For an author nothing is as exciting as getting your manuscript accepted by a publishing house. You slave over your work for who knows how long, having confidence that the story that you have to tell is interesting enough to be published and you'll be able to see your name emblazoned on the cover of a book that will perhaps change the perspectives of those who read it.
Finally your book finds a home, is announced by St. Martin's Press... and then some random other person throws a highly public fit about your race not being appropriate to be allowed to write this book.
'We all agreed' did we? Maybe that item on the last election ballot was in very small print so we overlooked it?
The description of the book in the announcement by the author (which has since been taken down) says it's:
about a young woman spending the summer with her wealthy aunt and uncle in Greenwich, CT, who develops an obsessive crush on the family's Black nanny and must decide who to protect after a tragic accident occurs, exploring the insidiousness of privilege and complicity and the ways that whiteness and power protect their own.'
We're going to be honest; this doesn't sound like a page turner to us. But it seems like the sort of thing that gets published these days, hits all the right culture war notes of being an important book... and like we said, when did we all agree that white people can only ever write about white people?
And it's hard to see this as anything but jealousy. The author of the book under discussion, Kate Broad, is a reasonably established author who has published ten books under a penname in the past, including one that was 'Top Pick' from Oprah Magazine. Ann Zhao is apparently a linguistics student at Wellsley who's graduating next year and is the author of a forthcoming book... and if you're going to complain about someone else's book maybe your own book shouldn't look like this...
In case you're wondering 'aroace' apparently is a portmanteau of 'Aromantic' and 'Asexual'... we had to look that one up. Zhao seems to have inserted a bunch of modern progressive tropes into the plot of the classic
Ernst Lubitsch film 'The Shop Around the Corner'. Very innovative.
Well that settles it, Broad's book should be a-okay then, right?
It feels strange to write in defense of such a pandering book as Broad's appears to be, but there are things worse than pandering and being a censorious scold because of an authors position on the intersectional oppression stack is definitely one of those. Zhao's book seems to come out this upcoming April and we'll be sure not to buy it... not that there was much chance of that happening anyway.
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