"Since starting to write this story about Champion, so many people have warned me away, expressed..."
Since starting to write this story about Champion, so many people have warned me away, expressed concern and shock, or (helpful but alarming) encouraged me to call the police if ever I felt threatened. I sort of knew what I was getting into when I began, and I believe I have as good an understanding now as I can have now that I’ve finished, but this fear is palpable. I know Champion will read this and I cannot imagine how it will feel for him. I would not want such a piece to be written about me, but I also hope never do to the kinds of things Champion has done. And I think that if I ever do them, I will deserve a story like this.
“Experiencing criticism for your actions is not the same thing as having your life ruined,” Mallory Ortberg wrote in The Toast on October 6, 2014, “no matter how unrestrainedly strangers talk about you.”
“You can ruin your own life,” she says, when you hurt someone else. “You have ruined your own life from the inside out.”
Though Ortberg was writing about a particular situation—rape allegations that were then roiling the alt-lit community—I think this is a useful framework to apply to any situation in which one person has hurt another. She argues that if someone has attempted to “physically and emotionally dominate” another person, then bringing that hurt to light “is in fact the best possible thing that can happen” to the aggressor, to everyone.
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The Exile of Ed Champion | Brooklyn Magazine
I’ve been living with this story for a long time. It’s been hard to research, hard to write, hard to edit, hard to publish. I hope something good comes out of it.
(via mollitudo)
Molly’s glorious piece on Ed Champion is worth the deep dive, even if, like me, you’re not in the ny literary scene.
