Drama aside, I find the question of authorship so interesting, reads the penultimate paragraph.
Unless Hayward releases a detailed and honest statement, we’ll never quite know the truth behind its creation. But a close reading leads one to believe that this is indeed a text of mixed authorship, for it seems quite schizophrenic in its handling of its central themes. At times it is so outraged about the covering up of the CLC that the moralizing bleeds off the page. At others, it descends to the same romantic platitudes that the rest of the text criticizes. It’s either a very clever manipulation of the reader, or it is what we think it might be—a work partially completed by one author, and finished by another.
I sit up, suddenly curious. Who is this person? I click on their profile, but the username is bland and innocuous—“daisychain453.” There is no profile picture. The account has no friends or followers I recognize, and its previous review history—similarly thoughtful takes on much-hated books like The Help and American Dirt—is fascinating to skim through, but reveals no clues about the author.
I’m frightened by how well this reviewer seems to know me. The earlier portions of the review were so clever, so incisive about the techniques employed in the text, that I wonder if she somehow got access to my editor’s emails, if she is perhaps someone who worked at Eden.
It’s the last paragraph, however, that lingers in my mind:
What no one’s really touched on in this discourse, however, is the nature of Liu and Hayward’s relationship. All the evidence suggests that they were indeed friends, though this seems a horrible thing to do to a friend. Was it a case of petty jealousy, then? Was Hayward—gasp—somehow responsible for Liu’s death? Was she, in some twisted way, trying to pay tribute to a friendly rival? Or is she in fact innocent in this whole affair? In any case, I’d pay to read a novel about that whole mess itself.
I’VE COME UP WITH MY NEXT PROJECT.
I wake up with the concept sitting in my mind, fully formed, welded together by my unconscious over hours of fitful, dreaming sleep. This is it: the path to literary redemption and blockbuster success at once. The answer has been so obvious this entire time, I can’t believe I didn’t see it until now.
I won’t dodge the controversy anymore. That mindset has been holding me back—until now, I’d been convinced that my literary resurrection would have to be divorced from Athena’s legacy.
But I can’t move on and forget. Nobody will let me forget, least of all Athena’s ghost. I cannot rid myself of her influence, or of the rumors surrounding her, surrounding us.
Instead I have to face them head-on.
I’ll write about us. Well, no—a fictionalized version of us, a pseudo-autobiography in which I blur fact and fiction. I’ll describe the night she died in all its heart-stopping, lurid detail. I’ll describe how I stole her work and published it. I’ll describe every step along my way to literary stardom, and then my horrifying fall. Academics and scholars will have a field day with this text. They’ll write entire books about how I cleverly blended the truth with lies, how I reclaimed the rumors about me, subverted the ugly gossip about a treasured friendship into a tale that confronts the reader with their own sick desire for scandal and destruction. They’ll call it radical. Groundbreaking. No one’s ever refuted literary expectations like this before.
I’ll play up the sapphic quality of it all, too. Readers will love that; queer love stories are all the rage now. Drop in a little hint of girl crushing and the TikTokers will go rabid. They could cast us in a movie together. Florence Pugh will play me. That girl from Crazy Rich Asians will play Athena. The score will consist entirely of classical music. It’ll win all the awards.
And once this scandal has been transformed and preserved in novel form, once all the ugly, unconfirmed rumors about me have been relegated safely to the realm of fiction, I’ll be free.
I’m so excited that I almost email Daniella right then with the pitch. But Daniella’s dealing with her own shitstorm right now. An unnamed former editorial assistant has testified to Publishers Weekly that Daniella had a habit of saying all sorts of bigoted things during meetings (“We already have a Muslim writer,” she’d told the team once during acquisitions. “Any more and we’ll be outnumbered.”). Eden has gone into PR lockdown in response. I am firmly committed to promoting diversity, equity, inclusion in all areas of my work, Daniella assured us in an email sent to all her writers. These remarks were taken out of context, and leaked to the press by someone I believe has a personal vendetta against me. The last I heard, she’d made some donations to some bail fund in the Midwest, although it’s not immediately obvious how this has anything to do with the original problem of Islamophobia.
I’m not terribly worried. The Daniella thing will blow over. Publishing professionals are accused of verbal gaffes all the time, but it’s not like you can cancel the one female editor at an otherwise all-male imprint. But it’s probably best not to wander into her inbox for now.
Instead, for the first time in weeks, I begin drafting in earnest. The words flow so easily from my fingertips, perhaps because there’s nothing to make up, nothing to pause and wonder about. It’s just the truth coming out of me, and this time I am in total control of the narrative. I start writing thousands of words a day, a level of productivity that I haven’t hit since college. I actively look forward to sitting down with my laptop every morning. I don’t stop writing until near midnight.
I can’t help but feel that there is some greater, karmic reason why my writing flow has returned. This feels like redemption. No—like absolution. For if I can write this thing on my own, if I can turn this whole horrible mess into a beautiful story, then . . . well, it won’t change what I’ve done. But it will assign artistic value to it all. It will be a way of revealing the truth without saying it. And beyond anything else, it will entertain. It will stay in readers’ thoughts forever, like a catchy tune or a beautiful woman’s face. This story will become eternal. Athena will be a part of that.
What more can we want as writers than such immortality? Don’t ghosts just want to be remembered?
I THINK CONSTANTLY ABOUT ATHENA THESE DAYS.
Memories of her don’t haunt me anymore. I don’t force flashbacks of her out of my mind when they intrude. Instead I linger within them. I mine them for details, immerse myself in the feelings surrounding them, and imagine dozens of ways to reimagine and reframe them. I sit with her ghost. I invite her to speak.
My therapist taught me once that the best way to deal with panic-inducing flashbacks is to think of them as scenes from a horror movie. Jump scares are terrifying the first time you see them because they catch you off guard, and because you don’t know what to expect. But once you watch them again and again, once you know exactly when the demon-possessed nun jumps out from behind the corner, they lose their power over you.
I do the same to every awful thought I’ve ever had about Athena. I delve deep into the horrible. I write out every excruciating detail of my evening at the Chinese American Social Club of Rockville. I describe how rotten I felt when the @AthenaLiusGhost account first went online, how the ensuing fallout wrecked my mental health. I capture Athena’s specter and etch it out onto the page, where it is trapped in black-and-white immovable text, where it can do little more than say, “Boo!”