Editorial Assistant Book Club, July 2023: National Dish by Anya Von Bremzen
Last month we read The Guest by Emma Cline and discussed her fascinating writing career and body of work as part of our ongoing editorial assistant book club where we read contemporary books that aren’t huge bestsellers. This month we’ll be moving to lighter fare and reading National Dish: Around the World in Search for Food, History, and the Meaning of Home by food writer and James Beard award-winner Anya Von Bremzen. I’m guilty at Dear Head of Mine of focusing intensely on fiction (there’s usually more to say), and so thought it would be good to switch tracks and explore the grey area between nonfiction and fiction that is narrative nonfiction. This type of food writing, narrative + food + history, has emerged over the past ten or twenty years as a consistent and delightful publishing category. Pick up a copy, read along, and send me any questions or thoughts about the publishing or writing or anything else in the meantime. See you again at the end of the month!
Biggest “News” in Books: Elizabeth Gilbert Canceled…Herself?
Elizabeth Gilbert, a bestselling author, most famously of Eat, Pray, Love—published in the early-2000s-days of Oprah domination and turned into a movie starring Julia Roberts —decided to cancel her upcoming novel, The Snow Forest, due to backlash. The backlash that caused her to pull her own book? Her novel is set in Russia, a country currently ruled by a dictator attempting a violent takeover of Ukraine, only The Snow Forest is set Russia…in the 20th century…
This is a strange move, to say the least, but digging past the headlines it’s fairly clear what happened. Gilbert is about as public and popular as a professional writer can be (1m Instagram followers, 250,000 Twitter followers) and she announced her book on Good Morning America on June 6th. Then Ukrainians on the internet saw a chance to create some international support for their war against Russia by dragging the book en masse. The majority of the negative reviews on Goodreads came just days after the announcement, mostly on the same two days by accounts with extremely low-activity (Goodreads has since taken the posting down).
Did I wisely pull this graphic because I knew it would disappear? Yes.
Given this timeline, it’s virtually impossible that any of those outraged reviewers actually read a word of Gilbert’s book. Which is nothing new in the world of book controversy—just like with book bans, the books become a symbolic flag to wave, in this case against Russia (an, admittedly, much more noble cause). In a strange twist of events Elizabeth Gilbert’s response was to pull her book’s publication less than a week later after her announcement citing — very implausibly — her “Ukrainian readers.” It's hard to find any substantive comments online or articles that back up Gilbert’s reasoning for pulling the book, there’s almost no one else rallying against her or calling this problematic aside from these one-note, one-star Goodreads reviewers. Gilbert, in a strange turn of events, seems to have canceled herself.
The idea that any book set in Russia is somehow romanticizing Putin’s authoritarianism is a fairly ridiculous assertion. As someone who watched approximately 42 hours of History Channel documentaries on Russian Tsars as a kid, there is basically no point in Russian history when the country wasn’t ruled by tyrants. And there’s nothing inherit to writing about Russia that supports that history. A country is a place and its people, not just its dictators. There is plenty of literature — Russian literature, in fact — that is about resisting this endless pattern of oppression and rule by force. None of this will stop dictators from using that very same art as propaganda—they’ll use anything as propaganda, July 4th being our yearly reminder that Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A” is still used as a patriotic rallying cry that it isn’t. Who knows if this was the case for Gilbert’s novel—we won’t find out any time soon. But we shouldn’t stop writing, or reading, or publishing about countries and places with oppressive regimes.
Are we all doomed to be YA?
Gilbert’s is just one book and I’ve heard speculation from very smart people in publishing that there might be other motivating factors for her choosing to delay her book’s publication, which would make more sense than someone with one million followers caving to 500 coordinated bad reviews. But it is also true that Gilbert’s decision is one of the many canaries in the coal mine when it comes to the shifting attitudes in adult literature. The fact that Elizabeth Gilbert feels the need to cancel her book (or even can use it as justification) based on the criticism of a couple hundred people who haven’t read her book makes me consider how we’re on an inevitable collusion with young adult literary culture.
Young Adult Publishing
I am writing about the culture of the Young Adult publishing as an observer with the benefit of having a few acquittances (authors/literary agents) who have backed up what has been reported in the news. From all accounts, the YA publishing space is the best example of an actual dystopian version of cancel culture. Writers, readers, and even editors routinely “call out” each other out in the YA space for being racist, sexist, ableist, insensitive, abusive, etc. And this furor works a surprising amount of the time—books are changed, publications are literally canceled, and the general environment is unpleasant enough that it seems to effect decision making at all levels. Even the cancelers become the cancelees at some point. You can and should read about it in more detail in this New Yorker piece and this Refinery29 piece, it’s incredibly fascinating, if not a little sad.
If we give everyone here the benefit of the doubt and that their purpose is to get more representative views in literature and more under-appreciated talent, it doesn’t seem to be achieving that outcome. Stats are hard to come by for the US market, but the gains in diversity in book publishing seem to be decent in the past couple of years. The question is, what kind of gift is this to the under-appreciated writers coming into the industry if the environment they find themselves in is a toxic and heavily policed one? I see many examples and hear many stories of YA writers leaving to write adult fiction for this very reason, and I expect that to continue even as our adult literary culture begins to reflect what’s already happening in world of YA.
A Culture of Outrage
We live in a country where the movement to ban books has never been stronger. The seeming opposite polar end to this fascist strain of thought is far left “cancel culture” (an almost meaningless phrase that nonetheless is useful in this very limited instance). Without equating the two sides of the coin, it is clear what unites these two growing cultural forces is one built by the Internet and the culture of outrage it encourages. The unifying trait that these seemingly opposite groups are moving toward is one of uniting in outrage—against a book, a person, an idea—without any meaningful engagement with the underlying source of where their ire supposedly comes from. It’s knee-jerk “if you read this then you’re…” kind of logic that pervades the language of both groups, it feeds off of short attention spans, uses the weakest form of criticism — cherry-picking sentences or paragraphs to use as hard evidence — and convinces other loud voices to join in the outcry, no reading required.
Slow Creep
I can see, as an editor, that this culture is slowly making its way into the industry, likely as the next generation after Millennials joins us and begins to move up the ranks. Questions of adding trigger warnings to the front of adult fiction have been raised. As has the question of whether a male author can write female characters. I’ve also witnessed how the YA type of hearsay can spread when an author is writing outside of their identity. One person will claim a book to be problematic, and because books take a lot of effort to read and digest, others will take this as a good enough reason to just say “no” without giving the book a chance. All of this is not to be alarmist—in all of the above instances, trigger warnings were not added, female characters were not erased and these books were published. But the default is beginning to shift, and it doesn’t feel like it comes from a better place. In real time it feels more as if we’re replacing lazy, reflexive thinking that had underpinnings of racist and sexist attitudes with lazy, reflexive thinking that is perhaps only slightly better by comparison. But the mode isn’t changing, we’re actually nearly as far from taking the time to judge people for the content of their characters as we’ve ever been, only moving towards doing it in a different way than we used to.
What Is an Editor to Do?
You should meet a writer outside of an identity they’re writing about with more skepticism as a reader, as they do have a higher standard to meet. And it’s reasonable to assume someone who shares an identity with their subject starts closer to it and is more sensitive in how they portray this identity. But in both instances, it’s our duty as publishing people, who read for a living, to approach both with guarded and critical but ultimately open eyes. At the end of the day, it takes thoughtfulness and skill to process human experience and then translate it to story and words on a page. You have to read the pages before you pass judgement. And if the author has written it in good faith and you disagree with how something is rendered—if you think it’s cliché, lacks nuance, or dabbles in hurtful tropes—then you’re better off having a conversation and engaging them, not demanding their manuscript never see the light of day.