From muckraking tell-alls to Bob Evans’s tantrums,
this Tin House editor has seen it all.

Nothing in life is coincidental.

As a child, I spent my days trying to live down my mother’s drunken foray into fame as cover girl for Feedbag Magazine after she created a horse feed called New Hope. Although many hailed my mother’s accomplishments in the horse world as most remarkable, I found them most humiliating, particularly the part: Have you ever seen the television horse named Fury? My name is Barbara Montgomery. I saved the television horse Fury. By the time I hit Los Angeles in the late eighties, years had passed, so I was truly astonished when I met up with an old neighborhood friend and his girlfriend—a soap opera star named Kitty, who had once been married to Mark Harmon—and he shouted, “Kitty, this is Lee. Have you ever heard of the television horse named Fury?”

I had traveled many miles over many years to remove myself from this particular claim to fame and I know I must have realized then, No matter where you go, there you are. For the moment, it just marked the beginning of another episode in a long and reckless course of working in and out of the entertainment industry.

What was remarkable about my last Hollywood tour de force was by the time I had heard about the job as an editor for X Books in Beverly Hills, once famous for its instatomes about Heidi Fleiss’s whores, Faye Resnick, Larry Flynt, and O.J. Simpson jurors, I had been out of the glitz business for a respectable period of time. I had been writing for newspapers and nonprofits, and had just completed an MFA in creative writing. Nevertheless, a year after my return to Los Angeles following graduate school, when an old friend from the East Coast asked me to interview for the job, I said yes.

Now editing books was not something I actually knew how to do, though I was the editor for the Santa Monica Review and had been a fiction editor at The Iowa Review. No doubt literary quarterlies were a far cry from muckraking tell-alls of Simpson jurors and Hollywood whores. So while I scheduled a meeting, I wasn’t exactly sure as to why.

X’s office, a faux Italian villa, was located then in the middle of Beverly Hills and, like the rest of the world, yes, even though I lived in Topanga Canyon, I knew about Beverly Hills and had maybe even had dinner there once, or at least had had a martini at the Polo Lounge. I also seem to remember doing the big house-tour when I first landed in L.A., but Beverly Hills would never be my ’hood. Nevertheless, I felt exhilarated as I entered the city limits again, all the streets neat and shiny and all the beautiful people in their horsebackriding outfits that reminded me of my mother in the old days, the only difference being that she actually rode horses.