For the writer who asked me yesterday whether there's any point in writing about their abuse anymore in light of what happened in that celebrity defamation trial
An open letter to them -- and you
Dear E.,
You asked me yesterday whether you should give up writing your memoir. As with all of your work, honesty is your manuscript’s beating heart: unflinching, honest storytelling about your experience of spousal abuse. And now you’re scared to be honest.
What’s going to happen if you publish your story now? Will your ex-spouse sue you for defamation? Will they win, even though you’re telling the truth? What if you never get a book deal in the first place because publishers are now convinced that intimate partner violence is a topic not worth the legal exposure? Worse: what if you do get a book deal, then get torn to pieces by an enraged, reactionary public?
For so long, you have been preparing for a terrifying cliff jump of public disclosure. You have been mustering all the courage you can to leap forward with your story, hoping to soar on the free air of Truth—or failing that, find a few sympathetic strangers to catch you in their kindness. But what if you just, well, fall? What if you end up shattered on the ground, bankrupt and broken?
You don’t know the answer to these questions. Neither do I. All I have is information that might help you answer it yourself: professional information as your agent and personal information as your friend.
I’ll share what I’ve got in a moment here. First, though, I’m hoping we can take a beat to wallow in grief and rage at the unfairness of it all. Your terror about truth-telling is not just valid; it’s circumstantially rational. And I do not know what the FUCK is wrong with all of us that that is the case for you.
Seriously, what in the everloving fuck is wrong with people? When did so many of us become so selfish, solipsistic, and smug—so sure we knew what everyone else’s deal was better than they knew themselves? Where is our curiosity, humility, trust, humanity? Jesus fucking Christ. Where?
OK, OK, don’t answer that. I know this is old news. It’s what a human culture looks like when constructed on a foundation of settler colonialism by people who have a boner for performative self-reliance.
Yes, and: one did feel for a while there that we had successfully gut renoed several key areas of the culture—at least in the large, white, privileged eyes of this sentient Cathy cartoon. Only now, all of those sterling new fixtures and features are clogging up or crumbling. And as a person whose body is already in the crosshairs of several key culture wars, E., this is all deeply unsafe and scary for you.
Ugh.
Okay, now let’s address the matter of whether or not you should keep working on that memoir.