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It must be bloody difficult, is what I reckon.
Although not, perhaps, as difficult as breaking in to the publishing world from a standing start, knowing no agents and having no connections whatsoever. If the parent breaks that ground first then the child will naturally have an advantage in the same field - not only of the talent/inclination to write, but also of seeing their parent make a success of what is, frankly, a fucking hard vocation to live off - "novelist" being seen as an actual, feasible career choice rather than a slow route to working in McDonald's. Not to mention growing up around authors, publishers, agents, journos and literary types in general.
Of course, the child still has to write something halfway decent to get it published - nepotism only goes so far. Rebecca Miller's doing well, I believe Erica Jong's daughter is published, there's the ever-spawning Freud dynasty, and so forth.
There's a lot more of this sort of thing, incidentally, in acting - where the idea of a dynasty is reinforced by the physical resemblance of child to parent. Off the top of my head, in Hollywood the Douglases, the Sheens, the Barrymores, Goldie Hawn's daughter - in England, Rafe Spall, Emilia Fox, Rory Kinnear - all talented both because and in spite of their fathers. Apart from Milly Fox, who isn't, frankly, all that all that, but is desperately ornamental. |
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