The Vivisection of Lindy West

Content warning: this post features graphic discussions of disordered eating, cannibalism (symbolic and otherwise), body dysmorphia, misogyny, and general messy mental health struggles.

Failure is a fascinating thing. On one hand, it has a sort of relentless finality, in culture – a certain inevitability that we absolutely refuse to acknowledge. No matter how good an artist is, eventually, they’re gonna produce something that either you don’t like, or nobody really likes.

The more famous they are, the more reticent we are to admit that they might, possibly, have missed the mark. At a certain point, artists often become “too big to fail” – well, if they’re men, anyway. Women and non cis-men, or men who fail to conform to masculinity, are ripe targets for failure, always hovering a breath away from falling off the balance beam and slamming ourselves square in the crotch.

Taylor Swift got an unfortunate taste of this with her Life of a Showgirl album; Lindy West isn’t as much of an international household name, but she’s certainly getting the same treatment right now.

But maybe you don’t know who the hell this is, or what I’m talking about. (If you’re the kind of person who reads my articles, you probably do know…but hey, more context and validation of facts is generally prudent.)

What everyone’s talking about

If you’ve heard of this memoir from feminist it-girl of the 2010s Lindy West, a seminal and influential confessional writer, you’ve probably heard about The Controversy.

Now, I’m a little trash-picking corvid at normal times. I enjoy gossip and Discourse and I love thinking critically about things, turning over nuggets and crystals and bits of broken glass from the culture, appreciating and evaluating them and hoarding them in my thoughts. I have a strong stomach for rot and filth; I get my hands dirty. I usually don’t do so in the public view of the internet, because I have seen too many people barely survive trolling incidents, but in private, I rejoice in the confessional spaces of group chats and gleefully, ardently consider mess.

Generally, I prefer fictional mess, where no real human beings have gotten hurt – tabletop roleplay games and various genres of fiction are ideal for exploring drama and its fallout. Hell, I’ve written an entire trilogy (I promise I’ll go back to posting chapters soon!) that’s basically just drama: the early 2010s musical.

This is as much to say that when I saw Lindy West’s name crop up on ICYMI, I jumped on it like the magpie I am, viscerally excited about the prospect of scandal and discourse. Then it came up on another podcast I absolutely love, There Are No Girls On the Internet, with a rather scathing take on the whole thing – particularly the absolutely unhinged and deeply unprofessional email that Aham, Lindy’s husband, sent journalist and essayist Scaatchi Cole.

I will have some words about the whole thing with Aham, but that’s for part 2, because I need to get deeper into the book to really share my thoughts. Suffice to say that I’m writing this article with Neko Case’s “The Pharaohs” playing on repeat. “I want the pharaohs/but there’s only men…”

Then yet another podcast I adore, The Worst Bestsellers, weighed in with guest Margaret Willison, Bossy Dame and polyamory alumnus, as she revealed in an episode of Love Letters.

I don’t always dive several episodes deep into researching a topic, but well, this one caught my interest. And then a friend in one of the book clubs I’m in wanted to read Adult Braces.

Reader, of course I enthusiastically supported this proposition. But although I was curious about the “real story” with the whole polyamory situation, I didn’t truly know what I was in for. I didn’t know I was going to walk around a corner and slam face-first into a funhouse mirror version of myself.

The Fame Monster

I’ve always felt a certain guilt about my own lack of success as a writer – surely, had I just tried a little harder and posted more, and etcetera, I could have become a Name; Marlon Brando At The Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender,” etcetera. Who knows, I still might; I’m not dead yet, and even death isn’t necessarily a bar to success (although it’s not a marketing strategy I plan to utilize, for the record).

But until reading Adult Braces – and admittedly, I’m halfway through, but my burning thoughts demanded an article already – I hadn’t realised quite how cannibalistic success really is.

Dr Devon Price wrote a rather good piece examining this side of the memoir. Now, the poly stuff in the memoir is going to be something I touch on, but first I want to talk about this thing that very few people are discussing: Lindy West’s quiet fall from relevance due to what looks like burnout.

I’ll have an article about burnout coming out soon, but I don’t want to write four essays crammed uncomfortably into a SmartCar, so forgive my brevity for the time being. Let us, for the moment, discuss a nasty little overlap between the way Lindy’s work is treated and the way Lindy’s body is treated.

In the memoir, particularly the sections set in Hollywood, West describes being alienated and dehumanized by people who are basically feeding off her work for the show. Now, it’s unfortunately true that a narrative show is just going to have changes made to it. It’s not a documentary, and hell, documentaries lie all the time. But that doesn’t invalidate or decrease the fundamental disrespect of herself and her life experiences that she ran into down in the Hollywood hellscape.

Fat Girl in the Mirror

Lindy either hasn’t quite connected it or hasn’t said it yet (or I missed it, in the 45% of the book I’ve read), but surely, at least some of the dire self-loathing of her body must have been influenced by living in LA. The way she talks about herself in Adult Braces, it would be easy to assume she’s plain, even undeniably ugly, some cartoonish cautionary tale housed in woman’s flesh.

So imagine the shock that washed over me as I read about this famous fat woman, writing about loathing her own body, and I looked her up – and was shocked to see that she was undeniably beautiful and hot, conventionally pretty.

Now, I’ve occasionally alluded to and mentioned that I struggle with body dysmorphia. I’m fat – a “small fat” in the lingo of fat activists; an absurd term that sounds like a slightly unappealing latte order – but visibly fat nonetheless. Somehow, I have three partners, and multiple other people have been attracted to me visibly over the years, or flirted with me. As a fat femme, this is one of those things we end up compartmentalizing or just putting in a box. Sure, I’ve been flirted with, but I’m still ugly and undesirable.

To be fat is to be subjected to traumatizing social and personal attacks, over and over; is it any wonder that most of us struggle with disordered eating in some way? Of course, the assumption will always be that binge eating is to blame, but this isn’t always true. Conventional anorexia and bulimia diagnoses use thinness as fundamental diagnostic criteria.

It’s entirely possible to be obsessively counting calories, peering at your tracking app after every morsel that crosses your lips, debating the cost of every bite and just how your metabolism will handle it, feeling intense guilt and shame as you dare to eat something you enjoy. It’s possible to struggle with intrusive thoughts about calorie counting years after you abandon the apps, advertisements for various trackers on otherwise innocuous phone games popping up and offering you impossible, AI-generated perfection or the classic before-and-after photo tricks. It’s possible to sit and stew and wonder if maybe, just maybe, this will be the time that your metabolism and body surrender to restricted calories and shed the prisoning rolls of flesh that lie between you and “acceptable” attractiveness.

Ask me how I know.

But Lindy knows too, and the weight of apparent self confidence, of being A Successful Fat Person who publicly loved herself, was drowning her. Now, some of the issues we struggle with are always going to be calls coming from inside the house, our internal voices projected onto other people like bad dubs over 2000s anime. But for Lindy, plenty of those shitty thoughts were being sent directly to her inboxes and comment sections by real people.

We love celebrities because we are desperate to steal a little of their light and prestige and power, to bask in their reflected glow and imagine ourselves in their places of pride. But when does that love become crushing, suffocating, toxic? When you can’t escape your own shadow, as happened to West.

In the early 2010s, that currently romanticized time, there was a serious penchant for TEDTalks, for clickbait solutions, for One Weird Trick that would dispel bigotry or grant self-confidence or heal whatever psychological or social ailments we suffered. Surely, with just the right words, we could reach a racist bigot and fix them! It’s that Aaron Sorkin, cowboy speech type heroism bullshit that poisons an awful lot of Western culture. All it takes is one brave, divine saviour to martyr themselves or fight the Ultimate Evil, and we will all be saved.

Am I saying that Lindy West is Jesus? Sure – but in the sense that every fucking person weaned on the goddamn fucking Hero’s Journey is Jesus. Or rather, that we are being trained and taught to see ourselves as the next potential Jesus, the person whose brave sacrifice and hard work will be enough to tip the Cosmic Balance towards good.

Now, I don’t know Lindy West personally. I’ve never met her, I’ve only read a few of her articles over the years. I don’t have a deep, profound type of parasocial attachment to her, unlike an awful lot of my fellow fat folks. (This is not to insult or denigrate them – if I was immune to idealising public figures, I wouldn’t have spent months in mourning after finding out that Neil Gaiman is a piece of shit.) But I will say that there’s something about Lindy West that hurt her, and has protected me, as I’ve slowly developed it over the years.

Lindy West is a kind, nice person, who cares about other people’s opinions. The visceral hunger for approval and love burns in her writing. And that is only human, and deeply understandable, but Lindy does not have what I have: I’m a mean, bitchy person, and until now, I never realised how much that has saved me.

Surviving the Internet

Anyone who’s spent a lot of time on the internet has gotten hurt on it. It’s as inevitable as gravity. Either by accident or by encountering someone thoughtless or seeking attention for snark, you will get hurt. I’ve certainly gotten hurt many times.

I had a bad experience on GoodReads with snarky reviewers taking potshots at my first book, sometimes misogynistically and queerphobically. (It was 2013, and snarky book blog reviews were all the rage. These were the heyday of vile attack pages like RequiresHate, after all, and the movie review culture of trying to cram in as many jokes per minute as possible.) I had a small but cutting run-in with Gamergaters after I dared to criticize a reviewer I used to like – someone from that dunking school, ironically enough. I’ve had uncountable fights with conservatives and fellow progressives and leftists on Facebook, taking exception to and being scolded for poor word choices and small oversights.

People on the internet are fucking mean, but also wonderfully kind, and publicly interacting on websites is a daily spin of the roulette wheel. But humans, like so many other creatures (including pigeons), are willing to gamble. And so we all do, because most of the time, or enough of the time, people are kind and good and warm enough that it’s rewarding.

But adulation is addictive, and as West describes, there’s poison in the honey. But there’s also something oddly compelling about the harm, as West admits, describing her profound act of self harm in cataloguing every bit of trolling she received, thousands of screenshots’ worth.

To survive the internet means having to accept the randomness of human interaction and the horrible unkindness as not necessarily deserved, but inflicted on yourself. As my wife often points out, people can be cruel and unkind because of shit that’s going on for them. This is certainly true of an awful lot of trolls, or even of normally reasonable people who lash out on a particular bad day. It’s worth remembering the basic humanity of everyone we interact with, even the worst people.

However.

What Lindy West seems to struggle with (so far, in as far as I can tell from reading a memoir and not knowing her as a real person in private or offline), is that some people’s opinions ain’t shit. It’s not that “opinions are like assholes; everyone has one and they all stink” – it’s that, in fact, some people act in ways that fucking suck, and are disrespectful, and it’s extremely important to learn how to not give a shit.

Perhaps my readers will have been surprised to hear about my appetite for mess, and drama, and Discourse; those who know me personally probably aren’t at all. And the reason for this is that, fucking frankly, not every opinion needs to be shared on the public internet.  I don’t share my messiest, juiciest, nastiest thoughts with everyone, because quite frankly, I don’t want to contribute to the toxicity in public discourse. It’s one thing to talk shit in private, but I am constantly aware – as I guess, most people fucking aren’t?! – that there’s a chance the subject of my speech could see something posted publicly.

So I don’t. In places where my thoughts can be accessed by search engines, I hold my tongue; I curate my thoughts; I am deliberate, as much as any one imperfect human can be. We are all at a party, and we can all be overheard, and people need to actually think about the fucking concept of privacy and discretion in how they communicate on the wide public internet.

It’s probably good to speak positively, in general, and to compliment people’s work. When I do reach out to or comment on creators’ projects that I admire, I try to write like I’d talk to them if I met them at a convention. That is, sure I’m warm and friendly, but I maintain a self-awareness of the fact that a) I know this person’s work, not the person themselves, and b) they don’t fucking know me, which means that c) I’m not entitled to speak to them in certain intimate ways. It’s okay to form an emotional attachment to someone’s work, and their persona. Hell, the current landscape of the creative internet actually requires that creative people encourage a degree of this attachment to fucking survive. You’re supposed to want to see every update from a “creator”, every video clip, every breath we take.

To be famous at all is to live in the holding pen outside a slaughterhouse

And this is a recipe for self destruction, especially for marginalized people. For a fat person, or a person in a fat body – god, so many of us feel like we’re a thin person just imprisoned somehow! – there is something particularly cruel and horrible about the inevitable scrutiny on us. Lindy writes agonizingly about how people scolded her for losing weight as they projected their insecurities onto her.

It must have hurt. I can only imagine how it hurt. And it is as much a fault of the “good fan” for having shitty boundaries and poor distinctions of self-definition around Lindy, as it is the fault of a troll for dehumanizing her and targeting her. In a horrible way, every fan is a troll waiting to happen.

There’s a speech in the first Sam Raimi Spiderman movie, where Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin emotively snarls advice at Tobey Maguire’s wide-eyed Peter Parker, about how what people love more than a hero is “to see a hero fall, see him fail.” The thing about a dead hero is that they can’t disappoint you. This is also true of dead women; they are perfect ciphers, sexy blank canvases upon which any fantasy can be perfectly projected, painted, embroidered.

Now make the beautiful woman fat. Because we don’t like talking about that, do we, that fat women can be incontrovertibly beautiful? But there is some horrible angle to this, to the way that fat bodies are subject to an extra level of scrutiny. Prodded, poked, laid out flat; as people performatively describe their disgust for us and demonstrate their own virtue at the expense of our fallen bodies. It is like being eaten to death by rats, devoured one bite at a time, though you’ll feel every nibble. Do it to Julia.

Societally, we do not discuss the beauty of fat forms; luxurious, plush flesh, a huge variety of different kinds of softness and welcome. A body you can sink into and rest on. It’s not all about sex: there is comfort here. My toddler son loves to sleep on my tummy, and the way he cuddles into what has been my most hated body feature gives me pause. He is comfortable, happy, on the fattest part of me, and my fat helps me nurture him, while cushioning my bones and organs against twenty-odd pounds of rambunctious little kid flopping against them. My lovers don’t mind my belly, but it’s my son’s joy that is eroding my self-loathing, bit by bit.

Sure, the nineties raved about big tits and the 2010s were the era of the thick ass and thighs – but fat on publicly celebrated bodies is sculpted, curated, strictly controlled; not permitted wildness or softness or malleability. To sag and give in to gravity’s arc is to fail at the task of womanhood, and increasingly, manhood; to admit defeat in the face of entropy. We are supposed to be young and firm forever. We do not discuss or even consider that, maybe, there’s beauty to be found in age, or even that aging isn’t as bad as we claim it is.

The people who hate Lindy West and other fat people would probably sooner stab themselves in the face than admit that maybe, possibly, some of them find us a little bit attractive, or even just don’t find us that disgusting. But fat bodies are common and normal. Fat bodies are normal.

 Just writing that sentence is, somehow, fucking iconoclastic, even after decades of fat activist work; just saying “fat bodies are normal” feels like it needs some sort of caveat, or apology, or context, or some swooping caveat to condemn the most extreme cases of obesity and high weight. As though stigma and scolding will save people from the shadow of fat this time, in defiance of literally every other piece of evidence we’ve got about the relationship between weight and stigma and mental health.

What Should Lindy West Do?

I can’t speak for what Lindy West needs to do, apart from like, probably more therapy – something, I hasten to add, that I recommend for pretty much everyone who can manage it – but I do think that, if Lindy were to read this article somewhere, I’d say she might wanna listen to some punk music. Punk music is, broadly, about expressing the emotion of telling someone to go fuck themselves, and she could do worse than listening to Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette a couple times. The Regrettes are also high on my recommendation list. I’d also mention Bikini Kill or The Suffrajetts, but I haven’t listened to much of their work yet. Same goes for The Bad Decisions, who are also on my music homework playlist.  

(Don’t fucking gatekeep what counts as punk in the comments, or I will come to your house, knock on your door, look you in the eye, and tell you how much I don’t give a shit.)

No, really. There’s allegedly a  Zen koan that says, “If you see the Buddha on the side of the road, kill him.” The meaning of this is basically that like, someone claiming or appearing to be the Buddha is not the real Buddha, and it’s kind of meant to make you think about the concept of reverence compared to actual reverence, and like the whole sorta-atheistic nature of Buddhism qua not actually treating Buddha as a god but as like, a role model – and other stuff. I’m not actually a Buddhist; just someone who likes thinking an awful lot. In the same way, if you see an internet troll in your comment section, kill them (in your head; for legal and fucking logical humane reasons, I’m not advocating actual violence).

But relatedly, I think there’s a deep and profound importance to learning to shun people’s expectations, especially on the endlessly cannibalistic internet. Lindy West was never going to be good and perfect enough to satisfy everyone, to be a Perfect Fat Person, especially because different ideas and requirements for what it means to be a Good Fat Person exist, clashing and cracking against each other like her poor, abused teeth. But in the same way that her teeth needed the support of orthodontics, individual creators absolutely cannot get by without the support of colleagues.

Community is a bit messier and less ideal than we want it to be. To quote a good friend of mine, “being in community means being annoyed sometimes,” and that’s true. And being annoyed means dealing with your emotions, which sometimes means bitching and gossiping in private, then working your shit out so you can actually still be kind to the person who’s annoyed you. This, incidentally, is also how relationships work, whether platonic, romantic, familial, or some messy alterous nebulous thing you’re trying to figure out.

I’m still unlearning the anxiety and uncertainty and double-back clarifications that Tumblr and Facebook arguments taught me; the uncertainty in my own voice and fear of misinterpretation as I fail to cover ground for every possible meaning. It’s interwoven with real-life trauma I’ve been through in nasty, elf-locked tangles and knots. Some days I win against the self-doubt, some I lose. But when I see my girlfriend hesitate and struggle to share an opinion, the kind Tumblr would have flayed her for in her teen years, I support and encourage her, because in doing so, I’m also putting the boots to my own demons.

Sometimes it’s really fucking hard to tell whether the yelling is coming from inside the house or the street outside. The worst thing of all is when the monsters in the closet and the dickheads on the street are screaming the same things.

So fuck ‘em. Be angry at them. Maybe get real creative with your insults and dismissals. It feels great sometimes. And the best ways to disarm trolls are a) a casual acceptance of fault, if you did in fact fuck something up for real, and b) baring your teeth and showing them that you’re not a helpless little creature.  

And when people who claim to love you try to transgress your boundaries and hurt you, give them a chance to talk about it. And if they keep doing it, over and over, they also might need to go fuck themselves, and you might have to say it.

And I have more to say about that, but we’ll get to it in part 2.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

A History of Failure

 

Art by Rachel A Rosen, who also designs amazing covers for books (HINT!)

This essay is not about Taylor Swift – or at least, it’s got far less to do with Taylor Swift than my last essay. But there is a connection.

It’s pretty hard to deny that even though it’s made adequate bank, Life of a Showgirl has had – at least on parts of the internet I’ve seen, i.e. my Discord channels and my Youtube and Substack algorithms – a pretty negative reaction from fans and a lot of critics. The line between “fan” and “critic” is blurrier than it’s ever been, in this current era of accessible content creation and platforming. You don’t need to be an expert for your opinion to matter; you just need to catch the algorithm at the right or wrong time.

Regardless, some people are treating the album, and Swift, as a laughingstock, and not for the first time.

Now, in my own life, I mentioned in my last essay that I was running for the local public school board, and while I managed to get over 2900 votes, from a voting turnout of about 18% and about 20k voters or so, I didn’t get a spot on the school board.

 (My shitshow of a provincial government apparently is floating the idea of just abolishing school boards anyway. If you’re Albertan, this is a reminder to make a fuss and do your best to piss off the UCP. Operation Total Recall is underway, and please check it out, because this government is attacking our democratic rights and everyone’s interests, regardless of preferred political affiliation.)

Now – my personal failure here was a disappointment, but I’ve had a much kinder reaction from people. Partly, I don’t have the expectations placed on me that, you know, a seasoned political candidate or a world-famous celebrity like Swift does. And while I’m proud that I made the attempt, there’s still a certain shadow over any effort that doesn’t bear fruit.

It got me thinking: what does failure mean?

There’s something really interesting about failing these days. Now, maybe it’s a modern problem, or maybe there’s a historical precedent here, but at least in my own English-speaking, Western cultural context, it seems to me like failure has developed this moral weight to it.

A Quick, Dirty History of Success

I’ve alluded to the basic concepts of Calvinism and gestured at the Protestant work ethic and its resulting trauma before. In a quick, dirty overview, a prominent strain of Christianity held that some people were chosen for Heaven and others simply aren’t, and the seats are limited: predestination. However, and here’s the extra nasty bit, people thought that God would hint at who was destined for eternal salvation by favouring them with success in their earthly life.

So of course, people who belonged to Calvinist strains of Christianity ended up working as hard as possible to try and demonstrate their state of blessedness. Mix that into the cultural soup of the Industrial Revolution, and you have an extremely toxic recipe for the future.

This whole belief system has kind of evolved into what’s now called the Prosperity Gospel, which is a more aggressive focus specifically on the idea that God will reward you in not only Heaven, but your earthly life, with actual riches. Immortality in a paradise of fellowship amongst loved ones and a divine parental figure is no longer enough to satisfy people who are scraping to make ends meet.

John Steinbeck did not actually say, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” The thing that this popular misquote gets wrong is at least partly its attribution of blame. It has this implication that damn it, these poor people are just stupid and stubborn, or ignorant – if only they’d see what’s gone wrong!

That perspective glides over the extremely intensive propaganda efforts that have gone into making people believe that poverty is their own fault. After all, if you just work hard enough, you can be a billionaire too, right? Ignore the widening legal loopholes for transference of wealth, avoidance of taxation, and the inheritance chains of property, wealth, and privileged advantages that directly tie into chattel slavery and European aristocratic families, of course. It’s just about luck and working hard! Get on that grindset, girl!

Back to Failure

The thing about focusing on success and The Power of Positive Thinking, and other similar late-Victorian and early 20^th century self-help texts, is that it doesn’t really account for what the fuck happens if…you just fail. In The Secret, one of the more recent and deeply influential permutations of modern prosperity gospel, there’s a whole thing about “The Universe” wanting to reward you by giving you whatever you think about most. Of course, that means that worrying about failure will actually result in failure…because the universe is kind of stupid and bad at consent, I guess.

Perhaps, dear reader, you can see the direction I’m pulling you in. The logical corollary of the axiom that success = favour from God or the Universe…is that failure means God, or the Universe, is disappointed in you.

I haven’t seen this discussed much, but the idea lurks like an urban legend intruder beneath the bed, breathing and panting damply, evident but too terrifying to confront directly.

“Bad Things That Happen to You Are Your Own Fault”

People don’t say this out loud in exactly these words, but the implication sits there, and turns up constantly, just like that urban legend slasher. Even after #MeToo in the late 2010s, people still say and imply that one’s clothing or behaviour could have been responsible for sexual assault and harassment.

Not attaining the success you expected at work, missy? Clearly the problem is that feminism has failed, and it’s time to Retvrn to the (imagined) past mode of life. Be more…traditional. You want a family, don’t you? Wouldn’t it be relaxing to just spend time with your children at home while your husband takes care of things? All you have to do is the chores, and you already do those! Why work in addition to that?

This particular message is all over social media, popping up in different forms like mutating toxic mushrooms around the earthen cellar door where fascism dwells.

Never in this line of propaganda is there a discussion of, say, fertility problems. Despite the wide accessibility of fertility treatments in our current era, having any kind of trouble, say, getting pregnant or impregnating someone, still carries the sting of humiliation. Never mind the question of what happens if you find out that you can’t crack it as a parent *after* you have children, or the constant, pervasive fear every parent has of failing their child.

As mentioned, the dominant cultural milieu in the West is flavoured by both capitalism and Christanity. Both the wealthy and the super-wealthy benefit from having the broad working class focused on aspiration rather than justice. If people are trying to grind their way to the top, and fighting each other for scraps, they won’t target the people actually holding the reins of power and wealth. Furthermore, if people see wealth as a blessing from God or the Universe, poverty indicates either withholding of a blessing, or failure.

Failure and poverty are thus made uncomfortable housemates, necessary to each other. Any type of failure risks the danger of poverty, and poverty itself is a form of implied failure.

Let’s Make It Worse

So, this is pretty bad, right? Like if you take apart the idea that failure is always your own fault *and* a result of not being good enough for the Divine Parent (whether that’s God or the Universe), it’s pretty scary and daunting. It’s a damn hard standard to meet.

Now put that in the context of our panopticon society. Speaking of 19^th century morality that’s stabbing us in the ass, the panopticon was a prison design meant to allow constant surveillance of prisoners, to make sure they were reforming properly. Constant scrutiny and an absolute destruction of privacy is clearly the way to stop someone from hurting people, right? Of course, if we’re talking about people breaking the law, we should probably allude to that whole “poor people commit crimes because they’re poor” thing that tends to happen. So basically, if you surveil and shame people adequately, it should be possible to fix their unfortunate moral defect of poverty.

The best part is, now we have the thing where user interfaces on social media treat every person like a content creator, people feel both social pressure and algorithmic pressure to post regularly. Between the data exposure required for social media and actually posting stuff about one’s personal life, we’ve developed a societal system of self-exposure and peer surveillance.

Now, peer surveillance has always been kind of a thing – people have been up in each other’s business for as long as we’ve been social animals, and in fact, other animals are nosy, too. But the current mode of peer surveillance transcends previous social models. Before, you’d have to be seen or heard doing something you weren’t supposed to; your thoughts, at least, were sacrosanct.

But now we share our thoughts as well, and present the world with an entirely new path of judgement.

And, in a world where the middle and lower class are collapsing together, rather than forging class solidarity and focusing on our mutual opposition, we resort to cannibalism, in hopes of temporary catharsis and relief. After all, if we can root out the class traitors, the “Treatlers” who still order snacks from food delivery services, surely we’ll be able to defeat our enemies, right? Somehow, people bullying each other on social media platforms has failed to trigger the revolution.

How the fuck do we fix this?  

The thing is, this situation isn’t unfixable. In addition to plain compassion and critical thinking and asking ourselves questions – should I *really* repeat this or engage with this content? Am I being too harsh on other people? – we need to practice both self-compassion and compassion towards others.

This sounds extremely boring and un-fun, so if you find yourself with superfluous hostile or mischievous energy, direct it towards the real targets: people in power. You have a right to be angry for what they’re doing to us, so write angry, ferocious letters, make art, or find other creative outlets to express your anger. People in power are so much more fragile than we think they are. We should make them scared again. For legal reasons, I am not directly advocating violent action, but I am advocating protests and strikes, and whatever forms of disruption you can manage.

Harass politicians and political figures who are trying to strip your rights away. Cover for your coworkers when they’re sick or “quiet quitting”. Ignore shoplifting customers, especially if you’re a fellow customer. Buy food for homeless people (and also just give them money). Find out what your neighbours’ names are and actually say hi to them. Be nice to random people on the internet, especially when you don’t want to. And above all else, reframe how you see failure.

What failure really means

Not everything we try to do is going to succeed, but instead of seeing failure as the end of a story, see it as part of a cycle. We can’t learn what works without failures along the way. Like death, failure is an inevitability. Also like death, it tends to be terrifying until you actually encounter it, and realise that it’s an essential part of living. In various ways, we will fail over and over – so the trick is to see how long one can keep going before the next failure; as well as to stop treating failure itself as a moral judgement on everything about us in our lives.

This is hard, slow work, and sometimes being nice to yourself is harder than being nice to other people – so turn your compassion outward; towards friends, family, and strangers, even celebrities.

(Compassion doesn’t mean blind defense, but if you don’t know the difference, maybe go spend some time sitting with that before you yell at me. There’s your first lesson: stop wasting your time yelling at random people on the internet when you could be trolling and harassing CEOs of large corporations.)

With practice at turning compassion outward, it gets easier to ask, “Would I say this to my partner? My best friend?” when dealing with negative thoughts and judgements rooted in the Christian/capitalist paradigm.

The other thing to do with failure is to see the freedom in it. If you’ve already failed, you’re already “a sinner”, and “damned” – so what comes next?

Well, actually, anything you want. If you’re already lost, why not go further? Modify your approach. Find a new goal. Instead of waiting for happiness later, find small happinesses now.  Instead of longing to be a billionaire, or waiting for heaven, ask yourself – what were you hoping for from those things anyway? To help your friends? You don’t need a billion dollars to do that. Life only gets better when you realise that the metrics of success were impossible anyway. To quote a song I like, “we’ll never get to Heaven ‘cause we don’t know how.”

Now, do I actually succeed in living by all of these precepts? It’s a work in progress. But hey, the more I fail, the more I have a chance to try again.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

What We Owe Our Fans: The Emotional Contract of Storytelling

 

[Warning: This essay contains spoilers for The Last of Us and Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, as well as Mass Effect. I’m talking about endings here, so if you see a thing, just kind of assume spoilers are on the table. Also, yes this is late, but it’s also like twice as long as my usual posts, and I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, so them’s the breaks.]

Ending a story is hard. Hell, getting a series off the ground is hard. Of the three series I’ve started – The Nightmare Cycle, The Memory Bearers, and The Meaning Wars – only one is complete.

(I still have plans to finish the first two, but quite frankly, book 2 for The Nightmare Cycle took ten years to write…and when I was finished last year, I decided I wasn’t happy with it, and that it needs a complete rewrite. The good news is, I’m a much faster writer than I used to be, so that’s part of my plan for 2026 and 2027; to finish The Nightmare Cycle. The Memory Bearers takes place in the same world, and will involve consequences from The Nightmare Cycle, so that’s why I haven’t been able to continue and finish that series yet, either!

That and, you know, the whole “adjusting to parenthood and scheduling” thing. And the hyperfixation committee decreeing exactly what I’m allowed to focus on, and when. Wheee. But I digress severely.)

Series are hard, yo

I’m going to focus mostly on books, because that’s my primary artistic storytelling medium, but I will reference other narratives to reinforce my point, which I think is broadly applicable to most narrative mediums, including a lot of nonfiction.

There are a lot of authors out there with series that have been started, get one book deep, and then – either due to personal reasons or publishing company-imposed limitations – don’t get to finish. (I’m looking at you, company that won’t let Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant release the sequel to Into the Drowning Deep!)

However, when some authors get big enough, like George R R Martin or Patrick Rothfuss, they can set their own schedules.

Now, I wrote an analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire’s failure to launch some years ago, but the example has certainly stuck in my mind.

The thing that led to my disgruntlement, touched on there, is the issue of the Red Wedding. Now, at the start of the book series, we get a rather hamfisted foreshadowing that Ned Stark is gonna bite it. His death felt entirely fair and unsurprising. Again, intense foreshadowing.

Book 1 starts with a family sundered, and emotionally, that should mean that the end of the series brings all of the family members back together, damaged but surviving, to recuperate together. That is the emotional core of the story of Game of Thrones that holds the first couple of books together.

This is a powerful storytelling concept, and it’s also the reason the series fell the fuck apart. In book 3, when Caitlin and Rob Stark are horribly and brutally murdered, Martin threw a subversive curveball in the equation.

 However, killing family members means that the reunion is impossible before it happens. By killing off his probable king, instead of, you know, badly disabling him or injuring him in some way, Martin effectively slew the emotional core of his own story.

It’s easy to see the evidence; without the emotional anchoring of their protagonist family for us to cling to, books 4 and 5 are a rambling mess. Now that so many years have passed since book 6’s expected due date, it’s pretty obvious that Martin is hopelessly stuck.

 I’m not going to say he should pass the writing on to some other author because he might die soon. (In fact, you should never say that to an author; I can’t express how phenomenally rude and inconsiderate it is.) What I do think is that any remaining fans with a lingering sense of hope…need to mourn the series and move on.

By waiting too long to publish, and by destroying the emotional anchor point of the story, Martin broke the emotional contract.

What’s an emotional contract?

I hasten to add that I’m sympathetic to other authors who get partway through a series and get completely stuck, or who start a series and don’t finish it. After all, I have my own context with that.

In the current romance writing world, there’s a publishing norm that’s become so hard and fast, it’s getting ossified: genre romance novels must end happily, with the couple/people in relationships together. It wasn’t always like this, and I personally think that less predictable love stories are due for a comeback. However, it’s important to signal to people that a story may be tragic, or at least that it’s meant to be less predictable. Otherwise, readers will respond VERY poorly to a broken emotional contract.

There’s that phrase again! An emotional contract is an implicit agreement with readers to finish a story in a satisfying manner.

The thing is, this concept transcends narrative medium and genre. Whether it’s a twenty-five-part story time on Tiktok, a prestige TV drama, or a niche genre book series – the audience expects a satisfying ending.

The blowup around Mass Effect is a pretty great example of the ball getting dropped. Now, the writing was very complex there, so it was going to be hard to make everyone happy with the myriad different relationships – but by promising a happy ending with some characters’ romances, and showing the importance of teamwork and the hope of survival in previous games, the third game’s ending was in conflict with itself. Killing off Shepard might have been okay in a vacuum, but given the themes of previous games, a lot of people felt betrayed. People would even have been willing to sacrifice Shepard…if they felt more autonomy over the ending’s decisions. The backlash was so famous and so bad that the gaming company was bombarded with three-colour cupcake orders, among other forms of trolling, and eventually had to go back and remaster the ending.

Completely unrelated illustration, but it’s progress in my attempt at a year-long drawing-a-day effort.

What’s satisfying?

People tend to get hung up on specific details and what they think they’ve been promised, which is a huge issue – the amount of entitlement people have towards creative media is pretty frustrating, and that entitlement also transcends genre, unfortunately.

An emotional contract is formed in stages. You’ll all have to forgive me for referencing the Hero’s Journey structurally a bit – but I’m commenting primarily on what I’ve seen of stories that are either written or translated into English, and mostly, published within the cultural milieu of North America and Europe.

The first part is the setup, where the status quo is explained and demonstrated. Then we get a disruption, where the desire/goal is established. In, say, the game Mass Effect, which I’ve also spilled a lot of digital ink thinking about, the fundamental goal is “handle the Reaper threat”. In like 99% of romance novels, the fundamental goal is connection and union with one or more love interests. In a mystery novel, it might be the setup of the fundamental question – you know, “Who killed Roger Akroyd” or whatnot. Fantasy and science fiction can have a whole range of situations, including any of the previous questions, or others, but there’s still usually some sort of question being asked at the start of the book. (I mean, that’s why it’s called speculative fiction, really.) In a horror novel, the desire or goal is usually just survival, but horror has different expectations, and as long as the ending is satisfying, audiences are pretty tolerant of a range between happy, bittersweet, tragic, and deeply upsetting endings.

Through the plot arc or arcs, we see the establishment of stakes (i.e. the risk versus reward for a character pursuing their desire). We see hints of the consequences of not having the goal or desire fulfilled, as well as hints of what attainment will lead to. Different stories and formats have different stakes, structures, and interruptions; for instance, video games have a very different structure than a TV series, even though they’re usually both visually-focused mediums. Regardless of medium, the end of a story usually comes from either the attainment of the desire/goal, or the fallout and results of its attainment.

The problems come into play when either a) a series simply never finishes, leaving its question unanswered, or b) audiences are unhappy with the attainment.

The delicate dance of audience dissatisfaction

 A lot of authors claim to be writing for themselves, but while this is fundamentally true to an extent, writing is also a form of communication. It is possible to write entirely for yourself – if you don’t publish or share your work with anyone, ever. Communicating with yourself is still a valuable and worthwhile pursuit, but writing always represents an act of communication.

Writing is also the absolute cheapest medium in terms of raw production, which is probably why it’s so popular; it also underpins many other art forms and narratives. No matter how a story is produced, whether that’s a video game or a podcast or a grand movie, it starts with being written down.

However, the more expensive the production, the greater the weight of the audience expectations. Authors can often afford to piss off their audiences a bit more – in theory – but the greater one’s prestige or recognition, the more audiences will develop expectations based on previous works. This is unavoidable, since humans are pattern-seeking creatures, just like many other animals. And that’s fine! The existence of patterns is morally neutral, but much less so once we get into the specifics of those patterns.

For instance, in true crime narratives, there’s a common emphasis on the heroism of law enforcement. Given that I’ve gone on the record many times as being against the concept of policing, especially as it currently exists, myself and other people find this quite objectionable. Still, even true crime and other non-fiction narratives follow narrative structures that parallel those in fiction. “Reality” TV still uses a degree of scripting, and often presents unpleasant characters who eventually suffer downfalls and other inconveniences, in the morality plays of our time.

In The Last of Us’s TV show adaptation, audiences have been incredibly pissed off about the death of Pedro Pascal’s character, Joel. While shifting the focus to Ellie’s character is fine, killing Joel off broke the emotional contract of a found family. It’s okay to kill some members of a found family in a situation with multiple characters – after all, look at D’Argo’s heroic sacrifice in the big finale of Farscape, which also has a pretty satisfying ending. But when there’s only two people in the found family, killing one off…destroys the found family. Emotional contract, broken. Result? Not just a few grumbles, but an internet full of fans lashing out.

Why is satisfaction important?

Life is unpredictable, chaotic, and unorganized. Humans impose structural narratives to keep ourselves from going fucking insane and to make sense of the world. Narratives also help us articulate our desires or goals, or relay values. Stories mean a lot, blah blah blah, power of story is significant. (I’ll be dissecting the whole “power of story” fetishization in a future article, by the way.)

Basically, we crave stories so we can get something that real life seldom offers. Abusers go unpunished, loved ones leave us and don’t forgive our trespasses, and sometimes love falls apart. On the other hand, sometimes we can only make sense of our triumphs and achievements with the benefit of hindsight. Not everything in our lives is a story of perpetual loss, attrition, and entropy. Or, you can look at it that way, but you might go insane, and even the nihilists and existentialists agree that in a world without divinely ordered meaning, we have to make and find our own.

Enter the narrative.

The practical upshot of all this is simple: life is fundamentally dissatisfying, and to avoid getting lost in it, we want our stories to make sense. Having a story take a sharp left turn – for example, a conventionally plotted romance novel having a shocking twist ending that leaves the main couple forever sundered – breaks the emotional contract. Like a hull breach in a space craft, it exposes us to the deeply dissatisfying chaos outside.

Now, don’t get it twisted – it’s okay to have unpredictable endings, as long as you set the audience up for an expectation of unpredictability. To put it mildly, storytelling and its conventions have changed a lot over the centuries, as values and audience desires have changed, too. In mythology, whether that’s the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita or The Journey to the West, narratives served to organize and teach morality and apply structure from a divinely ordained perspective. Wealthy aristocrats and royalty ruled by divine right, but could be toppled if a particularly clever and righteous beggar or lower-class person proved to be their better. In this way, mythology tends to be fundamentally conservative. It’s okay for Zeus to assault beautiful women, because that’s how heroes are born, after all. (PLEASE NOTE THAT I AM NOT ENDORSING THIS REASONING; I’M JUST EXPLAINING MY BEST UNDERSTANDING OF ANCIENT LOGIC.)

The line between instructive and entertaining fiction and narratives gets more and more blurry the farther back you go. The modern era clearly distinguishes between these categories, but it wasn’t always so. Still, every story in every format sets up a promise, and has to deliver.

Promises, promises

Partly to organize the chaos of the world, both humans and social animals have come up with concepts of agreement and promises. A pack of wolves might not sit down and hash out a contract to share and divide up their kills evenly, but they have an implicit agreement to work together and share food. Domesticated dogs, cats, and other animals understand that doing a trick or obeying a command leads to some sort of reward.

A promise is inherently transactional; it means giving something to get something. The thing given in return might just be trust, but that emotional and social capital has a very real value. Audiences give us their attention and money; we give them entertainment, instruction, or a mixture of both. Again, I have to emphasize that even non-fiction follows this structure; you wouldn’t still be reading this essay, two thousand words deep, if not for the implicit promise that I’m going to explain something of interest or value.

So let’s circle back, at long last, to the beginning thesis: emotional contracts underpin all narratives, fiction or non-fiction, and creatives break those contracts at their own peril. An example of deeply satisfying emotional contract fulfillment would be, say, the ending of Return of the Jedi or Return of the King, just to choose the absolute simplest examples I can think of. In Jedi, Luke is at peace with his father’s legacy, the insurgent communal anarchist rebel Ewoks survive and escape, the Death Star is destroyed, and Han and Leia are together. It’s everything we’re told to hope for through the original trilogy. Return of the King foreshadows the bittersweet twist of Frodo’s parting throughout the narrative by showing how the Ring damages its keepers, even the most stalwart and resistant. But even so, we’re still promised that eventually, Sam and Frodo will be reunited some day in the West, aka Elf Heaven.

What do writers need to know?

Emotional contracts might be very specific (“This couple will get together”) or very broad (“This story will be completed”) but failing to fulfill them introduces discomfort and chaos. A little discomfort and chaos is absolutely a good thing, because a completely predictable narrative is boring. It doesn’t satisfy the fundamental need to create meaning and order out of our chaotic lives. Too much chaos, however, and too many arbitrary changes, result in something like season 8 of Game of Thrones, which was so widely reviled that it retroactively pretty much killed the fandom.

Metanarrative actions can also destroy an emotional contract. JK Rowling, for instance, made a big point in the Harry Potter books of standing up for marginalized and bullied people. (How well she succeeded at that is a matter of some debate, but the broad strokes were there in the original work). When she turned on trans people and revealed virulent hate in her heart, she broke the emotional contract implied by the values of her series.

I’m not saying writers have to be as heroic as their characters, but if your work conveys broad-strokes values, it’s probably a good idea to try and follow those values in your professional life. Everyone makes mistakes, and the internet can be unforgiving, but if you develop a fanbase, it’s also like, worth having a personal ethos and trying to be consistent with it.

The slippery bits and caveats

Obviously, there’s a giant “But…” in my conception of emotional contracts, and that is – some audience members are going to misinterpret the specifics for the broad strokes. That is, there are going to be people angry that their particular ship wasn’t rewarded. Now, again, this is slippery, because we’re touching on the concept of queerbaiting just by implicating ships. It’s not 2009 or 2011 anymore, and the representation of queer relationships has definitely increased in the last ten to fifteen years, but I would caution my fellow authors in particular about watching out for queerbaiting. In my experience, the people who see a few minutes of contact and get excited about a potential ship are pretty self-aware and reasonably self-deprecating. It’s mostly when a relationship spans the long term, has a lot of focus, and is heavily built up that authors get into trouble for not fulfilling reader expectations.

Now, you’re just not going to make everyone happy. That’s human nature. But it’s very important to go over a particular project and make sure that the biggest promises that were set up actually get fulfilled.

(And that, among other reasons, is why I wasn’t happy enough with my first draft of Monsters and Fools, the sequel to Underlighters, and why I’m rewriting the whole damn thing.)

If there’s a particular couple that you’ve spent a lot of ink and time on, get them together OR have a damned good reason for them to not end up together. If there’s an underlying philosophical point in your work, even if you’ve outgrown it, just fulfill it and write something more mature in the next book or series, instead of trying to retcon the story to fit your new ideals. (ASK ME HOW I KNOW.) Villains don’t always have to die, but the fundamental questions asked by a work do need to be answered.

So get out there, and answer some questions!

I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out.

Meanwhile, I’m going to make progress on wrapping up the enormous private online tabletop roleplay game I’ve been working on. After that, I feel mortally compelled to work on the gothic horror rewrite of my first novel ever, a standalone that’s going to feature themes of gender dysphoria, colonization, and a tech oligarch villain. I’ve been struggling with Synchronicity (different title coming; I’m thinking “The Violent Ones”) since a former friend figuratively ripped its original draft to shreds and convinced me it was unsalvageably bad, in need of wholesale rewrites.

I kind of wish I’d just published that messy baby as my first novel anyway, buuuuuuuut I also know that my ideas for this complete rewrite are going to be a banger, and I’m going to do my best to do justice to it, on behalf of my shy, petrified teenage self, who hoped so dearly to release her first novel ever to the wide world, and to be a child prodigy.

Anyway, happy writing to all of us!

If you liked this article, and boy I hope you did, please do give me a subscribe, or take a peek at my Patreon and Substack. I’m trying to keep my stuff accessible and not paywalled, and your support helps me with that goal.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: Website  Amazon  Substack Patreon Ko-fi  Instagram  Bluesky  Mastodon  Tumblr  Medium  OG Blog  Facebook

Back on Ash Tree Lane: Revisiting House of Leaves

Art by Michelle Browne, 2023. Yep, I'm back on my bullshit.

An abbreviated version of this appears as a review for the book on my Amazon and Goodreads accounts, but I realised I had more to say. 

Beware, because 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS 

for this 23-year-old book (jeez) abound.

 I first read House of Leaves years and years ago, and then some friends suggested reading it for a book club this year. Naturally, I figured it was a good time for a revisit; it's probably been fifteen years or more since I picked it up. Maybe closer to twenty. (Jeez, I'm old.) 

Vibe Check

As much as parts of the book do genuinely deliver a dizzying thrill ride, the beginning of the book actually didn't quite hold up for me. But I have to admit, this is a book you have to binge - try to read it in long sessions. Also there's a ton of content warnings for this book - child abuse, sexual assault mentions, sexual harassment, mental illness, animal harm and death, infanticide, attempted child murder...plus some good, old-fashioned gore and body horror. Lots of horrible, excellent, spooky stuff, and it's generally treated with some respect. 

Once you start to "get" the book, the labyrinthine page formatting and the distracting footnotes - they're there for vibes most of the time, and to instill a sense of authenticity and realism - it's amazing. 

Is this book the most accessible thing I've ever read? Probably not. I don't even know how it is from a disability perspective - I'm not even sure how you'd make an audiobook that captures the vibe. (Maybe with lots of sound effects and clever editing tricks? Actually, if that exists somewhere, someone send it to me.)

And yet, the overall story, about the mental health issues of Johnny Truant, and the possibility of the entire thing being his invention? Or the invention of his mental health? And the subtle nested story meta-structure thing - is really sad and really cool. There's something very visceral about this sad, sad guy's lonely wandering and search for answers. 

A lot of people are tempted to skim Johnny's segments for some reason, but if at all possible, don't do that. Johnny's mother's institutionalization when he was young, his persistent struggles with poverty, mental health issues, substance use, and intimacy, as well as possible ADHD (just to take a few wild guesses), and the death of his "godlike" pilot father and the subsequent abusive monstrousness of his stepfather Raymond, are all essential parts of the narrative. 

Some griping

Yeah, it's at least borderline "dick lit," i.e. a book about man-pain bordering on the fetishistic (i.e., your On the Road, most Hemingway books, Crime and Punishment, Catch-22, Fight Club, plenty of other literary fiction titles - those are just some I've read that fit the bill). But this is "dick lit" that actually shares something scared, vulnerable, and alone, and shows the holes in toxic masculinity - as well as the dangers of mythologizing male figures in one's life. 

The creepy Oedipal stuff with Johnny's mother, as revealed in her letters from the mental institution, and the meta-fictional portrayal of Karen, as well as all the hookup girls, definitely fit too well into that Madonna/whore dichotomy. And it's worth saying that the book is extremely white and quite straight - for someone in LA, Johnny never seems to even encounter a queer person or drag queen/king, and homosexuality is only mentioned in a context of denigrating Will Navidson's masculinity, and questioning the fidelity of his wife, Karen. Even the book metatextually commentating on the mother/whore dichotomy, and having Johnny speculate on the inner lives of his hookups, does not succeed in fishing the book out of basic sexism. 

I can only speculate about ableism a little bit, but the character Reston felt like pretty good representation, and the mental health stuff - well, at least for me, it worked. The visceral horror of developing a family member's mental illness and recapitulating the cycle of trauma? Compulsive lying or avoidance of personal history to hide the horrors within? Yeah, I get it. Not all representation has to be Perfect (TM), and the institutionalization horror of his mother probably has some problems to unpack with it, but the cloying and suffocating nature of her attachment, as well as her desperate hunger for connection with the outside world, also shone through. 

I'll be honest - this is also a book that benefits from skimreading certain sections. I'm just not sure all the physics stuff actually adds to the narrative. I'm not a crunchy enough scientist to take value from it, personally. A lot of people hate Johnny, who is definitely not a Good Person, but I felt sympathetic towards the scrappy young man. I'm surprised Tumblr isn't all over House of Leaves, because he has "scrungly" disaster vibes for sure. (And possibly, considering how much he idolizes his friend Lude, a hint of coded bisexuality? For a book with a central focus on Greek mythology, it's agonizingly straight.)

The good stuff

My favourite sections are definitely the actual explorations of the house. It's no surprise that these are the segments that have resonated the most in pop culture - fans of the SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect) universe and HP Lovecraft have almost certainly run into the main concepts of this book already. 

I guess I'm a sucker for a good gothic novel, because there is something decidedly gothic about this one - it's a House, and it's Spooky, and it's about a Family and their mental illnesses. But in this case, the house is something that travels with Johnny, not just the physical location on Ash Tree Lane. The problems with the house for the Navidsons are all part of the baggage they carry with them. 

I've been sitting with the whole structural thing about the Minotaur, Theseus, Minos, and the whole stepson/stepfather hate thing, for a bit. There's this thematic element about Johnny being emotionally and mentally ill, and his mother being ill as well - that does seem like an intentional parallel? But there's also a thing about Zampano as Daedalus and a father figure, and Johnny as Icarus, soaring too high on his father's creation, only to be killed by it.

Is the entire thing an elaborate delusion? Is Zampano real? Who is this mysterious genius, this Daedalus-like figure whose invention - the book - ensnares and entraps Johnny, our humble Icarus and Minotaur? We certainly don't get answers, but he appears to be lonely, remote, and ripe for idealization. 

Is the Navidson Record meant to be real, or all Johnny's invention? The "editor" character is particularly interesting, especially because at no point do they clarify the reality or unreality of the manuscript.

When, throughout his extended mental breakdown, did Johnny possibly have time to pen this missive? It certainly seems possible that he was doing little else. But when was it accepted and submitted to a publishing company? The book definitely wants to give the vibe of just "appearing" in print. It's very "done" nowadays, but at the time, it was particularly revolutionary. 

Why does House of Leaves still work?

Well - in my opinion, HoL commits to the gothic and keeps you invested, but it also goes deep into the mental health issues that make up the backbone of both cosmic horror and the gothic novel. 

This, then, is probably why military takes on Lovecraftian fiction and the SCPs all kind of suck. I've watched a couple of Youtube videos and listened to a few Actual Play podcasts of Call of Cthulhu games with a Delta Green focus (that's a special forces take on Call of Cthulhu), and all of them just left me absolutely cold. (Maybe other people will enjoy these live-action takes on SCPs more than I did.) In addition to the fact that I'm just not much into jingoism, and I'm kinda critical of that whole carceral-state structure and the military industrial complex, conservative politics really don't work with cosmic horror or gothic novels. 

Sure, military elements can work great - in Lovecraft's Monsters, there's a rather good take on the story of Innsmouth that involves a military intervention - but it's also inherently critical of the role of said military. I do have some fondness for the Warhammer 40K universe as well, but that's also morally complex. 

Any kind of military apologia in the face of cosmic horror just absolutely sucks the scare factor right out of stuff. It's too objective and impersonal, when it should be intimate and invasive. And above all - really good horror must come from empathy. 

If you crave more

T Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon's What Moves the Dead, the HP Lovecraft stories "The Color Out of Space" and "Dreams in the Witch House" as well as the Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle are pretty excellent classic read-alikes; I haven't read Grady Hendrix's How to Sell a Haunted House yet, but I loved Horrorstor, and that's another decent read-alike for building-based horror. The "Endless Ikea" SCP is available on Youtube in multiple reading formats, as well as videos, and of course, there's always the original version on the website. 

The podcasts Welcome to Night Vale, TANIS, and the Rusty Quill Archives also all offer some good horror content if you want to savour the visceral fear of something breathing down your neck, too!

***

A writer and professional freelance editor, Michelle Browne lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: *Website * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Tumblr * Mastodon *Facebook * Medium * Twitter  * OG Blog* Instagram * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

The World Belongs to You: On the Sunset of White Supremacy

Hello hello!

On a whim, I found myself working on a short story today. There was a contest for a podcast I love, I Don't Even Own a Television, and I decided to actually take a shot at it.

(On a related note, I know that for those of us on slender budgets, rationing out meds is sometimes required - but take your meds, everyone. It's good for you, and good for your creativity.)

For the story, I found myself thinking about a positive comment or two one of the hosts made about Sun-Ra. As a different friend of mine has been inspired by the seminal poet and musician's work for some time, and has been tracing his effects on Afrofuturist literature, Sun-Ra's been on my mind. That and the ridiculous prompt soon blossomed into a tongue-in-cheek skewering of nostalgia-bait. The story itself featured three Black characters trying to run maintenance checks on habitat craft while asteroid-mining on the belts around Saturn, and ended with Tasia, the main character, happily considering her future in the infinite space around her. 

While penning the vignette, I got to thinking about an awkward topic I've been wanting to blog about for a while. As a white person - never a good way to start a sentence, but bear with me - I think about white supremacy and injustice issues a lot. Accepting my place in that system and the place of people who look like me can be thorny. 

So - how do those of us who are white emotionally cope with the historical and present burden of accepting that our ancestors and relatives were and still do wreak havoc and enact violence on so many others?

The Evil Empire 

Maybe it's a little silly, but one of the ways I have reconciled with this is by thinking of it in Star Wars terms. Obviously, this fandom is full of toxicity, and it's pretty illustrative in this instance. 

Being white, particularly in the post-European cultural mishmash of North America, means being the inheritors of the benefits of colonialism. That stolen land and wealth was given to us. And sure, our lives can be hard in different ways - but in others, in fundamental ways, we have been cushioned. 

More so, culturally speaking, white people still dominate in both American and Canadian culture, and in terms of representation. Sure, we're nominally a majority, but if you're reading my blog, you are probably also aware of how disproportionate that representation has favoured us, or at least, people like me (since you, dear reader, may not be white).

But in order to deconstruct that hegemony, those of us who are white have to let go of that heritage. 

Imagine, if you will, being born into the Empire in Star Wars and developing Rebel sympathies. Admitting that everything around you is basically wrong can leave one with a heavy heart, but the only way to fix the world and culture is to face and internalize this fact.

The Sunset of the Elves 

Here's the thing - it's okay to have mixed feelings about that, and to be like, "wait a minute, is this evil? Has my culture, my country, have my ancestors perpetrated and enabled evil?" 

Seeing evil as a verb rather than a state of being, the short answer to that question is "probably, yes." 

While that's rough thing to accept and process - nobody wants, truly, to think of themselves as bad - it also means that we have a chance to gracefully fade. I'm editing a project that deals with white supremacists and racists right now, and seeing things from inside that has given me a surprising empathy for them. However, as both the author and myself agree, violence and fear are not the way to protect that legacy. 

For one thing, Black people and other people of colour aren't particularly out to destroy all remnants of European cultural heritage, and more specifically, of whiteness. But - those of us born white should do that for them. 

It's not that I'm saying we ought to destroy every celebration, or that things like pagan traditions should be forgotten, but we absolutely have to let them become less prominent and make room in culture for the expressions of others. And maybe there's a tiny bit of romance to playing our part in letting the sun go down on evil, and watching others flourish. While the elves are not conventionally evil in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, the metaphor of transition still works decently, at least for my mindset.

And maybe it's okay for the empire, and us, its children, to recede and fade a little. We've dominated so much for so long - to the detriment of our own compassion and humanity, because that dominance came about through no natural means; only violence and control. (And I reject the proposition that violence and control are a "natural" way to live or some mark of triumph among a species that is, by evolution and fate, as pro-social and inclined to altruism as humans are.)

Shown: just one of the cultural groups I didn't even know about until a couple weeks ago.

But what do we get in exchange? 

Selfishly speaking - as most of this post is - it can be hard to let go of power. But we are still allowed to witness and, when invited, participate in the joy of others. 

The problem with whiteness - not merely European-ness, but whiteness, the construct - is that it is inherently restrictive. For those unfamiliar with its precedent, whiteness is an artificial invention devised by slavers to distinguish themselves from enslaved people. Specifically:

"The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America."

Let that sink in for a moment. Whiteness has erased European cultural heritages, flattened out shared heritage - for after all, if one is to benefit from whiteness, one must supuress and avoid any sharing or serious investment in other cultures, be they Indigenous, Asian, Black, or anything else - and only dabble with them, not engage.

The fight for equality

Even more perniciously, letting ourselves fear the safety and sanctity of whiteness - an artificial construct, as with racism in general - keeps us divided from other oppressed people and even just our neighbours. If we fear, hate, or deride others, why would we invite them to our table, or show compassion for them, or help them out?

We are stronger together. The world we live in, and the world of the future, will continue to be beautiful and diverse and amazing. And within that word, "diversity", there are more colours and shades and cracks and crevices than we can even understand. Multiculturalism doesn't mean a weird, indistinct melting pot - it means that people with thousands of years of history in their own rights can come together, share, discuss, and create new things. It means that people can live in different places, and come up with new foods, and that nobody ever has to be bored again. 

I'm not sure how to express just how beautiful humanity is, or how many different ideas and histories and experiences there are in the world.

It's truly a matter of going from a monochromatic view of the world to full-colour. It's dizzying, and wonderful, and sometimes even painful - but there's so much to share and enjoy. And yes, there are still points of friction, because rejoicing in our shared humanity and differences doesn't mean we can forget the legacy of all this pain and violence - but the future is, and can be, so bright.

As I said to one of my friends this afternoon, "the future belongs to you."

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and their cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Catch up with Michelle's news on the mailing list. Her books are available on Amazon, and she is also active on Medium, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and the original blog.