Yellowface

“Athena was so private with her stories while she was putting them together. They draw from such painful histories—we spoke about it once; she described it as mining her past for scars and ripping them open so that they bleed fresh again.” We never spoke about writing quite so intimately; I read the part about ripping scars open in an interview. But it is true; that really is how Athena thought about her works in progress. “She couldn’t show that pain to anyone else until she’d perfected the way she wanted to tell it, until she had complete control over the narrative. Until she’d polished it into a version and argument that she was comfortable with.

This is brilliant, Daniella writes in response to my turnaround. You are so wonderfully easy to work with. Most authors are pickier about killing their darlings.

This makes me beam. I want my editor to like me. I want her to think I’m easy to work with, that I’m not a stubborn diva, that I’m capable of making any changes she asks for. It’ll make her more likely to sign me on for future projects.

It’s not all about pandering to authority. I do think we’ve made the book better, more accessible, more streamlined. The original draft made you feel dumb, alienated at times, and frustrated with the self-righteousness of it all. It stank of all the most annoying things about Athena.

We cut out thousands of words of unnecessary backstory. Athena
likes to write in a rhizomatic fashion: jumping back ten or twenty years to explore a character’s childhood; lingering in rural Chinese landscapes for long, unrelated chapters; introducing characters who have no clear relevance to the plot, and then forgetting about them for the rest of the novel. I can tell she’s trying to add texture to her characters’ lives, to show the readers where they come from and the webs in which they exist, but she’s gone way overboard. It’s distracting from the central narrative. Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore.

Honestly, I’m relieved. Finally someone’s calling Athena out on her bullshit, on her deliberately confusing sentence structures and cultural allusions. Athena likes to make her audience “work for it.” On the topic of cultural exposition, she’s written that she doesn’t “see the need to move the text closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectly capable of moving closer to the text.”

The whole time I’m thinking, I’ve made it. I’ve fucking made it. I’m living Athena’s life. I’m experiencing publishing the way it’s supposed to work. I’ve broken through that glass ceiling. I have everything I ever wanted—and it tastes just as delicious as I always imagined.

Give me your bruises and hurts, she told us, and I will return to you a diamond.

But isn’t that what ghosts do? Howl, moan, make themselves into spectacles? That’s the whole point of a ghost, is it not? Anything to remind you that they’re still there. Anything to keep you from forgetting.

Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online.

Meanwhile, I think writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.

author efforts have nothing to do with a book’s success.