The debate over the authorship of The Last Front has been fraught and troubling for many in the Asian diaspora community. A lot of us, myself included, did not want to believe anyone could do something so vile or selfish. And a lot of us were willing to give June Hayward the benefit of the doubt.
With this evidence, there’s no longer a question about Hayward’s intentions. Hayward; her agent, Brett Adams; and her team at Eden Press have a choice now to make about accountability, transparency, and their supposed commitment to justice.
The rest of us will be watching.
I lower my phone. The water’s been running for a good ten minutes, but I can’t summon the willpower to go turn it off. All I can do is sit at the edge of my bed, breathing in and out as the world narrows to a pinprick around me.
When I first saw Geoff’s @AthenaLiusGhost tweets, I spiraled into an hours-long anxiety attack. This time, my reaction feels strangely muted. I feel like I’m submerged underwater. Everything sounds and feels wrong, distorted. Somehow, I am both more calm and more terrified than before. Perhaps it’s because this time, there is no question about what will happen next. This time the truth is incontrovertible, and it’ll make no difference whether I scramble to control the public narrative or not. I don’t have to wonder what my friends and colleagues are thinking about me, or whether they’ll believe my denials. It’s all there in black and white. What happens next will happen, no matter what I do or say.
I put my phone on “do not disturb” mode. I slide my iPad into a drawer. I shut down my laptop. I grab a bottle of whisky from atop my fridge—WhistlePig, a gift from Daniella for three consecutive months on the NYT bestseller list—and settle down in front of my couch, watching old episodes of Friends while I chug straight from the bottle, until I’m out for the night.
Let the internet do its work while I’m gone. When I face the noise, I’d rather it come all at once.
I WAKE UP THE NEXT MORNING TO SEE I’VE LOST A THOUSAND FOLLOWERS. The metric is still dropping; nines turning to eights before my eyes. This time, I don’t have to search my name to track the conversation. It’s right there, all over my timeline and in my mentions.
I fucking knew it about Juniper Song.
June Hayward strikes again!
Does this bitch never stop?
Wake up publishing, the White Witch is back.
Last time, I’d kept my social media accounts active—partly so that I could stay tuned to what was being said, and partly because I feared deactivation would be an admission of guilt. This time, my guilt is a foregone conclusion—all I can hope for now is damage control, by which I mean managing threats to my personal safety. I delete my Twitter account. I set my Instagram to private. I turn off notifications from my publicly available email address. Certainly I’m getting death threats, but at least this way I won’t know about them the second they arrive.
Someone edits my Wikipedia page to read: “Juniper Song Hayward is a ‘novelist,’ serial plagiarizer, and flaming racist.” That particular line is gone within an hour—Wikipedia has minimal civility requirements, I suppose—but the “Plagiarism” section of my biography remains as follows: “In March 2020, literary critic Adele Sparks-Sato published an essay alleging that the first paragraph of Hayward’s novella, Mother Witch, is a word-for-word copy of the first paragraph of Her, an unpublished story by late novelist Athena Liu. This allegation compounds long-running suspicions that Hayward also stole The Last Front from Liu, though there remains no conclusive proof this is true. Hayward’s editor, Daniella Woodhouse, has released a brief statement claiming Eden Press is aware of these allegations and is looking into the matter.”
My phone rings six times that day—all calls from Brett. I don’t pick up. I will eventually, when I trust myself to hear I’ve been fired without breaking into sobs.
For now, I take a kind of perverse pleasure in watching everything fall apart.
Over the next week, all of my publishing relationships disintegrate. I’m asked to leave two professional Facebook groups and three Slacks I’ve joined in the past year. My so-called writer friends ghost me without exception, even the ones who professed a few months ago to be on my side against the mob.
I have no one to turn to but Eden’s Angels.
Oh god, I text. It’s happening again. When no one responds—which is atypical; Jen is addicted to her phone—I follow up a few hours later with, I’m having a really hard time right now, is anyone possibly available to talk?
They ignore me for three days. Finally Marnie writes: Hi, Junie. Sorry; have been so busy these last few days. Moving house.
Jen never responds at all.
I’m supposed to have my monthly mentee check-in session with Emmy Cho on Friday. On Thursday afternoon, I receive an email from the mentor program coordinator:
Hi Juniper, Emmy doesn’t think that continuing with your mentor relationship is a good idea, and has asked us to pass the message on to you. Thank you for everything you’ve done for Emmy and for our program.
Bitch. Emmy could have at least mustered the courage to say that to my face. It’s probably ill-advised, but I write back to the program coordinator, Thanks for telling me. Do you know if Emmy has any feedback for my mentorship style, so I can take that into account in the future? What I really want to know is if Emmy’s going around bad-mouthing me. I don’t expect a response, but the reply lands in my email later that night: Emmy simply feels that you have very different perceptions of how the industry works. She also requests that you do not contact her, directly or indirectly, any further.
ON FRIDAY I DRAG MYSELF OUT OF BED AND MAKE MYSELF PRESENTABLE for a videoconference with my team at Eden. I finally picked up one of Brett’s calls the night before, after Rory texted me asking if I was alive: Your agent just emailed me. He said you weren’t responding, and he was worried about you. What’s going on? Is everything okay?
“Daniella wants to talk to you ASAP,” Brett told me when I called him back. He sounded tired. He didn’t even ask me if the allegations were true. “We’ve scheduled a Zoom meeting for tomorrow at two.”
Brett’s on the line with me now. All the Eden people are on the same screen, sitting together around a conference table: Daniella, Jessica, and Emily, and a red-haired man I don’t recognize. No one is smiling. No one waves hello when I join the call.
“Hello, June.” Daniella’s voice is cool and low, which is how I know she’s pissed. “I’m here with Jessica and Emily, and Todd Byrne from legal.”
“I’m here as well,” says Brett, ineffectually.
“Hi, Todd,” I say weakly. No one told me I was getting a lawyer. Todd merely nods at me. I realize then that Todd isn’t here for me, he’s here for them.
“Where’s Candice?” I ask, trying to get my bearings through small talk.
“Oh, Candice isn’t here anymore,” says Daniella. “She left a while ago.”
“Oh.” I wait, but Daniella doesn’t elaborate. I try not to overthink it. Editorial assistants come and go all the time. They’re underpaid entry-level employees in the most expensive city in the world—ill-treated, overlooked, and overworked with minimal opportunities for advancement. It takes inhuman drive to hack it in publishing. Probably Candice just couldn’t take it. “That’s too bad.”
“Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?” Daniella clears her throat. “June, if there’s anything we need to know, you need to tell us right now.”
My nose prickles. To my horror, I realize I’m already close to tears.
“I didn’t do it,” I say. “I swear to God. It’s not plagiarized, it’s all my own work, especially Mother Witch—”
“Especially?” Todd cuts in. “What does that mean?”
“I mean, The Last Front was inspired by conversations with Athena,” I say quickly. “But she’s dead now, obviously, and I didn’t have her to talk to while I was drafting Mother Witch, so the writing style doesn’t resemble hers as much—”