So You Broke Up with Your Agent ... Now What?

Tracy Slater shares her agent pitch letter that earned her representation for "Together in Manzanar."

Photo credit: Patricia Shinkoda

Happy November, Pitch Clubber,

Imagine for a moment that you have a literary agent. This coveted gatekeeper. They were integral to the publishing of your first book. But your second book, they look at it and say, “This isn’t right for me. … It’s not your book, it’s me.”

And you break up.

That’s the position the author Tracy Slater found herself in when she began shopping the idea for what would become Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp (Chicago Review Press). Tracy had published the memoir The Good Shufu, but when she was inspired by TiM — a narrative history — she needed to find a new dancing partner.

The split was amicable, but Tracy did the scary thing, which was to go back out and query around after a break up.

So this edition of Pitch Club features her agent query letter to Amy Bishop-Wycisk of Trellis Literary Management.

Tracy’s letter came in at 802 words and covers many similar beats that you would find in a narrative journalism pitch letter, but there are pivots and detours that Tracy took that were interesting and illuminating.

In Tracy’s opening thought, she talks about whether or not she thought it was a good idea or not to suggest that she had previous representation because a break up might mean she was hard to work with and nobody wants that stink hanging over them.

Knock three times to enter the club …

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Opening Thought

Dear Ms. Bishop:

On an early March morning in 1942, Elaine Buchman Yoneda stood on a Los Angeles sidewalk, staring up at the building where she’d been ordered to bring her 3-year-old son Tommy for deportation to a concentration camp. It was him that the army wanted imprisoned, she’d been told on the phone the night before. Not her.

Elaine was white and Jewish; her son Tommy, a mixed-race Japanese-American. My book of narrative nonfiction, The White Wife of Manzanar: A True Story of Passion, Betrayal, Murder & Mixed Blood in a Japanese-American Concentration Camp tells what happened next on that March morning, as the U.S. government was in the process of imprisoning almost 100,000 American citizens of Japanese descent in the months after Pearl Harbor. Through Elaine’s story, the book also uncovers the untold history of hundreds of mixed families like the Yonedas, who faced deportation of their relatives and had to choose whether to join them behind barbed wire or let them be imprisoned without them. (Think Farewell to Manzanar meets Snow Falling on Cedars meets Sophie’s Choice—if Styron’s novel had been about a literal concentration camp, not a death camp.)

The White Wife brings white audiences to the story of the Japanese-American camps in a more personal way than ever before, while illuminating how easily the line between “them” and “us” dissolves, a crucial point in this era of anti-Asian violence, Black Lives Matter, the separation of BIPOC families at the border, and debates over White Supremacy and Great Replacement theories.

I’m querying you because of your interest in historical nonfiction that shines a light on untold and overlooked stories, particularly about women and people of color. I also follow you on Twitter and have been moved by how much you champion the writers and stories you take on. Plus, I also just finished watching Bridgerton on Netflix, so we are clearly in sync on the important things. But more about the book that brought me to you:

On that chilly March morning in 1942, Elaine was facing a particularly uwful [sic] choice: to surrender her son or submit to her own imprisonment, joining him and her Japanese-American husband behind barbed wire, but leaving her other child, her white daughter from a previous marriage, outside. Her husband, already in Manzanar, would soon leave for the Pacific war front to fight for his country—the United States—which would leave Tommy alone in a concentration camp orphanage, unless Elaine agreed to be imprisoned too.

In an especially cruel twist, the order to transport Tommy, alongside anyone on the West Coast with even “one drop of Japanese blood,” was signed by another Jewish American, though one whose ambition amidst virulent antisemitism led him to hide, deny, and finally erase all trace of his own ethnicity: Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen. Bendetsen becomes Elaine’s perfect narrative foil, a man unable to reconcile contradictions or complications in anyone’s identity, even his own, leading to disastrous consequences.

The narrative brings readers through Elaine’s incarceration; the political turmoil in Manzanar that made the Yonedas—deeply committed to America’s war cause—targets of escalating attacks and landed them on a “death list”; Elaine and Tommy’s narrow escape through a dark night of riot, murder, and mayhem; her struggle to repair her life and fractured family; and finally her triumph in rebuilding both, all while becoming a celebrated civil rights activist. Bendetsen’s narrative arc moves opposite: after receiving military honors for his role leading the forced removal and incarceration of the West Coast Japanese-Americans, his legacy descends into infamy, as he destroys evidence of his crimes and tells increasingly outlandish lies both about his own ethnic background and his role in WWII, ultimately dying a pariah.

I’m drawn to Elaine’s story (particularly backlit by Bendetsen’s) because its contradictions reflect a more extreme version of my own. I’m a Boston-bred, Jewish-American lapsed academic; married to a native Japanese man whose job frequently moves us to different continents; and raising a mixed-race child across radically different countries, languages, cultures, and families. My first book, the memoir The Good Shufu (Putnam, 2015), was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. I stopped writing for a while after that because in a crazy twist I unexpectedly got pregnant (at 45! naturally!) and became a new mom at age 46, but I’ve recently published an article on Karl Bendetsen’s Mixed-Marriage/Mixed-Blood Policy for the Japanese-American research organization Densho (This clip and more @ http://www.tracyslater.com/about.) From the moment I googled “white wives in Japanese-American concentration camps” (as one does), I fell in love with Elaine’s story and all her struggle has taught me about persisting as a wife, mother, and woman who refused to let others define her, even in life’s darkest moments.

Many thanks for considering this, and warm regards,

Tracy Slater

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Together in Manzanar is an outstanding work of narrative history. You can listen to Tracy on her appearance on The Creative Nonfiction Podcast. You can find Tracy on Instagram @good_shufu and on Bluesky @tracyslater.bsky.social.

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