***

“Beauty queens don’t have muscles. The whole point is to make looking beautiful natural. Muscles aren’t feminine, and they make it appear as if you weren’t born with those sleek lines, you had to work for them.” Linda paused for breath. “Everybody uses spray-on wax to stick their bikini bottoms to their butts, and the judges know it. But they better not see any traces of it. Because that would mean you weren’t born perfect. It’s all such a lie.”

The two men in their navy blue suits nodded in unison. One— Tom or Dick or Harry, she couldn’t remember—said, “There have been a number of exposés on the beauty pageant circuit. We’re more interested in your personal story. If we were to accept the manuscript we would need the more complete personal angle.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Linda said, even though she did.

“What Harry is trying to say is that what’s of interest to us is your personal story.”

Linda looked at Tom or Dick—had to be one or the other if his colleague was Harry—and slowly said, “Yes, I believe that’s exactly what he said. But I think I need you to be more precise.”

“The details of your own preparations for the pageants, for example. Is what you’ve already written the complete story?”

“Yes, everything is there.” Linda knew where they were going—they wanted the same thing the other two publishers she’d met with wanted: more dirt on her mother.

“We could use more, you see.”

“This is a memoir, not fiction, though lately the line between the two has been blurred.”

Harry gave her a fatherly smile. “What will sell books is the unvarnished truth about how an innocent girl was exploited by her mother all for the sake of a tiara.”

“What is there in that manuscript is the unvarnished truth. All of the truth. It’s in the context of the rest of my life. This book is not about my mother. It’s about me.” She doubted they would get the difference.

“We want it to be about you, of course, but it needs a hook.”

Linda sighed and gathered her things. “I’m not claiming to be the best writer of all time—in fact, a real writer would probably help. But I’ve told the truth, the complete truth. There’s no more to say. If you change your mind, you have my number.”

They made polite noises about considering it and Linda left as quickly as possible. Okay, so much for making the book a priority. She wanted to see it in print if only to prove wrong her mother’s accusation that she’d written it purely for blackmail.

Well, wasn’t that just another example of her mother pushing her buttons? Okay, she told herself bracingly, if you are going to get this book in print it has to be for your purposes and no other. You want to tell, get it all out, and move on, and that has nothing to do with your mother.