In 1981, Nettie Jones was shopping her debut novel, “Fish Tales,” a shocking story about a married woman’s booze- and drug-fueled sexual escapades.
Full of violence, dark humor and graphic erotic scenes, it wasn’t an easy sell. One agent put it down after a few pages. The first two editors who read the book rejected it. Then Jones mailed the manuscript to the novelist Toni Morrison, who was working at Random House, editing groundbreaking books by Black luminaries like Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara and Henry Dumas. Morrison liked the voice in “Fish Tales,” and bought the book for $3,000.
When it came out in 1984, “Fish Tales” caused a stir. Set in Detroit and New York City during the 1970s, it’s narrated by a wily, unhinged woman named Lewis Jones, who ricochets between night clubs and sex parties in a haze of champagne, vodka and Valium.
Critics did not know what to make of Jones, who confessed that she had based the story on her own life. A New York Times reviewer praised her ambition but found the book “assaultive” and “pornographic.” After a brief spell in the spotlight, Jones slipped into obscurity.
In the following decades, she bounced between teaching jobs and fellowships, attended divinity school and struggled with addiction and bipolar disorder, eventually ending up in a Manhattan shelter for more than a year.
Jones’s fortunes shifted last spring, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux made an offer to republish “Fish Tales,” which had been long out of print. Now 84, sober and living in subsidized housing in Brooklyn, Jones said she’s not all that surprised that the book is getting a second life.
“I had — can we just call it faith? — that this would happen,” she said. “I was just hoping something was going to happen before I died, and then my concern was, Am I going to get paid before I die?”
This time, “Fish Tales” is drawing the rapturous buzz that Jones hoped for 40 years ago. The new edition that came out in the United States this week drew endorsements from acclaimed writers like Justin Torres, Raven Leilani and Angela Flournoy.
“It’s a really raucous and raunchy book, but it’s also tender and disarming at times,” Flournoy said.
International editions are already lined up in Britain, Norway, Poland, Germany and Brazil.
For Jones and her admirers, the attention on her work feels overdue.
“I have some wonderful young authors now contacting me,” Jones said. “I am the grandmother now. Or am I the grand lady? The grand author?”
Whatever rank Jones now occupies in the literary world, the modifier “grand” suits her. Jones, who wore a black beret that accentuated her piercing pale blue eyes, has a big booming laugh and an even bigger persona, a spiky wit and an almost alarming candor. Her voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper when she reflected on the “Hollywood lifestyle” she once led, and how her undaunted pursuit of pleasure fed into her fiction.
“They say this book is erotic,” she said in a quiet tone, feigning shock, before bursting into a laugh. “Make me stop,” she pleaded. “Can’t you go home now?”
Jones was born in Arlington, Ga. in 1941, the elder of two daughters in a working class family. Her father was in the Army and her mother, who chafed at the lack of opportunity in the South, moved to Detroit to work in the auto industry. Jones was raised by her grandparents until she was 5, when she and her sister joined their mother in Detroit.
Kicked out of high school after becoming pregnant, Jones had a daughter at 17. She and the baby’s father married and soon divorced; Jones managed to continue her education as a young single mother, eventually getting her high school diploma and then a bachelor’s degree in education from Wayne State University. She got married again, to a dentist, and taught high school in Detroit.
But Jones felt suffocated by domestic life. After receiving her masters in education, she moved to New York in 1971 to study at the New School for Social Research, but school was mostly an excuse to escape. Her husband and daughter, who was then 13, stayed in Detroit.
“She definitely was a free spirit who set her own rules,” said Jones’s daughter, Lynne Harris.
Unleashed from family responsibilities, Jones lived with a roommate on Ninth Street in Greenwich Village, and threw herself into partying and sexual experimentation, which was plentiful in 1970s bohemian circles. Her husband tolerated her infidelity, but Jones felt ambivalent about marriage, and eventually divorced him. “I got tired of being an adulteress,” she said.
In the late 1970s, she moved back to Michigan and devoted herself to writing. “I began thinking, What do you write about, what do you know the most about, and this is kind of shameful, but I think I know the most about men,” she said with a smile that made it plain that she did not find this the least bit shameful.
Lewis, the protagonist of “Fish Tales,” is a restless married woman in her 30s with an indulgent husband who supports her while she bounces between Detroit and New York. Lewis and her sidekick and enabler, a gay escort who goes by Kitty-Kat, host sex parties they call “orgyettes” and consume vast quantities of drugs and alcohol. Lewis cycles through fits of mania, attacking her lovers and slashing her wrists with a broken champagne glass — impulses that lead to her undoing.
Jones didn’t have an agent, so she sought the advice of a friend, the novelist Gayl Jones, who gave her a list of editors to query, among them her own editor, Morrison. Morrison saw its potential after other editors balked, but rarely communicated with Jones, and quit Random House to focus on her own writing the year before “Fish Tales” was published.
Looking back, Jones still feels stung by how little editorial attention and promotion she received.
“I just don’t think I was what she expected, and that was because I had no fear of her — I didn’t know I should’ve,” Jones said of Morrison, then laughed. “I wish I had kissed her hand, if that’s what it took.”
Other aspects of the publication bothered Jones. She hated the book’s cover, which featured a Black woman, lying naked under a quilt, floating against a blue backdrop under a large green fish. Jones was deliberately opaque about her heroine’s race, and left her author photo off the cover because she didn’t want her own racial background to shape the book’s reception.
When “Fish Tales” came out, Jones was living at Yaddo, an artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. She was already deep into writing “Mischief Makers,” a novel about race and class that centers on a Black woman from Detroit who leaves the city and adopts the identity of a white woman. Published in 1989, the book received strong reviews and established Jones as a versatile storyteller; on the jacket copy, Jones is hailed as “one of the major female Black writers in the United States.”
Jones started work on another novel, “Puma,” which followed the themes and characters of “Mischief Makers.” But drinking and mental illness stalled her progress and strained some of her relationships, she said.
“That period in her life was very disheartening, because I knew that she was a woman that had so much more to offer the world, and she was being cast aside,” said Valerie J. Kindle, the mayor of Harper Woods, Mich., who first met Jones in the 1970s — Jones was her teacher in 7th grade — and has remained close with her.
For the next few decades, Jones bounced between academic posts and taught creative writing at colleges around the country. But she was often on the edge of poverty, and rarely stayed put for long. After leaving her teaching job at N.Y.U. in 2010, she spent long stretches in Jamaica, staying with a friend who owned a spa in Negril.
Years later, when she decided to settle down again in New York, she was unable to afford rent. In 2014, she ended up living at Lenox Hill Women’s Mental Health Shelter on the Upper East Side. A planned two-week stay stretched to 15 months.
Eventually, Jones got a studio in a subsidized housing unit in Brooklyn, where she still lives. She gave up alcohol, though she couldn’t recall exactly when. “I’ve been sober a long time,” she said. “I cannot tell you the day, because you’re sober and then you’re not sober and you’ve got to try again.”
In late 2023, Jones was living on $1,600 a month from Social Security, still tinkering with her third novel, when she got an email from the founders of a new publishing venture, Julia Ringo and Naomi Huffman, who were looking for forgotten classics to republish. A bookseller had suggested that they look at the novels Toni Morrison edited. Huffman found a reference to “Fish Tales” and was intrigued.
They found Jones’s contact information through Wayne State University. It turned out she was living in Flatbush, just a short walk from Huffman’s apartment. They made contact, and discovered that Jones had gotten the rights to her novel back in 1998 and was eager to republish it. Farrar, Straus & Giroux is releasing the text more or less unchanged, with a bold new cover and an afterword by Jones.
Jones hopes to live to see “Mischief Makers” back in print. She also aims to finally publish “Puma,” which she’s been working on since 1992.
If literary acclaim eluded her 40 years ago, Jones feels she’s better prepared for it now.
“I knew it would happen,” she said. “It feels like it’s happening at the right moment.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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