The Uncle Tom trap
On not becoming a character
Hello friends,
A polyamory memoir has been making the rounds recently, getting bashed everywhere. I haven't read the book, but the critique seems to be that polyamory doesn't make the memoirist happy--it merely amounts to more work, more angst, more emotional labor, all undertaken after she's already done the work of feeding her family and putting her kids to bed--and that her real problem isn't monogamy, but that she has a shitty husband who doesn't do anything around the house.
I find the uproar around the book a bit perplexing. It arose purely because the publisher put a lot of effort into marketing the book. And they marketed the book because they thought it would appeal to lots of people. Meanwhile, for the last few years an acquaintance of mine has been trying to sell her memoir about opening up her marriage, and has gotten reams of rejections saying how uncommercial it is.
This makes me think that the publisher and editor deliberately courted controversy by promoting a polyamory memoir where the overt message (Polyamory good, saves marriages) is undercut by the covert message (I am dreadfully unhappy).
This reminds me of reading Amy Chua's memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which uses simple East/West dualisms in its explanation of why Eastern parenting (bullying your kids to get good grades) is better than Western parenting (letting them do whatever they want). I enjoyed the memoir immensely, even as I didn't quite believe it. I simply did not believe that Chua was pushing her kids quite as hard as she pretended to. And I also didn't believe the portrait of the mother who was chose, consciously, to yell and scream at her kids for hours, and then write about that as if it was just jim dandy. I read the eldest daughter's blog for a while, and she seemed perfectly normal, very articulate, and relatively close with her mother. It's not that I didn't think Chua pushed her daughter hard--it's just that something didn't add up in this package. If Chua really was the kind of monster she portrays herself to be, then she wouldn't be portraying herself as such a monster--her very lack of defensiveness seemed telling, and seemed to show that all of this was a performance--that yes she had pushed her daughters, but they were also, constitutionally speaking, the sort amenable to being pushed.
Chua and her husband have been caught up in constant waves of controversy since, so I won't belabor the point about whether or not she's a good mother or kind person, but I did realize that if she hadn't allowed herself to be cast as a villain, the book wouldn't have caught on. The book worked because the hot take was so easy: "This is a horrible way to treat your kid". And because it was layered in a double-consciousness "Am I racist if I think this is bad?" there was a level of complexity to the controversy that made it sticky and easy to discuss (even 20 years later!)
I was on a podcast recently and the topic of Thomas Chatterton Williams came up, ands the podcast host chided me, saying it sounds like you're calling TCW an Uncle Tom. I wanted to say no, because I don't think TCW would let himself be whipped to death to save a girl from rape, but that would've been a deep cut. Anyway, I think my critique of TCW is that the easiest and quickest way to literary success is to turn yourself into a character. And if you've been around the literary world long enough, then you start to realize what kind of characters are open to you. And your level of success is directly proportional to how completely you subsume your identity into that of the character. We see with Andrea Long Chu one kind of character--the mouthpiece for indefensible ideas, who offers them up, cunningly but unconvincingly argued, for other people to tear down. In Emily Gould we see a different character--the emotive, out of touch white woman. With Lauren Oyler we see a third character, the critic who enthusiastically undertakes hatchet jobs.
I don't feel sorry any of these people, despite the hate they get, because the hate is core to their appeal. Peoples' hatred arouses lots of controversy and comment, and that hatred creates equally vociferous defenses. That push and pull of critics and fans is what creates a literary career. But hatred tends to outlast love. Those who hate you will wait for years and then come out to savage you in reviews and comment sections. Long after everyone has forgotten about the initial beef they sometimes stalk you from place to place, harassing you, doxxing you, causing you physical, financial, and reputational damage.
With TCW, he chose to become the millennial who scolded other black people. Regardless of his opinions, that was the source of his power, he was the totem that reactionary whites could use to say see not all black people believe this stuff. As such, the hatred and dislike he inspired amongst left wing intellectuals was key to his rise. Without that rancor, he wouldn't have had a career.
Similarly I'm very aware that I have the option of becoming the trans woman who scolds other trans people. The one who pumps the brakes and is like, maybe trans women shouldn't do this, or advocate for that, or demand these concessions.
It's not something I want to do, but it's certainly an option that's open.
But on the contrariwise side, it is a niche that will eventually be filled. Even now, some trans woman writer is pitching the Atlantic with an article about why actually trans women shouldn't play sports. And they will publish the article, and she will get lots of requests for podcast appearances, and she will get an agent, and distribute a proposal called NONE OF THE ABOVE, and sell it for six figures and although it'll underperform on the market, she will make regular appearances in the usual outlets for the next five to ten years.
And although I will definitely make fun of her, I'm also aware it's not really her fault. The Atlantic would not have published a better or more nuanced article. And a better or more nuanced book wouldn't have gotten more attention than hers. She will come to my attention precisely because she is an object for me to hate. And yet, I have to assume that if she's at all canny, then she understands precisely why she's in the public eye, and she understands that the bargain she's made does indeed include the oppobrium of people like me.
This is one of the reasons I dislike Substack's constant urging that writers on the platform brand themselves in precisely this way--as characters in this sense who serve some reliable textual chicken nuggets for an audience that comes to them for those predictable satisfactions. It isn't just characters-to-hate; there's another branding strategy that involves becoming a surrogate figure for an audience, a crusading hero who is also often martyred or attacked by whatever that audience thinks of as evil.
Anybody who writes in public finds that over time, your voice becomes something of a trap, but that's more or less just a miniature example of genre formation. After a decade of blogging in the aughts and 2010s, I had readers who expected me to always be the reasonable figure who would try to bridge between opposing positions, so if I let loose with snark or anger, I'd get responses that complained that this was unworthy of me, or uncharacteristic. That surprised me at first, but it made me realize how much I'd let a sense that blogging required a more idealized or responsible "public" voice shape what I wrote, and how that in turn had created an expectation for my small but persistent readership.
Becoming a character is sometimes a hyper-intensified version of that same process. But sometimes it's exactly as you suggest here: an initial choice to conform to a persona intended to spark strong reactions in order to sell a lot of books and become a memorable archetype/stereotype. I think it's right to suggest that some of the people who make that particular deal with a sort of devil end up regretting it. Genre is a generous kind of writerly prison and it's not that hard to rebuild its walls or escape altogether, but once you're a character, not only will it be very hard to change the minds of a public readership, you likely find that people in your everyday professional and personal life expect you to perform that character and relate to you as if you are really that way.
Longer-form online writing of the kind this platform supports lets us do something more like journaling, about plague years and much else, where our inner complexity spills out and floods over any sense that the writer is just a character to be hated or defended. Maybe that doesn't sell very well, but maybe it's better for the writer and the (small) audiences that come to appreciate that approach.
It's not that I don't see your point about the role he plays in the discourse and the broader point about the existence of such roles, but my issue with your assessment of Thomas Chatterton Williams, among other things, is that it's far too reductionist when it comes to the actual person you're talking about.
He's better and more authentic than you're giving him credit for, and deserves more benefit of the doubt. Given how much attention you in particular have paid to the way that we all inhabit certain roles and make certain strategic career moves, shouldn't you'd be open to the possibility both that these complicated and fraught roles exist and that someone could occupy them without compromising their integrity. We're all reducible to these types if treated with insufficient generosity.
That VQR essay I mentioned is really good.
https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2015/01/black-and-blue-and-blond
His two books are mixed, but neither of them is phony.
I understand why you don't want to occupy that role yourself, and of course there's nothing wrong with that, but why shouldn't someone who cares passionately about race in America and thinks that the mainstream politics of it are wrong take it upon himself to push back on that. You don't have to agree with him, of course, but I don't see why the endeavor is intrinsically dishonorable.