which, if she got all that critical acclaim, would have been a piece of cake. I have a pretty good hunch that the job she tragically and disdainfully took in the end was probably a real plum in publishing because otherwise why would someone have offered it to her? I mean, would you offer this chick something in customer service or accounting? In which case, her novels did open the door for her at a time when the economy sucks, too. If writing novels got me a great job and/or gigs co-writing with celebrities, I don't think I'd be asking Argentina to weep for me.

And:

It's definitely not Anne Lamott - "Bird By Bird", which has been out forever, is at 8992 on the Amazon sales list, and young mothers everwhere swoon over "Operating Instructions" (currently 2497). Even if her current books haven't been big sellers, she's still a strong catalogue name.

I was leaning toward Jayne Anne Phillips, who published the horrible
please-Oprah-pick-me novel "Motherkind" in 2000, but she had been published
long before 1996. Since the author's timeline fits neatly with the rise and
fall of the Oprah bookclub, I think we have to consider writers who wrote
Oprah-style books but who didn't make the great one's cut.

And we think no to Beth Nugent, A.M. Homes, Janette Turner Hospital, Susan Minot, and no, it's not Andrea Dworkin, and yes, Patricia Highsmith is dead.