Withdraw the withdrawals
Always start the day with a bracing challenge to pious humiliation rituals. Kathleen Stock is a brilliant challenger. The news from Ukraine is grim, she says, but on the upside…
…the American author of Eat, Pray, Love has withdrawn her next book from publication.
The novel in question, The Snow Forest, is set in Siberia, and is now postponed indefinitely in the name of the Ukrainian people. In a video made by its author Elizabeth Gilbert to explain her decision, she explained she did “not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm”.
Upon hearing this, my first thought was that surely this book can’t be that bad. A memoirist and compulsive advice-giver as well as a novelist, Gilbert writes chatty, candid prose with an emphasis on spiritual matters.
In other words she writes the kind of thing I’d rather rip my own head off than read.
Though the peppy writing style tends to set my teeth on edge, thousands of female readers apparently adore her.
Wait. Maybe I am trans after all.
Joke, but not entirely joke. It always irritates me that women are the target audience for this kind of dreck and that so many of them oblige.
It’s perhaps not surprising when a self-help guru turns out not to follow her own lessons in practice. But it is genuinely sad to find a novelist as apparently accomplished as Gilbert misrepresenting fiction as governed by some strange guilt-by-association principle — acting as if, at any time, a work’s importance and value might be cancelled out by more pressing priorities in the real world.
Lie down with slushy self-help authors, get up with profound confusion.
…the truth is that sensitivity readers, trigger warnings and censoring attempts are mostly directed towards publishing for women and children, rather than publishing for men. It’s chick-lit not prick-lit that tends to be treated as something to be morally perfected, and each week seems to throw up a new example. This week, it was also the turn of Nancy Mitford’s comic romance The Pursuit of Love, now published with the pious declaration that the text contains “prejudices” which were “wrong then” and which are also “wrong today”.
Oh get out. Of course it contains prejudices; they’re part of the comedy!
But if we collectively stopped giving internet bullies the power, they wouldn’t have any. In my own preferred version of a more inspiring world, no women author or other female creative would ever have to make a retraction of their work again, or publicly apologise for anything at all. But if that’s too much of a pipe dream, then I think we should at least all commit to mocking any prominent authors with apologetic tendencies, until they start apologising for previous apologies in a panicked recursive spiral. I really think this strategy could be a gamechanger. I might even write a self-help book about it.
Let’s think of a title. Eat, Drink, Mock?
That link is to an article in The Times, not Kathleen Stock.
Thank you; fixed.
This reminds me, also, of the great hue and cry to cancel NFL games the week after 9/11. While canceling the games made sense for a number of reasons, the amount of air taken up in the news that week by the decision, and the debate over it, was just absurd to me. It just seemed very much to inflate the NFL’s collective self-worth, as if the most important issue in that week was whether or not a bunch of grown men would pass a weirdly-shaped ball around a field.
I’m getting the same vibe here, which shouldn’t surprise me when dealing with one of these ‘self-discovery’ authors. “Oh, the impact of my writing is so great I must withdraw this text lest it cause suffering.” By indefinitely postponing it, the author and publisher are creating much more hullaballoo than would’ve been generated by “Self-help author releases new novel.”
There are a few people who, whenever I find they have written something, I am always pleased to read it. Kathleen Stock has become one of those people for me. She is outstanding.
Thanks for the link!
Eat, Pray, Drub.
Slightly off topic, but my impression of the original purpose and uses of trigger/content warnings at university addressed both male and female PTSD: combat veterans (mostly male) and rape victims (mostly female). The warning was, in effect, “We’re going into some material that may be difficult for you. Brace yourself to handle it.” It wasn’t, “You can skip this part.” The “safe spaces” were places to recover in private; the lecture itself wasn’t a “safe space, and therefore you can shut down material you don’t want to hear or take place.” What were originally shields to help people cope with receiving difficult material, have been turned into swords to prevent anything from being said or done at all. It drives me crazy.
maddog1129@6: Yeah, that was my take on trigger warnings, too, at least for college classes. I do also recall them being a thing for novels and non-fiction web writing fairly early on, with more of a “this is something you might want to avoid if you find it distressing” vibe. I suspect that that application, which is perfectly reasonable for things we are actively seeking out for entertainment or personal enlightenment, then bled back into the classroom scenario, causing our current issues.
maddog1129@6 & Freemage@7
That was the idea behind trigger warnings when they were started. As I recall.