Alumnae Profiles - Lee Boudreaux '86
One for the Books

Lee Boudreaux '86 has loved books and reading for as long as she can remember. Today, she's living a bookworm's dream-identifying, shaping, and promoting tomorrow's potential best-sellers as a senior editor at Random House in New York. "'Do what you love' sounds idealistic, but it's great advice," she said. "Of couse, in the early days, everyone will try to talk you out of it, you'll be paid very poorly, and your parents will wonder why they spent so much on your education when all you do is xerox all day long. But because I love reading more than just about anything else, I'm better at it than I am at just about anything else." Her energy and enthusiasm make it sound easy. But Ms. Boudreaux's path from tiny Coles Point, Virginia, to the side of authors like Stephen King and Adriana Trigiani reads more like the plot of one of the Southern novels she edits: Girl takes a chance and moves to the big city. Works for free. Works for a little money. Works another job on the side. Hangs in there. Eventually triumphs without losing love of home and sense of self. Like any good page-turner, the early parts of Ms. Boudreaux's story foreshadowed what was to come. A member of the Quill and Scroll journalism honor society, she edited the SMS yearbook her senior year. She remembers other, less obvious clues, such as a bumper sticker in Shannon Spears' English classroom that read "There's no place like Narnia." "I thought, 'That's right!' I wanted to spend as much time as possible in the (fictional) places I love, whether that's Narnia, or Atticus Finch's front porch, or Oxford University with Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder." She also recalls lessons learned on the playing field. "The hockey team was brilliant practice for being an editorial assistant," she laughed. "We didn't win a game in four years. You knew the other team was going to beat you, but you went out there anyhow. You just kept plugging away without any immediate rewards." Not surprisingly, Ms. Boudreaux was undeterred by the "long row to hoe" she faced in entering the publishing world. The turning point came when, at age 26, she sold her car to move from Atlanta to New York. Her choice of roommates, three young men she met at the six-week Radcliffe Publishing Course, prompted this note from her mother: "I suggest you check the Weather Channel to see if Hell has indeed frozen over." Her mother relented, and the move paid off. Ms. Boudreaux landed a job as assistant to the editorial director at Doubleday. When her boss took a job at Random House six months later, Ms. Boudreaux went with her. To meet the rent, she supplemented her income with freelance paralegal work for the first four years she was in New York. She also began to build her own "list" of authors, starting with getting Omar Bradley's memoir, A Soldier's Story, back in print (Ms. Boudreaux still gets a Christmas card from Kitty Bradley every year). Being a book editor is not what most people imagine it to be. "Currently, I have six 300-page manuscripts on my desk and nine on the floor," Ms. Boudreaux explained. Reading takes place nights and weekends. During the day, she concentrates on bringing new projects into the house: networking with agents; negotiating for books she wants to buy; writing detailed editorial letters to help authors through the ardous process of revision; serving as a liaison between authors and the production, art, and sales departments; coordinating with publicists to promote her authors and their books; even writing book jacket and catalog copy. It takes nine months from the time she's done with a book until it hits the shelves. "Publishing is the ultimate needle-in-a-haystack profession," she said. "What you count on, and hope for, is that someone will walk into a bookstore and spend $25 on the 'needle' that you've found and polished."

Lee Between the Lines SMS Accomplishments: Five-year day student. National Honor Society, National Merit Scholarship Commended Student, hockey team captain, voted "Most Likely to Succeed." Higher Education: B.A., English and government, College of William and Mary, 1990. Certificate, Radcliffe Publishing Course, 1994. Career Path: Paralegal, McGuire Woods; editorial assistant (unpaid), Longstreet Press, and clerk, Barnes and Noble; assistant to the editorial director, Doubleday; editorial assistant, assistant editor, associate editor, editor, senior editor, Random House. Books to Watch: Lee's current literary passions include Prague, a first novel about young American expatriates in the early 1990s, and the paperback of Mary Ladd Gavell's I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly, a collection of stories published 30 years after the author's death that John Updike calls "a gem" and which was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2001. Commencement Address 2003