The Orange County Register, February 26th, 2007
One day when Pamela Samuels-Young was 12 and growing up in Compton, she pulled a copy of Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised Land” from her aunt’s bookshelf.
She was so impressed with the gritty story of an African-American boy her own age growing up in Harlem that she took the book without asking permission. She was afraid that her aunt would think she was too young for the graphic language, but she was determined to read it.
Flash-forward 25 years or so to the mid-1990s, and Samuels-Young had become an attorney at a prestigious international law firm based in Los Angeles. She was a fan of legal thrillers, but she always thought it was too bad that none of the characters resembled her. So she decided to write one herself.
She usually started at 4:30 a.m. and wrote for a couple hours before work on weekdays and all day on weekends. She wrote on the flights she regularly took to Washington, D.C., and at night in her hotel.
It took her three years to finish. She made 20 copies, gave them to friends and colleagues, and waited for praise. Instead, people seemed to be avoiding her. They didn’t return her phone calls or they made excuses about why they hadn’t read it yet.
“I’m thinking, ‘What’s wrong with these people?’ ” Samuels-Young recalls.
It finally occurred to her. Maybe there was nothing wrong with them. Maybe there was something wrong with her writing.
Samuels-Young has always loved a challenge. Her father is a retired machinist, her mother is a former mail carrier, and neither of them had college degrees. But Samuels-Young, a graduate of Compton High, quickly picked up two of her own. She graduated from USC, and earned a master’s in broadcast communications from Northwestern University.
Straight out of graduate school, she landed a job at the ABC affiliate in Detroit and later returned to Los Angeles to work at KCBS.
She considered herself too shy for on-camera work and focused instead on news writing. For a time, she loved the heady atmosphere of the newsroom on a big news day.
“I remember when the space shuttle blew up. I remember when Reagan was shot. Those were the days when there is that glamour, that push. It’s teamwork,” she said.
“But I think you burn out after a while. I burned out. I said there’s got to be something else.”
Inspired in part by the TV drama “L.A. Law” (this was the 1980s), she applied to law school. She took the Law School Aptitude Test, and despite having only three weeks to prepare, she scored high enough to get accepted at several law schools. She picked UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. After graduation, she went to work for O’Melveny and Myers, specializing in labor and employment law.
Her experiences at a big law firm convinced her that legal-thriller writers like John Grisham and Scott Turow were missing something.
“It is different for us,” she said, of female African-American lawyers. “I learned a lot. It was a tough competitive environment. For me, a kid who grew up in Compton, to be exposed to that environment, to even make it there says a lot.”
It’s no surprise that when she sat down to write, her lead character was Vernetta Henderson, an ambitious attorney at a premier law firm in L.A. who is eager to become the firm’s first African-American partner. She thinks the way to get there is to litigate and win the sexual harassment case she’s been assigned.
Her friends, family and colleagues are a varied group. Her husband, Jefferson, is a self-employed electrician; her confidant is a brash, sexy college friend named Special, and her mentor is a gruff, well-connected senior partner at the firm named Jim O’Reilly.
Looking back, Samuels-Young can see why friends ran from her after reading her early effort, despite the colorful cast of characters.
“I was trying to be a great literary writer. I was writing about how the shadows hit the wall,” she said. “With a legal thriller, you want action. You want story.
“I found my voice when I said, ‘I’m a news writer. I can write short, snappy; let’s try that.’ ”
Using her new voice, she rewrote her first manuscript and completed another. She went back to Kinko’s and made copies to pass out to friends.
“People were much more encouraging. They didn’t run from me at work,” she said. “It taught me a lesson. If you write a good book, people are going to say it’s a good book.”
Finding an agent was another story. She’d heard that John Grisham had been rejected 45 times before his first novel found an audience. It was a story she took to heart as she began to gather a collection of rejection letters of her own.
Her personal life, though, gave her cause for celebration.
In an uncanny case of life imitating art, Samuels-Young met Rickey Young, a plumber, when he came to her house to fix a problem. They fell in love, and had a big white wedding three years ago. It was Samuels-Young’s first, at age 45.
Young persuaded his lawyer wife to move from Baldwin Hills to “conservative Orange County,” as she puts it.
“I came here kicking and screaming. When we found this house, I fell in love with it,” she said of the couple’s 1970s-era two-story house in Cypress, which they share with two of Samuels-Young’s stepchildren, ages 16 and 22.
“I will be here forever,” she said. “It seems like a slower pace than where I was living in L.A. I like walking through the neighborhood. This place has a zillion parks.”
In time, her luck in publishing picked up as well.
Her first book, “Every Reasonable Doubt,” was published in February 2006, and her new one, “In Firm Pursuit,” is out now.
Her stepson was with her when she saw her novel on the shelf at the bookstore for the first time.
“After all these years of trying to make it happen, it was an overwhelming feeling,” she said. “He took a picture with his camera-phone, and he said, ‘Don’t cry in the store.’ It was such a long battle. Law school, none of that was as hard as this. It’s so rewarding.”
AUTHOR: Pamela Samuels-Young honed her writing by getting feedback from friends. Her second book, “In Firm Pursuit,” is out now.
