THE INITIAL RESPONSES AND QUOTE TWEETS ARE, OF COURSE, VICIOUS.
Fucking liar.
So you just happened to write a book that your dead friend would have been working on? Seems convenient to me.
LOL she’s not even good at writing apologies.
Ugh, so June Song came out with her non-apology, and I bet white people will be jumping over themselves to defend her. I hate this industry.
Don’t believe a word from your mouth, racist bitch.
If that’s the truth, why did it take you so long to say anything?
Though once I get through the initial flurry of fuck-yous, it’s apparent that my statement has gone over quite well. I can actually see the needle of public opinion shifting from skepticism to sympathy overnight.
This has been one of the most vicious and malicious campaigns I’ve ever seen, tweets a prominent blogger who’s been neutral on the debacle so far. Shame on you all for the damage done to Juniper Song, and to Athena Liu’s legacy.
Twitter, this is why we can’t have nice things, says a BookTuber with fifty thousand subscribers. When will we learn not to dog pile on situations we know nothing about?
There’s also this statement from Xiao Chen, which, honestly, I’ll take: This book is so racist that it’s obvious only a white person could have written it.
By the next morning, the @AthenaLiusGhost account has disappeared. There’s nothing to point back to now; no original claim to bolster. The citation links are broken; the quote tweets lead to nothing. Some people are still making a stink, lambasting the publishing industry’s haste to believe young white women over everyone else, but elsewhere it seems people would like to pretend this all never happened. I’m sure there are still angry detractors out there who believe I did it, but there’s not a shred of concrete proof—they don’t have enough to escalate this to legal action. Besides, the only one who could act on behalf of Athena’s literary estate is Mrs. Liu, and she hasn’t made a statement or reached out to me. There is nothing solid to this smoke monster; only the fleeting memory of lots of people yelling over nothing.
BRETT EMAILS ME WITH SOME GOOD NEWS THE FOLLOWING MONDAY.
Greenhouse Productions made an offer of fifteen thousand for the option. Eighteen months, with the option to renew, and more money for you if they do. I’m going to try to talk them up to eighteen thousand, which I think I can get. We’ll have our film agent look over the contract and make sure everything’s up front, and then we’ll send it to you to sign. Sound good?
Fifteen thousand is a bit lower than what I’d hoped for given all the hype, but I guess the fact that Greenhouse is making any offer at all signals their continued faith in me.
Just like that? I write back. What was the holdup?
Oh, Hollywood moves slow, Brett replies. Trust me, this counts as quick. I’ll get the paperwork to you by the end of the week.
Everything goes back to normal. Deadline runs a nice press release on the option deal, and lots of people congratulate it for me online (they all seem to be under the impression that it’s Jasmine Zhang directing, but I don’t correct them). The publishing news cycle moves on to the next juicy scandal, which involves a YA writer who sent anonymous death threats to a rival for months before slipping up and sending one from her own email address. (She’s trying to pass it off as a joke, but no one believes her, and the affected writer has started a GoFundMe to raise money to sue for emotional damages.)
The death threats dwindle to only one or two a day, and then none at all. I feel safe opening my DMs again. Within a week, all I get in my notifications are the normal slew of “congratulations” posts, tags in book stacks and reviews, and the occasional creep asking if I’ll personally review their five-hundred-page manuscript. All the mean tweets about me are lost to the black hole of Twitter’s memory. I start sleeping through the night again. I can eat without dry heaving again.
I am innocent in the court of public opinion. And at least for now, Athena’s ghost has been banished.
Fifteen
I SHOULD HAVE LEFT THINGS THERE.
The Discourse has finally blown over, just as Brett had promised. I no longer need to mute my notifications for fear they’ll crash my phone. I’m no longer Twitter’s main character. But that’s precisely the problem—I’m now trending toward irrelevance.
Such is the life cycle of every book that doesn’t become a classic. The Last Front has been out for nearly a year at this point. It finally dropped off bestseller lists after four months. It didn’t win any of the awards it was short-listed for, in no small part due to the @AthenaLiusGhost scandal. The fan mail, good and bad, is all starting to dry up. The school and library invitations have ground to a halt. I’ve heard no news from Greenhouse Productions since I signed the contract—which is common, apparently; most optioned properties sit untouched on the shelf until the option period is up. People have stopped soliciting me for op-eds and essays. Nowadays, when I tweet something funny, I get fifty or sixty likes at most.
I’ve been an internet nobody before, clinging to one or two weekly Twitter mentions for a boost of serotonin. But I hadn’t realized that even if you capture the entire literary world in the palm of your hand, it can still forget about you in the blink of the eye. Out with the old; in with the hot new thing, which is from what I can tell a pretty, fit, twentysomething debut writer named Kimmy Kai who spent her childhood doing acrobatics for a traveling circus in Hawaii and has now published a memoir about spending her childhood doing acrobatics for a traveling circus in Hawaii.
I’m not starving. I’ve done the math. If I live modestly—“modestly” defined as staying in my current apartment and ordering takeout every other day instead of every day—I could survive the next ten, even fifteen years on my earnings from The Last Front alone. The hardcover of The Last Front has gone back for its eleventh printing. The paperback edition just came out, which has generated a nice sales bump—paperbacks are cheaper, so they sell a bit better. I truly don’t need the money. I could walk away from all of this and be perfectly fine.
But, my God, I want to be back in the spotlight.
You enjoy this delightful waterfall of attention when your book is the latest breakout success. You dominate the cultural conversation. You possess the literary equivalent of the hot hand. Everyone wants to interview you. Everyone wants you to blurb their book, or host their launch event. Everything you say matters. If you utter a hot take about the writing process, about other books, or even about life itself, people take your word as gospel. If you recommend a book on social media, people actually drive out that day to go buy it.
But your time in the spotlight never lasts. I’ve seen people who were massive bestsellers not even six years ago, sitting alone and forlorn at neglected signing tables while lines stretched around the corner for their younger, hotter peers. It’s hard to reach such a pinnacle of literary prominence that you remain a household name for years, decades past your latest release. Only a handful of Nobel Prize winners can get away with that. The rest of us have to keep racing along the hamster wheel of relevance.