My Favourite Author is An Asshat

What do you do when the person who inspires you is deservedly cancelled?

Wondering where I’ve been? I have an Extras column coming to explain, but in short, too many elections.

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Dear Sonal,

I’ve always been so inspired by [[REDACTED]] but the recent revelations about them are just horrible. I’m so stunned. Of course, I believe the victims, but I feel so disappointed. Betrayed even, if that makes sense.

But now I don’t know what to do about the books. Not the future books—I’m on board with never reading another one ever again—but the ones I fell in love with years ago.

Those books meant something so precious to me. They still do. You know those books that speak to you in just the right way at the right time, that make you feel less alone in the world? That’s what those books are to me. These are the books that made me want to be a writer. And now it’s all so tainted, but I still can’t forget what those books and those words have meant to me.

I know everyone is throwing out the books and of course I support the reasons why. I feel guilty about still loving the books and not wanting to throw them out.

What do I do?

Sincerely,
Torn

Dear Torn,

It seems like every few months—and perhaps more frequently than that—there is a new controversy about a former “good person” writer who turns out to be an asshat. Or worse.

And of course, that creates a social media shitstorm and everyone starts dramatically throwing out that author’s books, lest they be accused of supporting shitty and harmful behaviour.

But I keep coming back to a public Facebook post from Marlon James, which I will post here even though it pretty much eliminates the need for me to say anything else.

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Marlon James
May 6th, 2018
Here we go again, trying to figure out what to do with problematic motherfuckers. If you want to read Drown, read Drown, if you still want to get freaky to "I Like The Crotch on You," go get freaky, boo. But enough of this moral crisis over people who ain't having no moral crisis over you. Hell, they could have had one before they chose to assault, harrass, and molest. Before they forced tongues into mouths that were not theirs, or told young writers at that week long conference how they plan to fuck them later. Because that crisis supposes quite a few things, all of them horse shit. That not reading a writer ever again is some sign of moral smallmindedness, as if anybody will ever know what is still a very private choice. And one that might very well be self care. It supposes that these writers work are so essential as to pose a dilemma when they don't. It also perpetuates a fallacy that you have no choices, which is utter bullshit. You can go your entire life never listening to R. Kelly or reading Charles Dickens and if you think your life will be the poorer for it you need a wider world of books and music. Start with books from the women these men made it their business to fuck up.

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Call me controversial, but the books we choose to read or not read, or keep or not keep, don’t really make a difference in whether or not an author is an asshat. It doesn’t ensure that justice will be done. It doesn’t rid the world of oppression.

This, of course, also isn’t license to ignore that they are an asshat, or go around yelling about the evils of cancel culture and defending them on social media because you like their work.

But the performance of justice on TikTok or whatever is not justice. That’s…. well, it’s TikTok. If it feels better not to keep them or read them ever again, then that’s what you should do. But throwing out the books doesn’t necessarily help the actual victims unless, perhaps, they are in your actual home looking over your actual bookshelf. This choice may be the right thing to do for yourself, but it’s not going to change the world.

Note that this isn’t quite the same thing as a boycott, although some people will call it that. Boycotts are typically a long-term, sustained action with a particular goal in mind. Never buying another one of that author’s books or never seeing one of their movies—sure, maybe that will have an impact on that author’s bottom line or their ability to put out work in the future if enough people are doing it, but I’m not sure that everyone refusing to support a particular asshat necessarily has a specific goal in mind in terms of what they want the author to do. Throwing away the books you already own? Not so much. And again, it doesn’t necessarily change anything for the actual victims.

Truthfully, we all feel a little helpless, to see terrible things happening and to not being able to do anything about it. It would be nice to engage in a simple action like throwing a book into the recycling bin, and in doing so, make the world a little more just. It’s not always so easy as that.

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Granted, it’s a little different if you are in a position of even minor power, for example if you are in a position to choose a book to teach, which implicitly valourizes the author, and especially if you make everyone in the class buy the book which supports the author financially. This is a place where choosing other books and stories or highlighting other authors can make a real difference in terms of where you put your support.

But in a purely practical sense, that can still get tricky…. and maybe this is me reacting to the work involved in creating a good reading list for a writing class. If we’re looking at short stories, can we really pretend Alice Munro does not exist? (Alice Munro chose her husband over her daughter saying she was being sexually abused by her stepfather.) If we try and substitute a writer of similar renown by using Chekhov instead, are we promoting the same old classic white dudes over women? I’m assuming there’s no breaking news about Chekhov coming and also that I haven’t missed something.

Plus, referring to well-known writers who may be asshats serves as a good shorthand, especially in situations like this newsletter or when I’m thinking of off the cuff examples, but in order to mitigate valourizing this author, I try to make a point of mentioning when someone is an asshat.

I’ve used a similar approach in teaching, (I almost always use freely available stories) at least until I can find an example that works for me from an author who isn’t an asshat. I genuinely don’t know if this is a good enough approach. This likely points to the fact that I probably need to read a lot more short fiction that’s freely available, so that I can find those examples and also so that I can easily pivot.

I remember trying to diversify the authors in the course I was teaching by adding optional readings by writers of colour. I picked a Junot Diaz story that I really loved, and then the news broke. (You heard about the sexual assault and harassment stuff, right?) I haven’t yet figured out a replacement that works for what I want to show, that I love as much as a story. My workaround has been to encourage anyone opposed to reading the story to skip it (it’s optional) and also, talk about the resonance between Diaz’s problematic behaviour and the character’s, because like, it’s there, and there’s a lot of introspection to be mined from the way the character is made sympathetic despite being a terrible dude, and also how so many want to defend their favourite authors when they are in fact, terrible dudes. (I know I haven’t named the story, but frankly, this could be any of Diaz’ stories.)

I admit it, I do not have a good answer here, aside from my own continual need to keep reading broadly, especially if I’m looking for stories to teach from, and also being willing to pay royalties to writers who are not problematic asshats that are protected by their prominence and are therefore not published in the New Yorker archives.

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Back to your question, Torn.

There’s a tendency, I think, to assume the books we really love are written by people we would truly admire, because how could they possibly write such a wonderful book if they weren’t kind and warm and empathetic themselves?

Marlon James has another quote on his Facebook that I have saved, but since he could go write his own advice column (if, like, he ever wanted a break from being a world-renowned writer) I’ll summarize: writing excellent characters doesn’t require great empathy. It requires great observation.

You can be misogynist as hell and still write women well if you are good at observing the details. You can be super-racist and still write people of colour well (at least, in their interactions with white people) if you are good on observing the details.

Most of the time, these misogynists and racists and [pick your oppressor] aren’t very good observers of women or people or [pick your marginalized population], so generally, they don’t write these characters well, although it’s not necessarily impossible… but still, this doesn’t prevent them from writing other characters well. Flannery O’Conner was racist as hell, but also a hell of a good writer.

Writing good characters also doesn’t mean that the writer is good at any sort of introspection or personal growth. Maybe they can see insights in their characters, but that doesn’t mean they can see that in themselves.

This isn’t some attempt to separate the art from the artist, in the sense of saying, sure, terrible people who create great things deserve all the lauding for their great works and never mind that they were a shitty person. We are creating art under capitalism; the financial rewards and opportunities that allow people to create art going to asshats (even if their work is excellent) means that we can’t ever really say it’s okay to ignore that a person does harm, even if they’ve written something amazing. There are other amazing writers who haven’t done harm that get further disempowered as a consequence. Or more simply put: the money part makes everything complicated.

But maybe it’s separating the art from the artist in a different way; that you love a piece of writing in no way guarantees that the writer was an inherently amazing person. It’s really awesome when the two come together, but liking someone’s work in no way justifies putting them on a pedestal as a human being.

It’s worse now that we have social media, where a person can establish a long public record of being “one of the good ones” in terms of their hot takes on the issue du jour, and therefore, you can sit back and relax.

Except… that is social media. It’s easy to spout a bunch of “correct” takes, and if you’re a writer, it’s extra-easy to be very pithy in these takes and create an authentic-seeming persona that is a slightly better person than you actually are, which in turn allows you to skip over the messy work of figuring out how to deal with your own privilege. I mean, a pithy good take gets all the likes and shares and thousands of people agreeing with you, and that feels really good. Examining your own bullshit? Not so fun.

But the truth is, there are no “good ones.” I don’t say that to be pessimistic, but rather to remind ourselves that we have to actually do this hard work ourselves.

We can’t just relax and look to our favourite writer’s take on the situation as our guidance of how good people are supposed to act and say, yes, I am also a good person because look at the good people that I admire.

I mean sure, I have more than occasionally checked out other people’s takes on situations while in the earlier days of confronting my own bullshit in terms of how deeply baked oppression is in our society, and what it means for all of this to be structural instead of individual, and how much of that line of thinking I have absorbed because my first reaction was not necessarily the “correct” one, and also wanting to express my own hot take on social media but wanting one that will be well-liked and not massively derided. But we can’t simply stop there without looking at our own reactions and trying to unpick all the stuff we’ve learned over so many years. I am used to the notion of “a bad person” and not “the entire system is fucked up and needs to be reimagined in a way I can’t fully visualize, because so much of this is ingrained in me in ways I haven’t even discovered yet, and maybe I will never fully comprehend it, as much as I’d like to be seen in the world as an intelligent and good person.”

We can’t be afraid of being wrong, or of being corrected by others, although one would hope that this would be done kindly. We can’t be afraid of publicly learning and growing and changing our minds. We live in a world where so much of ourselves can be put out there for the world to see and react to, and so yes, some of our own growth may happen publicly, and that’s okay.

Sure, it would be easier to look to our favourites as “the good ones” and then not do any of that introspection at all. Complacency is bliss.

Possibly, this fuels some sense of misplaced guilt, that in admiring an author or artist that turns out to be an asshat, that shakes up our sense of guilt over having not seen it. Maybe it also triggers some sense of “If I didn’t see this coming, what else am I not seeing in the people around me? What else am I not seeing in myself?”

I don’t know. Perhaps that’s wishful thinking. I can’t think of a writer for whom a revelation of bad behaviour would so thoroughly shake me, but then again, I have a long history of important people disappointing me (whassup, mom?) so maybe it’s not a thing I can personally connect with. Or maybe I haven’t found that one writer who I so completely identify with, possibly because that writer is more than likely brown, and therefore not as likely to be published and widely promoted as some of the better known ones who may be asshats.

In any case, whatever you do with those books you loved, the solution is still read more broadly. Skip some of the big award-winners, especially if you aren’t connecting to them anyway. Read people who aren’t the big and widely promoted names. Read more women, more work by racialized writers, by queer and trans writers, by international writers, by disabled writers, by anyone who has never made a bestseller list. Read open-mindedly, that something may be amazingly written but not famously promoted, because that is the way it is.

Read with the understanding that maybe you or people like you will not be centred in the story, and that this may result in situations that you might find confusing, but sit with that confusion with the assumption that the author has portrayed a world that relies on a different set of axioms than the world you are used to, and try to understand what those might be. Oh yes, that is once again some of that pesky introspection…. it’s okay, read commercial fiction by similar groups of authors and you’ll get there in a way that’s more entertaining. (I know there’s a lot of this kind of thing happening in Romance novels, and it’s awesome.)

Maybe you’ll find that there’s no need to worship one writer when we have an enormous pantheon of writers to choose from.

But even if you don’t, your To Be Read pile will now be so large, you need never worry about what to do with those books by [[REDACTED]]. You won’t have time to go back to re-read them anyway.

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Readers, have you been heartbroken when a favourite author turned out to be an asshat? What did you do? Leave a comment below.