Problematic Authors: The More You Know, The Less You Wish You Knew

And so, yet another beloved, admired, well-respected author is exposed as (probably) a total piece of trash. I say probably because, even in the face of damning accusations, we’re only hearing one (albeit horrific) side of the story and we’re all innocent until proven guilty (even when it seems he’s pretty fucking guilty).

Anyway, I’m not here to accuse or defend Neil Gaiman because I’ve never met the man (or any of his accusers) and know nothing about his private life. For me, he’s always been the British dude who wrote a cool novel with Terry Pratchett, the comic books that inspired Lucifer and The Sandman, and Homer Simpson’s YA cash-grab fantasy, The Troll Twins of Underbridge Academy.

And you know what? I was entirely fine with that. I was good with him being no more than a name, a face, and a short bio between the covers of a book. I didn’t need to know his politics, his religion, his sexual preferences, his favorite sports team, his take on the moon landing conspiracy theory, or whether he prefers Coke or Pepsi. His friends, his lovers, his children, his enemies, his fans? I could enjoy (or not enjoy) a book just fine without knowing any of that.

For all that social media has done to create communities and introduce me to like-minded authors, I find myself increasingly nostalgic for the days when they were just a name on a cover. I miss the days when I could find a book, be drawn in by the cover or the blurb, and not have to second-guess reading it because of something I read about the author. I miss when I could just read a book, enjoy it, and put that author on my must-read-more-of list, never knowing if they were secretly a Baptist preacher, a serial rapist, or an aficionado of red baseball caps.

There’s a whole philosophical dilemma around whether you can (or should) separate the art from the artist, but I think it’s the false familiarity of social media that makes it such a dilemma. It’s one thing to go into a classic novel knowing the author was a racist, a Marxist, an anti-Semite, or a homophobe, and to be able to put that aside in favor of the text. Whether it’s being able to make excuses for them (different people, different times, different morals, different values) or just having no emotional ties to them, we can acknowledge that they were an asshole even as we admit the book deserves to be considered a classic.

With contemporary authors, it’s so much harder because we feel like we know them. What’s more, we’ve formed an emotional attachment that creates a sense of betrayal when they’re exposed for having said or done something horrible. There’s a sense of shock there. A sense of loss. A loss of respect and a loss of enjoyment. But the thing is, we don’t really know them. We’re not friends, even if we have exchanged a DM or two. Those interactions may be meaningful or memorable to us, but they’re not coming to our birthday, our wedding, or our baby shower.

For that reason, I struggled with the art/artist dilemma for quite some time. The first big one to really hit me was JK Rowling. Now, I was never a raving fan of Harry Potter, not one to line up at midnight for the next book or anything like that, but they’re among the very few books I’ve read alongside my spouse, and I admired this single mom who made such an impact on pop culture. Until, that is, she revealed herself to be an unapologetically hateful TERF, and that betrayal set in – betrayal of the memories with my spouse and betrayal of my respect for her as a woman.

The thing is, it seems like the list of authors behaving badly, the ones we shouldn’t be reading anymore, grows by the month. There’s always something being done or said that makes us see these authors in a new light, and pretty soon your treasured TBR pile threatens to be a mountain of trash for the garbage man to pick up. As a neurodivergent reader, I feel like making the distinction was even more difficult for me, but since I’ve begun managing my anxiety, I’ve found it easier to separate the art from the artist. Not foolproof, not by any means, but I can draw those lines a bit easier.

Does that mean you should do the same? Of course not. We’re diverse individuals, as different from one another as our reading tastes may be similar. If you can successfully separate the art from the artist, good for you! If you feel the need to throw them both out, that’s fine. If you choose to censor your shelves going forward, but continue to remember past reads fondly, that’s fine too. Perhaps you draw the line at hate speech, or maybe it’s at violence. It could be that, unless you feel personally attacked, you can put the author aside. That’s your right and there’s nothing wrong with it.

At the end of the day, the way I see it, art is a cooperative effort. It’s a give-and-take between the author and the reader. I don’t know who originally said it, but I love the “staring at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly” analogy. Great books are as much what we bring to them as what the author put into them. I enjoyed them just fine when I didn’t even know if the author was a man or a woman, much less how they behaved behind closed doors, and I’m going to take advantage of the Twitter/Facebook exodus to be far more selective in my social media following to recapture that innocence/ignorance.