On lurching for paradise
Or: my take on SHY GIRL and the rest of the current publishing discourse.
Of course it all happened during my children’s spring break. Of course the Publishing Discourse laid out an entire Christmas buffet of drama while I was on a beach in Florida and unable to write about it.
The entrée in this buffet was obviously Hachette’s cancellation of Shy Girl, a Honey Baked Ham so large and well-cut in its spiraling dysfunction as to promise us weeks and weeks of monotonous leftovers to come. But there were plenty of side dishes, too: a love memoir which roused many readers into obsession, alert to perceived darkness in its subtexts and paratexts. The ongoing fallout from that other memoirist who allegedly lifted her trauma from a middle school classmate. The authors on Reddit crying, what is the point? What is the point of all this revising and workshopping and querying if editorial standards are this low and publishers don’t care about quality? The increasing anxiety, shame, projection, and anger everywhere you look—not just about the Shy Girl situation per se, but more broadly what constitutes acceptable vs. unacceptable AI use in our field. See also: who ought to be enforcing the rules, which are currently more vague than one would hope.
As everything in this buffet is shelf stable, I’m sure I’ll come back to it for seconds and thirds in the months to come. For now, however, I have just one big hot take on the whole spread: why I think all of these dishes have appeared at once and this spring—and what those of us who write, edit, or sell books for a living can learn from them.
We’re going to take a kind of circuitous route to my hot take, but I promise you there’ll be plenty of career advice hiding in the bushes.
