On being canceled before it was cool

I got better, but being a newt actually did kind of suck

I. I Hate This Story

I mean, I really, really hate this story.

I hate it because it’s stupid, first and foremost. Any time I’m asked to tell it, I’m always interrupting myself to apologize for how stupid it is. I’m— I’m sorry, it’s just, are you sure you want to hear this?

Have I mentioned that it’s really, really stupid?

The thing about having been canceled is that it’s little bit like having been conned, or catfished, or bullied in high school. It’s an embarrassing thing to be a victim of; that it happened says something embarrassing about you. And talking about it after the fact, that’s the most embarrassing of all, because implicit in any cancellation story is the admission not only that you are the sort of awkward social orangutan who other people bond over scapegoating, but worse, that you remember this and it still bothers you. Which is peak loser behavior!

I have never met a canceled person who enjoys talking about what happened to them, who doesn’t self-deprecate and minimize and, you know, it was all so ridiculous and a long time ago and I’m not even mad about it! Please don’t put it in the newspaper that being publicly shamed was a traumatic experience — and definitely don’t put it in the newspaper that it actually still feels kind of risky to talk about it, even nearly a decade later, that part of me worries I’m going to hit publish on this post and all the main characters from this moment in my life are going to immediately appear behind me in the mirror, like the Candyman, back to finish the job.

Have I mentioned that I hate this story?

Are you sure you want to hear it?

II. How the Crabs Got Into the Bucket

First, none of this would have ever happened if not for the Twilight Saga. In 2005, Stephenie Meyer’s fantasy series about sexually frustrated vampires was released, and became such an instant, massive, bestselling success that it spawned a decade-long boom in the literary category known as young adult (YA) fiction. Suddenly, everyone was reading YA — and everyone wanted to write it, including me.

Initially, I ended up in YA sort of by accident — my first novel had an 18 year-old protagonist, which made it default young adult — but I immediately loved it. There was incredible creative energy in YA at that time, and a huge diversity of stories being told; dystopia and fantasy were having a moment, but so too was ambitious, dark, weird, and lyrical literary fiction that also happened to be about teenagers. This was the kind of work I wanted to do, and I was in good company; I shared an editor and imprint with authors like John Green, Andrew Smith, Gayle Forman and Nina LaCour.

But by the time my second novel was published in 2014, the YA market was contracting, and the rumblings of an ideological shift were becoming discernible. My personal theory is that this had a lot to do with YA authors having gravitated to the microblogging site Tumblr¹, where they made themselves both accessible and answerable to a fanbase for whom reading was less a leisure activity than an archaeology project in search of something to take offense to — people who believed that the purpose of art was to handhold its audience to the proper moral and political conclusions, and struggled to grasp that fictional characters did not necessarily represent the views of the author who created them.

Tumblr had a feature called the reblog — essentially a quote-tweet avant la lettre — which fans would use to instigate pile-ons against creators who had been accused of perpetrating some ism or phobia. If I had to identify the moment when the writing was on the wall vis-a-vis the YA Woke Takeover, it would almost definitely be the summer of 2015, when the author John Green — who was the closest thing in that world to a bona fide literary celebrity — made national news for being anonymously accused on Tumblr of having pedophile vibes.

This sort of high school queen bee social aggression would have been a professional liability in most scenarios. In YA, it was not just tolerated but encouraged— and not just among the actual high schoolers who the YA audience ostensibly comprised, but among the adult authors who wrote it, the adult librarians who circulated it, the adult agents and editors and publishing professionals who acted as gatekeepers to the publishing process, and the media professionals who covered all of the above. When John Green responded to the aforementioned accusations by pointing out that accusing someone of being a sex criminal for writing books for a teen audience is not just messed up but trivializing of actual sex crimes, he was excoriated. He had committed the cardinal sin of having dismissed and invalidated the feelings of teenage girls, who were increasingly being treated as unassailable cultural and moral authorities by a bunch of people who, I’m just guessing, never read The Crucible in school.

So when the calls to censor YA books began, it was no surprise that they were coming from inside the house.

III. It’s Me, Hi, I’m the Crab in the Bucket It’s Me

In 2016, I was living in multiple professional worlds: I was a freelance entertainment journalist and TV recapper for TV Guide, EW, and Vulture; I was a humor writer, cartoonist, and advice columnist for a site called Sparklife; I was liveblogging the 2016 presidential campaign as a correspondent for Us Weekly; I was in talks with my publisher about my third YA novel (a romantic comedy) and was working on a fourth.

I was also thinking this next book should be in a different category, for adults — because weird things were happening in YA.

The booming literary economy of the post-Twilight years was over. The third film in the Divergent series had flopped, signaling the collapse of the industry’s formerly reliable publishing-to-Hollywood pipeline. There was less money to go around, and fewer deals being made — and the competition for the remaining scraps was starting to get very ugly in a very particular way, spearheaded by a loose but influential clique of authors who had figured out that the industry’s growing identitarianism could be leveraged for personal and professional gain. Crucially, this group understood early that the guilt of middle aged liberal white women was a powerful and infinitely renewable resource, especially the kind of women who made a living or wanted to as authors of children’s books. Those gals would lie down naked in traffic, flay themselves with a grapefruit spoon, they’d do anything you asked only please, god, please don’t call them racist on the internet!

There were several high-profile campaigns that year to cancel certain YA novels — always by this type of white woman author, and often one who was in direct competition for attention, shelf space, etc, with someone in the aforementioned group — for being “problematic,” which is to say, guilty of some ism or phobia. The public face of these campaigns was on Twitter, Tumblr, and Goodreads, but they had a second, insidious presence in the places where professional authors gathered to network, the most important of which was a Facebook community known as Binders Full of Women Writers. Most Binders groups were, not to put too fine a point on it, absolute snakepits from hell², but the YA sub-group was notoriously toxic, owing to its particularly convoluted rules about who was allowed to say what, to whom, on which topics, on the basis of identity. If you questioned the wisdom of these rules, your privilege was showing; if you disagreed with them outright, you were gaslighting. (If you did so while being straight, white, and able-bodied, you had committed an actual hate crime and were literally in the KKK.)

I was not an active participant in this group, but I was a member — and in November 2016, I logged onto Facebook to discover that dozens of authors were organizing a petition to censor The Continent, an as-yet-unreleased YA novel by an author named Keira Drake. Their plan, for which they were openly congratulating themselves, was to request that the book be pulled for edits; then, they agreed, the publisher could just quietly cancel it altogether.

It made my free-speech liberal hair stand on end.

I didn’t say so then and there; I didn’t want to fight these women, which the rules of the group made more or less impossible anyway. But later that day, I logged onto Twitter — where I had about 2,000 followers — and posted, vaguely, that I was aghast to see creative professionals engaged in what I referred to as “book banning in the name of social justice.”

This, as it turned out, was a big mistake!

Although that tweet identified neither the aspiring censors nor the book they were targeting, it evidently got me noticed, in a bad way. For the next couple days, I received a flood of angry responses, mostly of the it’s not censorship when we do it variety, plus a fair number of tweets calling me a talentless racist idiot (the one I’ve always remembered, which is incredibly still up nearly a decade later, was, “Your pointy hood is showing.”) But then, miraculously, a deus ex machina entered the chat: I had sent the tweet on November 7, 2016.

Election Day was November 8.

And that was the end of it… for awhile.

IV. What You’ve All Been Waiting For

Although the debacle over The Continent began as a niche publishing drama, it eventually got big and hairy enough to escape containment into the mainstream internet — and to attract the attention of a New York Magazine writer named Jesse Singal. (Yes, the very same!) In January 2017, in response to some of Jesse’s tweets about the evidently insane dynamics of YA publishing, a Twitter user with the handle “Tabitha Burke” shared screenshots from the Binders group in which the campaign to censor The Continent was being discussed. I was shocked and not a little impressed; Tabitha Burke wasn’t just breaking the rules of the group, but mocking them, and publicly dissenting from the orthodoxy. I followed the account, which unlike mine was anonymous and unverified; I remember wondering if it might be someone I knew.

Imagine my surprise when, a few days later, I logged on to discover that the same woman who had initiated the campaign to cancel The Continent — an influential author with a Twitter following in the mid-five-figures — was publicly, furiously, repeatedly accusing me of running the account myself.

I’m just going to say, again, that however stupid this whole thing already is (extremely), this is where it gets even stupider. Unfortunately, two things are true: that what happened next was the most idiotic of tempests in the tiniest dumbass teapot, and that the relative scale or absurdity of the tempest makes very little difference when you are trapped inside the teapot.

Immediately, several things happened:

1. The rumor went instantly viral and spread like wildfire through my personal and professional communities, which might have happened no matter what, but was likely made worse by the fact that I didn’t bother to respond to it right away, assuming (like a fool) that nobody would really take it seriously.

2. I tweeted saying the rumor was false, and replied to a handful of people who had amplified it or named me, asking them to please stop spreading it. Immediately, the same woman who had started the rumor publicly accused me of “going after” the posters who were spreading the truth about my secret identity; the initial rumor was still spreading, but now, so was a second wave of accusations that I was trying to abuse and silence the brave posters who were trying to hold me accountable.

3. Someone sent me a message saying I should probably check in on the YA Binders page, because people were making some pretty serious allegations about me; when I tried, I discovered that I had been banned from the group permanently, despite it now being obvious that I had been falsely accused.

For the next week, I watched myself be talked about online. That the owner of the Tabitha Burke account had immediately cleared my name, posting additional screenshots from inside the group to which I no longer had access, made no difference at all. The rumor continued to spread, now joined by more, even salacious allegations: that my latest novel had been rejected by my publisher because it was too unspeakably racist to print, that I had sent abusive and harassing messages to reviewers who hadn’t liked my books, that I was guilty of unspecified-but-implied-sexual behaviors toward teens that made me a danger to the community. Any outlets I freelanced for were tagged and pressured to cut ties with me, as was my editor, as was my agent.

But none of what was being said about me by my haters worried me as much as the deafening silence from people I thought were my friends: my publisher, my editor, my fellow authors. There was one woman who I had been close with, who had asked me out the previous year for coffee and advice: she was anxious and vulnerable, pouring her heart out about the new book she’d written that her editor seemed not to understand, confessing that she was thinking of moving to a new publisher. I told her then that her work was ambitious and beautiful and brilliant, and anyone would be lucky to have her.

Now, I reached out to her asking if she would please speak up in my defense. She wrote back that she was so sorry, she had no idea what I was talking about, and also she was running out the door to catch a plane but we’d talk soon!!!

Then I checked Twitter: she had unfollowed me.

More ominously, my editor had, too.

V. This Part Was Actually Devastating

Remember how, in 2016, I had a couple of novels in the works? Somewhere in the midst of all this, my agent called. My third YA book, for which I had been on the verge of signing a contract, was officially dead in the water — as was any prospect of publishing my fourth book, which had gone out on submission a month or so before. I had a terrible feeling that I already knew the answer, but asked anyway: was this because of what had happened on social media?

She hesitated.

“I don’t think it helped.”

VI. If You’re So Canceled Why Are You Still Breathing

This wasn’t the end of the fallout, but I just want to pause to make an observation: we’ve already established that cancelation is an embarrassing thing to have been a victim of, that being targeted for it identifies you as a particular sort of loser.

But the other thing about it, and I find this fascinating, is that it might be the only traumatic scenario in the world where your survival will be held against you.

Even if it took years to claw your way back to something resembling a livelihood; even if you had to completely reinvent yourself professionally and do a lot of embarrassing shit to make ends meet in the meantime; even if you’ve held your breath through every lucky break or minor success ever since because what if it all falls apart again? There are people who will be more offended by your tenacity, your audacity, in having come back from the attempted murder of your career than by the fact that someone tried to do this to you in the first place.

At their angriest, they will sneer that whatever success you’ve earned isn’t even yours. You didn’t make a comeback! You made…

VII. A Career Out of Being Canceled

I did, in fact, do a lot of embarrassing shit for the new few years in order to make ends meet. I wrote YouTube scripts and listicles, for 8 cents per word, for one of those terrible content farms whose articles show up as a little grid of clickbait on places like weather dot com. I got certified to teach yoga and took all the work I could get, sometimes leading up to 20 vinyasa classes per week, a grueling endeavor for which my middle aged body still has not forgiven me. I gritted my teeth through years of unfathomably bad The Walking Dead episodes just because recapping them was a guaranteed $75 per week.

The one thing I didn’t do was write fiction. Although I still had an agent (god bless her), it was pretty clear at the time that my life as a novelist was over; any future I had would be in journalism.

And did I make a career out of being canceled? I suppose it depends on your perspective. A common trope about writers is that our default response to a trauma — a medical crisis, a parent’s death, a con job where you were somehow persuaded to put $50,000 in a shoebox and leave it behind a toilet in the Port Authority, or, yes, your blacklisting from a cherished profession — is to report a story about it. The idea is that there’s comfort to be found in the journalistic reframing of a tragedy: instead of marinating in anguish over what happened to you, you force yourself to be curious about how it happened, and why, and who else it has happened to. You set aside your story, which hurts, and tell someone else’s, which is interesting.

I don’t know if that’s true for every writer, but it was true for me. About eight months after my life as a YA writer ended, my investigative report about the climate in young adult fiction was published in Vulture. I spent nearly three months reporting it and interviewed more than a dozen people from all sides of the controversy, including the pro-censorship contingent; it is still probably the most viral thing I’ve ever written, and I do think it helped launch my career as a culture writer.

Of course, it also got me massively dogpiled on YA Twitter, but this no longer bothered me. I was a well-sourced, knowledgeable, careful journalist. What were they going to do, bully the editors at Vulture into blacklisting me from reporting the truth? Ha, ha! Ha, ha!

VIII. Time Is a Flat Circle

As it turned out, the answer to the above question was yes: in 2019, Vulture told me they would no longer be accepting my pitches after my reporting on a recent YA cancellation ruffled the feathers of a certain malicious goober who had never quite gotten over the disappointment of having failed to completely destroy my life two years previous.

This was bad news, of course, and I was pissed off, but not devastated. I had, shall we say, more interesting things going on.

This is the difference between the singular cataclysm of being canceled — which is what happened to me in January 2017 — and the long, lingering aftermath, in which you become what the writer Meghan Daum refers to as problematized. (One also need not be canceled to be problematized, but being problematized is, I think, an inevitable byproduct of having been canceled.) The Vulture thing is a rarity; for the most part, I will never know what did or didn’t happen for me because of one specific person’s bizarre vendetta. And you may notice that I haven’t named this person — partly because I actually am a great deal more successful than her at this point, and why bother, but mostly because she was never the problem.

The spineless, bowing, scraping cowards who were so petrified of being called racist on the internet that they let a person like this gut the literary apparatus and wear it like a skin suit: they were the problem. Grow some balls, sirs!

Anyway: people sometimes ask me if I think I’d still be writing YA if not for this, and my answer is always no. In some senses, this is a story about me being violently and prematurely shoved out of a world that I was probably going to exit soon, anyway. And while it took a long time, some serious strategizing, and some pretty bizarre turns (I did not, you will be shocked to learn, have “sneak back into publishing under cover of Stan Lee’s trench coat” on my list of professional aspirations), I did eventually get to write a novel again, and then another. My latest, How to Survive in the Woods, was released in March.

What I’m saying is, two things are true: That I have been blessed today with professional success beyond anything I could have imagined, that I am grateful beyond measure for every opportunity I’ve been given, that I take none of it for granted.

But also, one big reason why I take none of it for granted is that there was a moment back in the winter of 2017, when my name was trending online for all the worst reasons, when I looked at my husband and said, “I don’t think I’m ever going to be published again, I think this is probably the end.”

And then I cried so hard that I threw up.

1. For more on Tumblr as cultural architect, read Katherine Dee’s deep dive.

2. For more on the demonic environment that was Binders, read the marvelous Leigh Stein.