DANGEROUS FICTIONS in the NYT Review of Books!
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I am very, very pleased to announce that the New York Times Review of Books has chosen to run an excerpt from my upcoming nonfiction book, Dangerous Fictions.1 We’re calling it an excerpt, but it’s really a condensed version of the introduction. The book’s full thesis is complicated, and it’s hard to boil down into newspaper-sized essays, but the NYTRB editors managed to distill all the really important parts of the opening argument into something that people can actually read in one sitting. (They did cut the opening section, which is funny and about poop, but we can’t have everything.)2
I’m really impressed. If the NYT had asked me to trim down the introduction myself, I would have figuratively and literally died. I couldn’t do it! And not just, I think, because it’s my book and I’m too deep in the weeds with it, but also because this kind of extractive editing is a skillset that I simply don’t have. A Thing I Have Noticed about book publishing is that it requires a lot of work by a lot of people who are great at very specific parts of the process. The proofreaders for this book were extraordinary—they noticed errors and accidental repetition and generalized clumsiness that would have made me look like an absolute idiot if these mistakes had stayed in the final version. (I am sure I will still look like an absolute idiot thanks to uncatchable errors but that’s a Me Problem.) Writing and publishing a book is really not an individual project. In fact there really is no such thing, in any field, as a solo creator working alone (I talk about this a bit in the book! which you can preorder here.)
I have also worked with people in various publishing situations who were shockingly terrible at their jobs, and the impact of that can be hugely disruptive both to the work and to a writer’s sanity. If this was a good industry, a fair industry, that treated people well and paid them well and didn’t attract so many wealthy talentless sociopaths (I would say: you guys know who you are, but you almost certainly don’t) then we would have MANY more good books in circulation. There’s no lack of writing talent in the world—I feel this very strongly—just a lack of support and good circumstances and the industry’s general roulette wheel approach when it comes to matching the right writer to the right publisher. When you read a great book, it feels miraculous: and it really is, but not because genius is so special and rare, but because good writing takes a lot of work by a lot of people all pulling in the same direction.
Anyway, if you are personally struggling at the moment to find an agent or a publisher, if you have dealt with weird and shitty people in the industry, don’t despair: as horrible as this process can feel, it’s not you. If your work isn’t quite at the level you want it to be, if you can’t find the people who will help you take it over the edge, that’s not a You Problem. It’s just really, really hard to get matched with the right people, and a blessing when you do. There really is nothing wrong with you. There is something wrong with the universe.
I do want to emphasize that NYT’s news and opinion coverage of trans issues and immigration has been—and continues to be—fucking abysmal. However, the NYT’s recipes, games, and much of their arts criticism continues to be very good, and is run by different people, who are not personally responsible for the behavior of their bosses and colleagues in different departments. And yet an organization is an organization; different departments’ subscription income, as far as I know, isn’t siloed. If you don’t pay for the NYT and the excerpt above is unavailable to you, a fun thing you can do is (narcs don’t look) add archive.is/ in front of the link. That will get you around most paywalls in general. (If you are a narc and you read this anyway, go stand in front of a mirror and punch yourself in the face.)
This is so amazing!