I forward her email to Brett. Can you tell her to step off? I ask. Agents are wonderful intermediaries during heated exchanges like this; they let you keep your hands clean while they drive in the knife. I think I’ve made my stance pretty clear, so why is she still bothering me with this?
Brett proposes that perhaps, instead of bringing in an outsider, we can have Candice do the sensitivity read instead. Candice responds curtly that she is Korean American, not Chinese American, and that Brett’s assumption otherwise is a racist microaggression. (It is at this point that I determine Candice exists entirely to complain about microaggressions.) Daniella jumps in to smooth things over. Of course they’ll default to my authorial judgment. Hiring a sensitivity reader is entirely my choice, and I’ve made it clear that I don’t want one. We’ll stick to the original production timeline. Everything is fine.
The following week, Candice sends me an email apologizing for her tone, on which Daniella is cc’d. It’s not a real apology; in fact, it’s passive-aggressive as fuck: I’m sorry if you felt offended by my editorial suggestions. As you know, June, I only want to help publish The Last Front as well as we can.
I roll my eyes, but I take the high road. I’ve won my battle, and it never pays to bully a poor editorial assistant. My reply is succinct:
Thank you, Candice. I appreciate that.
Daniella follows up in a private thread to inform me that Candice has been taken off the project. I won’t have to interface with her anymore. All further communications about The Last Front can go directly through Daniella, Emily, or Jessica.
I am so sorry you had to deal with this, Daniella writes. Candice clearly had some strong feelings about this project, and it’s affected her judgment. I want you to know that I’ve had a serious conversation with Candice about respecting boundaries with authors, and I will make sure this never happens again.
She sounds so apologetic that for a moment I feel embarrassed, nervous I’ve blown this out of proportion. But that’s nothing compared to the relief that finally, for once, my publisher is firmly on my side.
HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMEONE YOU KNOW GO FROM ORDINARY TO, suddenly, semifamous—a polished, artificial front familiar to hundreds of thousands of people? A musician from high school who made it big, perhaps, or a film star you recognize as the blonde girl on your freshman floor with the eating disorder? Have you ever wondered at the mechanics of popularization? How does someone go from being a real person, someone you actually knew, to a set of marketing and publicity points, consumed and lauded by fans who think they know them, but don’t really, but understand this also, and celebrate them regardless?
I watched all this happen with Athena the year after we graduated college, in the run-up to the launch of her first novel. Athena was a Known Entity at Yale, a campus celebrity who received regular declarations of love in that year’s iteration of the Secret Valentines Facebook group, but she wasn’t yet so famous that she had a Wikipedia page, or that the average reader’s eyes would light up with recognition when you said her name.
That changed when the New York Times ran a hype piece on her titled “Yale Graduate Lands Six-Figure Deal with Random House,” centering a photograph of Athena in a low-cut blouse so sheer you could see her nipples, posing in front of Sterling Memorial Library. They ran a quote from a famous poet then adjuncting at Yale dubbing her a “worthy successor to the likes of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston.” Everything ramped up from there. Her Twitter follow count shot up to the mid–five figures; her Instagram numbers hit six figures. She did puff-piece interviews with the Wall Street Journal and HuffPost; once, while driving to a doctor’s appointment, I was startled to hear her crystalline, unplaceable, occasionally suspiciously fake, somewhat-British accent drifting through my Uber.
Cue the mythmaking in real time, the constructed persona deemed maximally marketable by her publishing team, paired with a healthy dose of neoliberal exploitation. Complex messages reduced to sound bites; biographies cherry-picked for the quirky and exotic. This in fact happens to every successful author, but is weirder to witness when you’ve been friends with the source material. Athena Liu writes only on a Remington typewriter (true, but only after her senior year, after she got the idea from a famous visiting lecturer). Athena Liu was a finalist for a national writing competition when she was only sixteen (also true, but come on; every high schooler who can string sentences together places in those competitions at one point or another; it’s not hard to beat out other kids whose definition of art consists of plagiarized Billie Eilish lyrics). Athena Liu is a prodigy, a genius, the Next Big Thing, the voice of her generation. Here are six books that Athena Liu can’t live without (including, invariably, Proust). Here are five affordable notebook brands Athena Liu recommends (she writes only on Moleskines, but check these other brands out if you’re poor)!
This is so wild, I’d texted her, along with the link to a recent Cosmo shoot. I didn’t realize Cosmo readers were, like, literate.
HAHAH I know! she’d responded. I don’t even recognize that girl on the front page, they’ve airbrushed me to death. Those are not my eyebrows.
It’s the hyperreal. Back then it was still cool to quote Baudrillard as if you’d read him in full.
Exactly, she’d said. Athena.0, and Athena.1. I’m a work of art. All construct. I’m Athena Del Rey.
So when it was my turn to release a novel, I had wild expectations that publishing would do the same thing for me and Over the Sycamore, that some well-oiled machine would build my public persona without my lifting a finger, that the marketing department would take me by the hand and coach me on precisely the right things to wear and say when I showed up for all the major media interviews they had set up for me.
Instead my publisher threw me to the wolves. Everything I learned about self-promotion I learned from conversations on a debut writer’s Slack, where everyone was as lost as I was, throwing out outdated blog posts they’d dredged up from the corners of the internet. One absolutely had to have an author website, but was WordPress better or Squarespace? Did newsletters drive sales, or were they a waste of money? Should you hire a professional for your author photographs, or was a selfie taken with Portrait mode on your iPhone sufficient? Should you create a separate Twitter account for your author persona? Could you shitpost on it? If you got into public beef with other writers, would that tank your sales or drive up your visibility? Was it still cool to have public beef on Twitter? Or was beef now reserved only for Discord?
Needless to say, the high-profile interviews never materialized. The closest I got was an invitation by some guy named Mark, whose podcast had five hundred followers, and which I immediately regretted saying yes to when he began ranting about the overpoliticization of contemporary genre fiction and I began to worry that he was maybe a Nazi.