"Everything you hear about in publishing - it's all going to happen to you": author and literary critic Naomi Kanakia
We sit down with “a transfem brown YA writer who happens to write very good books” and we unpack EVERYTHING.
The following conversation goes LONG. If you’re seeing this as an email, the best thing would be to click “read online”. Otherwise, the text might get truncated and you would miss out on Naomi Kanakia, someone who carries such an awareness of her own strengths and weaknesses she elevates pretty much everything she touches. And besides: no way I was gonna edit any of THIS out.
Naomi Kanakia is the author of two YA novels, with three more books in the works, including her first adult novel with Feminist Press (The Default World) and a nonfiction project with Princeton University Press (What’s So Great About The Great Books?, “a reexamination of the Great Books movement, and whether these much-criticized and much-praised works are worth reading if, like the author, you're not white, male, straight, and cisgender”). Naomi’s essays have been featured on Tablet, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Literary Hub, amongst others.
Topics include (breathe): working in “the highest of high culture (literary criticism) and in low culture (YA and sci-fi)”, idealising high culture only to discover “the majority of the writers, editors, agents, and critics involved simply don't have their own independent taste”, the reason why literary fiction doesn't discuss money, meritocracy, “the line between 'phony' and 'person with terrible taste'”, credibility, Azia Kim, impostors and con artists, being rejected, being celebrated, the demon of envy, being “a transfem brown YA writer who happens to write very good books”, the success of anti-racism and diversity efforts in the workplace, having fired and being fired by agents, the anti-woke movement, the lure of racial grievance and the fact “so many people only want to be seen as great, but they have no inner concept of what greatness entails.”
ENJOY.
I first met you thanks to your recent output as an essayist / literary critic, down to you having an upcoming book with Princeton University Press, so imagine my surprise when I found you had a *robust* background as a YA novelist and speculative story writer. Can you walk me through the transformative reality of your body of work? Was there a main reason for you being so active in different genres and so willing to try out something else?
I've been wondering how to answer this question. I started off as a Sci Fi fantasy writer, because that's what I read almost exclusively in middle and high school. But after dedicating myself to writing, I got very into the canon. I didn't want to feel inadequate anymore, like there were some books that weren't for me. And in the course of reading canonical literature, I've been exposed to lots of different genres and my tastes have diversified. I love crime fiction and spy thrillers and chick lit and mysteries and polemics and philosophy and poetry and all kinds of other things.
And while you're right that the industry would prefer you to stay in one lane, the very slowness of the publishing world militates against it. I can spend a year waiting for a book to sell or four months for comments from an editor. What do I do in the meantime? Because of contractual limitations it's just quite hard to simultaneously work on multiple books in one genre, so the natural solution is to experiment in another genre.
On a broader level, I think the question is why I work in the highest of high culture (literary criticism) and in low culture (YA and sci-fi). I certainly don't come to the latter as an outsider. Those are, if anything, my most natural homes, to the point where it's amusing when commercial writers say I'm elitist. Like, dude, I've had stories in Analog and Orson Scott Card's Sci Fi Magazine. I am DEEPLY conversant with the sci-fi and YA worlds in particular.
For a long time I idealized high culture and really wanted to be taken seriously. I left my first two agents in part because they weren't interested in sending out my literary fiction. But the process of selling my literary novel (The Default World comes out next June from Feminist Press) and of pitching and placing my essays has left me somewhat contemptuous of the world of high culture.
With YA, I know how to craft something that has a believable chance of being a breakout hit. That's all publishers want. They leave the artistic stuff to me--the themes, voice, character development, etc. Editors weigh in, but all they want is a good story. I can do a lot in the margins and in fact spend a lot of time working on aspects of the story that editors and even readers tend not to notice.
But high culture is notionally not bound to the valuation of the marketplace, it is acquired and marketed on the basis of its artistic value, as determined by cultured individuals. But the majority of the writers, editors, agents, and critics involved in the higher literary world simply don't have their own independent taste: they know what they're supposed to like, so they praise things that look like that book. This is how you get writers highly acclaimed for their prose style, but when you read the book, the prose is arrhythmic and jangles the ear. It's not beautiful, it's ugly. But the people in the industry don't really have an ear, because developing one requires insight and work. You need to read and to think. So you have a situation where people are supposed to be anointing stuff as good or bad, but they don't really know how to do that on their own, so they spend all their time looking for superficial signals about what everyone else thinks of it.
Whereas in YA it's a lot simpler. You're trying to guess what the ordinary YA fan would like, and you often have this job in part because you yourself are a YA fan (which it isn't hard to be, because YA is just inherently easier to enjoy than literary fiction). Thus people tend to trust their gut more and just be more genuine and easy to understand.
One of your recent essays (“If They Want to Be Published, Literary Writers Can’t Be Honest About Money”) rightfully frames money and class as a glaring double omission in modern literary works - it's true that characters seem preoccupied with manners and the way they're perceived by others, generally speaking, but we're led to believe everybody's quite wealthy and will never experience any sort of material downfall. (Which, *fine* if you're writing escapist fare - then again, as a reader of pulpy novels past, I can vouch for Jackie Susann devoting entire chapters to her characters discussing the finer points of a contract, pace and thrills be damned). Is this type of selective ignorance here to stay, or are we going through some collective episode that's bound to pass once a trend falls out of fashion ?
I think the reason literary fiction doesn't discuss money is simple: the cultural position of literary fiction is dependent on the concept of meritocracy. Why do we read and discuss literary fiction? Why do its writers get awards and professorships? Why does the general public, in other words, support literary fiction with it's attention and tax dollars and tuition and aspiration? Because literary fiction is, notionally, the best fiction to come out of our common culture. The smartest and most sensitive people of every generation, they write the books that will define our epoch.
But really it's not a meritocracy. Most literary writers come from well off or well connected backgrounds. They started out on third base. The path for a middle class person to make it in lit fic is pretty narrow: they need to get into good schools and get awards and fellowships and sell a novel relatively quickly, for a relatively large sum, before they reach an age when they'd want to start a family and own a home. It's doable, but it's hard. Whereas more privileged people like me can afford to fail again and again and to develop at our own speed.
Which isn't to say it's impossible for a middle class person to make it, but the odds are against them. So the rewards in literary fiction, like many of the good things in America (professorships and nonprofit jobs also come to mind) go disproportionately to the upper classes. And that's fine! TS Eliot made the point a hundred years ago, in Notes Toward A Definition Of Culture, that one cannot expect the masses to develop good taste. Good taste is a luxury, and you'd expect to see it disproportionately amongst the leisure class. (His broader point was that a hereditary leisure class, as in Britain, would see high culture as its personal possession and feel responsibility for it by right of birth, while the upper class in meritocratic society like America would be too occupied with striving and upward mobility to develop true culture). I think in America, we have made high culture, especially in literature, *seem* like it belongs to the entire middle class. That's why we have the emphasis on representation. And that's why we persist in pretending that literary writers are ordinary middle class people who happened to write a good book.
The problem is that the art of literary fiction depends on noticing the world and telling the truth. It's *not* escapist, and no true artist could allow themselves to lie overtly about the state of our society. So a wish fulfillment fantasy like The Devil Wears Prada can pretend it's possible for a regular gal to be assistant to the most powerful person in fashion, but a literary novel about the same topic would be compelled to note in an overt way that the premise of someone with no connections simply drifting to the top of the pile, because Anna Wintour respected their gumption and liked the cut of their jib, is absurd. The Devil Wears Prada (which I like quite a bit, both as book and movie) doesn't read as dishonest because it's written and read within a middle class context, where the idea of getting a job on merit, or potential merit, is taken for granted. But if it was written and read in an upper class context, like literary fiction, it would be disgusting.
If literary fiction accepted its position as the fiction of the upper class, then you could have a novel that took place at a fashion magazine or in a law firm or business or doctor's office, because literary fiction would feel free to explain, for a fellow upper class audience, how money and class work in those situations. But because literary fiction has to pretend to be middle class and to believe in meritocracy, it can't really discuss occupation. Instead only commercial fiction discusses occupation, because the writers of commercial fiction are often from working or middle class backgrounds and genuinely believe in meritocracy in a way that few literary writers can.
Which is to say, I don't know. I don't really see the situation changing any time soon, to be honest. And if it did it would only be because the middle class had become so powerless that the upper class no longer felt uncomfortable letting the meritocratic mask drop.
About the whole "literary taste making" element - you said, "they know what they're supposed to like, so they praise things that look like that book". It's become increasingly difficult to talk about this, because every person who's not deemed "accomplished" according to severely limiting standards (literary awards and professorships) can and will be dismissed as a nobody, a loser, sour grapes etc. (And, in fairness, sometimes unchecked professional jealousy does play a role in the conversation.) I've started to call it "quality theater". By far, to me, the weirdest part of it would be the way the same mechanisms seem to materialise in smaller and smaller creative circles. It's like every group recreates a system where nobody's truly happy and everybody feels slighted.
Yeah, a friend who's a poet was telling me how strange it is that all his poet friends post on Twitter about each others' work and are like, "This poem is REVELATORY and AMAZING, and you MUST read it now." And the poem is usually pretty mediocre. It's perplexing. One wants to believe that some people have just decided, "I will do or say whatever I need to in order to succeed." So they turn into flatterers, but they maintain their own integrity, deep inside. They know they are lying. To me, that's okay. Everyone's gotta eat. But in many cases the rewards are so low - why bother to tweet dishonestly about a poem? - that you start to think... maybe they're serious!
The line between 'phony' and 'person with terrible taste' is very thin, and it's constantly getting thinner. The problem is kids listen to the phonies, and they inhale their nonsense, and then they turn into people with terrible taste. But the latter have made their own bed. I think all writers know, deep in their heart, that you can't become a good writer by ticking boxes. You can't just do the right degrees, read the right books, and become a good writer. But they don't want to do the work, and listening to the phonies offers one way of avoiding the work.
Which of course is made even easier because the work doesn't get rewarded! I too was amazed when I entered the high literary world and started hearing these stories of people getting book deals based on a few stories or an essay or the first hundred pages of a novel. That almost never happens in YA (I mean unless you have a _really_ popular TikTok or Instagram). One person who interviewed for a job at our program was 27, recently graduated from Michigan, had gotten her agent because the agent had visited Michigan and read some chapters (it was a linked collection), and the agent sold the book instantly, so the person boasted they'd never gotten a single rejection in their writing life. MFA students _love_ this kind of story. They're very delicate. They don't want to be rejected. They want a fairy to sprinkle fairy dust on them. They're always looking for the professor who will pass their story to the New Yorker, or the agent who will come to visit and take them on, or the story that'll get notice.
It's because a lot of them are great at applying to stuff. They went to good colleges, got good MFAs, and now they look for the next step in the path--gatekeeper who they have to please in order to be published--and it's less clear, and they're adrift. I have no respect for this attitude. I like gumption. Scrappiness. People pushing themselves forward. One of the most formative experiences of my life was in college when we had this girl, Azia Kim, who pretended to be a Stanford student (living in the dorms and everything) for nine months. When she was caught, the campus newspaper asked me to do man on the street interviews to see how people felt about her. I asked everyone, "Should Stanford admit her?" I assumed this would be a no-brainer "Yes." This girl obviously had more gumption than, like, every other kid in school. But out of fifty students, forty-nine said no. And I realized, wow, you guys actually think being here means something. You actually derive some self-image from this (I was a legacy, so maybe I was immune from that delusion).
Anyway these are the people who go on to become literary writers. I've realized that 90 percent of Americans, when they hear a story about someone who's rejected and outside the mainstream, they sympathize with that person, but people in the high literary world are more likely to be like, well... they applied and got rejected, so they must not've been good enough. That attitude frightens me. I find it so incomprehensible and disturbing.
The genre fiction world is unbelievably different. You expect to get rejected. And there's no step-stool. You don't get cossetted and told you have great promise. You're nobody until you're somebody. But you also _see_ lots of people sell their books, so you know it's possible.
Your competence as a literary critic got you a book deal with the Princeton University Press - your essays stood out because you have a point of view, you don't parrot what everybody else treats as gospel, yet, your essays also got noticed because they were rightfully published in the good places. “Literary Hub”, “The LA Review of Books” and so on. I'm super happy you got the job, but I wonder if the same pieces would have been noticed had they appeared in less prestigious venues.
Yes, the Princeton Press thing was definitely great fortune! It's exactly the kind of fairy tale story that I was describing. And it's because just one editor took an interest--I've never had another book editor reach out. My essays are very good, it's true. I do think them being in real journals helps a lot. Nothing I've written for my blog (Woman of Letters) has ever gotten the least notice. I tell people wow, I have to stop going around with a chip on my shoulder, being like, nobody ever picks me, because it did in fact happen at least this once. And in terms of giving me credibility in the world of high culture, it's the best possible thing that could've happened.
Alright, this is the part where we talk about DEMONS. (Question at the very end.)
I've been mindful of keeping my previous life separated from the work I've put out as Barbara Genova, for a variety of reasons, and this choice brings its own set of issues to the table, but: in the Before Barbara Times I've been personally aware of multiple authors who got book deals on the basis of very little. One writer turned in a two-page proposal, another had a longform piece published on a literary website, a third writer got a blank "ahh just give us a novel" deal in a season where big publishers were plowing through indie press catalogs to scoop potential authors right up. All three of them proceeded to eventually turn a book in - years after their deadline.
As a result, the finished products got no promotion - because nobody was expecting those books anymore, so they were dumped into the wild, and that was the end of that.
That's why I've come to think a few literary types just want the aesthetic thrills, the elevation that comes from Authorship, and they harbor such a degree of self-loathing it's a miracle they function on the daily level, because if you're not willing to do the work, then why on Earth did you sign a deal? Dude, you have some DEMONS.
So here's the question at last: think about all the people chasing what they're supposed to want, failing to deliver in a satisfying manner, and just coming across as super ultra miserable all the damn time. What would a similar trap look like for you? Chasing a big award? Craving an extra degree of recognition? Befriending craven people in order to fit in a crowd?
For me the demon is envy. I know some writers claim to take joy in others's successes. I try, but I'm frequently envious. Often bitterly so. Even good novels can make envious, so I sometimes have a Salieri type vibe when I enjoy things. I used to avoid novels by trans women because they'd fill me with so much envy, but then I started reading them and I experienced so much recognition and pleasure that it was overwhelming. But if I tweet @ that author and they don't email back, it poisons the joy. I feel inadequate. I hate the idea of being snubbed or of people feeling better than me. As a result I've disentangled myself from the literary world. I'm mostly off Twitter. I try to enjoy books purely as a fan. If I like a book, I'll send a fan email, not a tweet. I'll review it on Goodreads or Amazon, the way a regular fan would. I've gotten good at separating worldly acclaim from my self-image. Paradoxically, this has allowed me to see the flaws in my own writing. I have good taste, and my prose isn't overtly awful or overwritten, but it's not beautiful. My writing can often be thin. I rely too heavily on dialogue. Sometimes I feel very inadequate. But I'm not stuck in the look where I'm like, but so what, at least I'm better than X kid who just got profiled in the NYTBR. Because, yeah, I am a better writer than X, but so what? So are a lot of people. Comparing myself to X is stupid. It's a trap, something that keeps us stupid. Part of being a mid-career writer is just recognizing, yes, most of what gets praised bears no resemblance to literature, and that's just life. Those people aren't doing the same thing you're doing. What you're doing is trying and failing to write something valuable. What they're doing is trying and succeeding in writing something mediocre. These are very different problems. They're almost different fields and industries.
I do find it funny that at every big literary imprint there's one editor who has good taste. At Simon and Schuster it's Lauren Wein, for instance. At Knopf it's Jenny Jackson, etc. The problem with trying to write something valuable is that the path is SO narrow. For mediocre books, you've got five editors at the imprint that you can appeal to. For potentially-valuable books there's only one. And if that person isn't into your stuff then tough luck. It's just really amusing that whenever a major press puts out a book that's actually good, it's from the same handful of editors. This is also one area where anti-racism and diversity efforts get complicated. Because the anti-racist person at an imprint usually has just awful, terrible taste. But if you're queer or of-color, you get funneled to that person. Same thing with agents!
And sometimes the ones with good taste are racist! You look at some of the agents and editors with the best taste, and they rep no people of color. At the same time, I would die to defend them. Like, please for god's sake, even if they only publish white people, please do not fire the one person who is publishing good books!
On an even further sidenote, I am supremely lucky that my YA editor, Steph Guerdan, is both the trans go-to editor for HarperTeen and that he has supremely good taste. So it is possible for a person to be both anti-racist and have good taste. But I don't think Steph occupies the "editor with good taste" position in the office; they're an anti-racist editor who just happens to have good taste, the same way that I am a transfem brown YA writer who happens to write very good books.
I really like what you said here:
"This is also one area where anti-racism and diversity efforts get complicated. Because the anti-racist person at an imprint usually has just awful, terrible taste. But if you're queer or of-color, you get funneled to that person. Same thing with agents!
And sometimes the ones with good taste are racist! You look at some of the agents and editors w/ the best taste, and they rep no people of color. At the same time, I would die to defend them. Like, please for god's sake, even if they only publish white people, please do not fire the one person who is publishing good books!"
Much as I would be loathe to admit it, a part of me does miss the "good old days" everyone complains about - I've started communicating with a publisher again recently and I made the deliberate choice to share material with an OLDER MAN, not because Daddy will take care of me, but because a) he made clear he was interested in form over subject matter any day of the week and b) I don't want to get dumped on "women editors" desks ever again.
And you can't be a good fit on the grounds of gender alone! "Women editors" often ended up resenting you as the "lady problem" they got saddled with, instead of working with the writers they truly wanted. It was counterproductive as hell, everyone was Mad about it, and it still was the most common scenario where I dipped out of the field.
I do something similar. I tell my agent to submit to boomers or Gen X editors. The younger and more explicitly anti-racist / pro-queer an editor or agent is, the less likely they are to respond well to my work. When I was looking for an agent for my literary book, I was often ignored, ghosted, or form-rejected by the queer and PoC agents, as well as the ones noted for repping queer and PoC literary novels. They simply weren’t interested in even seeing my work. I was a bit astounded because sometimes they’d be young agents, who hadn’t sold many books, and how many traditionally-published trans women are they even getting in their slush pile? I was everything they claimed to want! Meanwhile their bosses, the name partners at the agency, were excited about my query and happy to read my manuscript.
The same pattern repeated itself at the editorial level—the only editors who full-on refused to see my manuscript were a young Indian editor and a young trans editor. I still don’t really get it.
But I’ve realized that I simply don’t send off the right signals. I’m obviously not ideologically committed to anti-racism in the way many queer PoC writers are. I’ve read Ibram X. Kendi, and I’ve read several books on CRT and Afropessimism, and I think the insights are valuable. There’s certainly a case to be made that we have such structural racism in the US that any color-blind policy inevitably benefits white people over PoC and only serves to increase racial disparities. But the proposed solution is usually to explicitly take race into account in the laws (through quotas, for instance). This seems iffy to me. Like, okay, researchers did an experiment using faked-up resumes where a white Ivy League grad got many more interview offers (when applying to jobs) than a white state flagship grad did, but a Black Ivy League grad was only on par with the white state flagship grad. The natural corollary is that equity requires the Black Dartmouth grad to be given some advantage, so he is lifted up to the status of the White Dartmouth grad. That would be fair. But the white state college grad will never ever ever ever ever ever ever believe the Black Dartmouth grad doesn’t already have it better than him. So ultimately the problem seems a bit unsolvable.
A lot of my white friends think that anti-racists don’t literally believe in their rhetoric—that they’re faking it for some advantage. That might be true for some, but anti-racism is fuelled by a lot of genuine anger. I feel it too. Nine states in America have banned kids transitioning. In two states, adults now can’t transition either. I feel helpless. And if someone I worked with favored those laws, I can imagine wanting to get them fired.
But I think it takes a lot of intellectual contortions to imagine that firing someone in California will improve trans rights in Idaho. At the same time, firing the Californian is the only way to concretely hurt the transphobes.
So my problem is I don’t really have any solutions to the world’s problems. What I tell myself is that I don’t want the transphobes to win and for literature to die. Unlike when it comes to racism, I know literature. I understand it and have the power to affect the literary world. If all I cared about was equity, I’d say why not fire the Californian? Why not only buy politically correct art? It probably won’t do anything, but if there’s even a chance that it could save some trans kid’s life, then why not? But I don’t only care about equity: I also care about literature. And to me that means caring about truth and beauty.
The anti-racists in the literary world don’t see any opposition between truth / beauty and anti-racism. And the anti-woke liberals see no conflict between nineties-style color-blind liberalism and truth / beauty. But to me the conflict is that neither ideology seems likely to solve the problem of racial disparities. I’m not an aesthete. My work deals with politics. I’m interested in ideas and ideologies. I’m lucky enough to belong to a social class that’s also interested in those things, so when I write about the manners and mores of the people I see around me, politics naturally comes up. I don’t think it’s disreputable to discuss politics in a book: Tolstoy did it, Dostoyevsky did it. Conrad and Hemingway did it. But I think that political books have to be judged on their aesthetic merits. And, to me, a book can’t be beautiful if it ignores the natural contradictions and antagonisms of its subject matter.
For instance, The Default World opens with my trans woman narrator talking to a trans woman bartender, who tells her to be wary of all the homeless people on the block. And my narrator thinks that’s such a class marker—because none of her upper-class queer / alternative friends would ever say boo about unhoused people. Now, from that scene, do you know whether unhoused people are dangerous or not? No, because there’s a conflict there—some characters experience the streets one way, and some in another.
But most of the anti-racist editors, agents, and critics really like you to take a position. I’m not totally sure why. I think to them it’s the equivalent of firing the guy at work who is a transphobe. The only sphere in which they have control is that of what texts to accept or reject, so they reject anything that strikes them as at all bad.
However, I can’t say that I prefer the old regime. The old regime never published a trans person. In the old regime, you had to be a genius like Jhumpa Lahiri to get published, if you were Indian. In the old regime, you still had five editors with bad taste and just one editor with good taste, but the ones with bad taste exclusively bought white people, and the one with good taste only bought non-white people if they thought a white audience with good taste would like their work.
Anti-racism has been good for me. My first book went to auction the very weekend that the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag started trending. My second book sold in the wave of YA LGBT romances that was augured by the success of Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda. My third YA sold around when the fight over trans rights came to the forefront of our consciousness. My literary book sold in the wake of the success of Detransition, Baby, the first breakout novel by a trans woman. My nonfiction book sold because of the hunger to hear a positive non-white, non-cishet view of the canon. I don’t think any of these books would’ve sold fifteen years ago.
BUT, none of them, with the exception of my second and third YA, sold to committed anti-racist types. That’s the key. Antiracism puts pressure on mainstream white people to try and diversify their lists, and it gives them more leverage when arguing with acquisitions boards that they should make an offer. Without that pressure, the editor might think ‘this topic is too niche’ or, if they did try to acquire it, the acquisitions board might shoot them down.
So, there’s a push and a pull. Antiracist types are generally uninterested in my work, but they create an environment where their colleagues feel more incentive to buy it (which is maybe the reason antiracists don’t like my work. They think, even a straight white person could love this).
The main thing I dislike about antiracism is that the persistent messaging about diversity gets translated, by many white people, as, “Our stories don’t matter.” I’ve seen a lot of people get discouraged and start to become kind of racist (they only want brown people, or I need to be brown to break in, etc). That’s part of why I feel a bit suspicious of antiracism. I wonder if antiracists understand that white peoples’ stories matter to them as much as ours do to us, and that no true artist will ever think, “It’s not my time.” They’re always going to want to succeed. Nobody wants to wait. Nobody wants to give way. That’s why I think white people can accept colorblindness (everyone should have an equal chance) but hate the idea of reparations or quotas. Perhaps, as a trans person, my community ‘deserves’ more representation, but in concrete terms that might mean that I, a specific person, get an advantage when it comes to succeeding. And how is that fair?
Of course, antiracists tend to be cannier when it comes to the way things work in the real world. The fact is, someone always has an advantage. As I said earlier, well-off people have a huge advantage, which we tend to obscure and mystify. The average white person likely had an advantage in the nineties and perhaps still has one now. I have no clue. So an antiracist might say, if someone always has an advantage, why not distribute that advantage so that it benefits a broader community. One trans person selling a book helps all trans people, but one white person selling a book might not help all white people. As I said, I don’t find that totally convincing, but it can also be hard to argue with.
In practice, I’m just a lone artist trying to preserve my integrity and sell books. I craft my manuscripts so there’s always an explicit value proposition for the publisher (I wrote an entire book about this, The Cynical Writer’s Guide To The Publishing Industry). It's totally fine that most editors / agents have bad taste and work on terrible books--it actually makes better market sense, since good books aren't likely to sell better. Given the craziness of the world, I don't necessarily expect anyone besides myself to have time for my work. Nor do I think my work is the best that's out there. But over time, I've come to realize there is a *lot* of good unpublished work out there. Writing good stuff is hard, but getting it published is equally hard. And what separates me from most pretty-good writers is that I *don't* believe my skill or the quality of my work automatically means someone should buy it. I've accepted that people have other standards, including political litmus tests, and I've spent some time figuring out how I can market myself to them without compromising what makes my work good.
When you mentioned the "Azia Kim" story I had to catch myself from falling down a day-long Internet rabbit hole. I'm fascinated by impostor stories, but I don't find them particularly compelling on the individual level, and by no means I give them that weird generational pass I see going around. Jia Tolentino wrote about the whole Fyre Festival debacle (she was also featured as a talking head in one of the documentaries) and she chronicled the general "ehh" pass Fyre co-founder Billy McFarland got, usually on the grounds of [mumble mumble the world is harsh, capitalism is a scam, get ahead any way you can]. It's a very detached feeling, and right now I wouldn't be able to tell you if it comes from - collective Internet brain taking over, or if it's a sharp course correction made to reject the optimistic template we've *kind of* become numb to. Hard work doesn't pay off, might as well celebrate the weirdo grifter who almost got away with it.
When it comes to con artists, I don’t admire people who steal money, but I admire anyone who wiggles into any place they’re not supposed to be. I have a certain sympathy for race-fakers, for instance, and for people who lie on their resume. I like people who pursue personal connections. I get emails all the time from desperate self-promoters, and I admire writers who pound the pavement, trying to make something happen. To me, there’s too much waiting in line, too much waiting to be anointed. I like people who believe in something, even if that thing is themselves. I’m often reminded of Tolstoy, writing in War and Peace about Lieutenant Berg, who only ever talks about himself, but “everything he told about was so nice, so earnest, the naïveté of his youthful egoism was so obvious, that his listeners were disarmed.”
About this thing you said:
"The main thing I dislike about antiracism is that the persistent messaging about diversity gets translated, by many white people, as, “Our stories don’t matter.” I’ve seen a lot of people get discouraged and start to become kind of racist (they only want brown people, or I need to be brown to break in, etc). "
I’ve watched this happen in real time in (check) 2020 on screenwriters' forums. Ryan Reynolds announced he was going to personally pay for between 10 and 20 production trainee salaries on the set of an upcoming movie of his, and the opportunity was open to BIPOC people of all ages. Here's a video of Reynolds introducing the project:
The point of Group Effort was, "let's give a few marginalised people the opportunity to get their first job on a movie set, that they can hopefully parlay into more jobs later on".
I watched the backlash happen in real time: at first there were positive comments ("Maybe I can apply!", "I'll share it with my friends!"), and then, like clockwork, someone went "so I'm white and poor and I'll never have access to anything?".
It's very easy to feel like "only people of a certain ID get a break" : people with some sense should learn to keep their grumbling private, or, they could take the time to articulate what they see / think / experience, but there's a perverse reward system at play lately, so if you start complaining about "forced diversity" you find a ready-made audience. Think about all the people who build a public persona on anti-wokeness, from the YouTuber that makes hundreds of videos about "forced diversity" in popular movies, TV shows and comic book, to the pundit who either chases the embrace of bigots or just goes for it when the opportunity presents itself.
Yeah, the anti-woke movement really bothers me. As our discussion has shown, I have my critiques of contemporary anti-racism, and I've certainly been called out unfairly before (including, before I openly transitioned, by trans people who thought I was a cis man), but there's strong statistical evidence of disparities between white and Black people at all income levels. In other words, some kind of racial disparity exists that is quite separate from class disparities. I have friends who are class-first leftists, and they just refuse to engage with this evidence. Wokeness is a response to these disparities. For us to have a racially equitable society, a Black Ivy League grad _should_ have the same odds of success as a white one, and a mediocre Black writer should have the same odds of selling a book as a mediocre white one. There is very clear statistical evidence that we don't live in that society right now. And, moreover, there is a history of race-blind welfare programs disproportionately benefiting white people--so yeah, I just don't know how we can fix racial disparities without giving an explicit leg up to disadvantaged races.
This is not something anti-woke liberals want to touch. To me, it's a bit intellectually dishonest. They are repeatedly exposed to these facts, but somehow there's no penetration.
I have more respect, to be honest, for the white person who just cares about their own self-interest. A lot of anti-woke people in the arts are basically schmoes. I once got an email from a librarian in North Dakota who had read my Cynical Guide to Publishing, and she was like, my only quibble is that you say non-white people are at a disadvantage, and that's not true--actually non-white people have it better. And I talked about it back and forth, and ultimately I was like, I understand her point: I doubt you can find a single editor or agent who doesn't say they're openly looking for diverse voices. Given that, it's hard not to think, well, my manuscript isn't what they want.
In truth, the effect of having a marginalized identity is really complicated, and it's mediated a lot by education and access. I actually don't know if the white North Dakotan librarian has much of an advantage or not! I do know that she's basically on the outside, and I'm basically on the inside, so there's a huge difference between us. Of course I _need_ to write about race / gender stuff to sell a book, and she doesn't, but still--I _am_ able to walk that line and produce books that are desired by publishing and that I still like, and she might not be. So who knows?
It takes a lot of wisdom to resist the lure of racial grievance. I think that any self-respecting person is likely to be at least tempted by it. If you've produced something you're truly proud of, and it's not selling, then whether you're white or non-white, you'll naturally land on race as a reason. The exceptions are those drippy white liberals who, for some reason, say stuff like, "Maybe it's not my time." I'm like, good god, man, you only have one life, of course it's your time!
I certainly have flirted with racial / gender grievance. When The Default World was being rejected by agents, I was very ready to write it all off as transphobia. That was probably the first time in my life that I was willing to feel truly angry about being discriminated-against. But it put me in a dark place, mentally, made me question whether working and producing made any sense, and it also made me uncharitable: it forced me to find reasons for assuming ostensibly well-meaning people were actually biased against me, and it made me run down other trans woman who *did* sell books (oh, they're just pandering!). None of that felt good or was productive. Finally, I just came up with my current framework of, ehh, it's pretty random, and quality doesn't count as much as you'd think. It's a robust framework. But, you know, I've certainly been respected by editors and agents who I respect, and it's nice to just think, oh, for whatever reason it didn't work out, rather than that they are transphobes.
When you're dealing with social issues, it makes sense to discuss racism, but when you're dealing with yourself as an individual, I don't know whether focusing on racism or transphobia is the route to a happy life. But I do think it's natural.
Last question: I started this project once I fully appreciated my overall frame was (still is) "expectations, reality and the inevitable crash". Looking at your professional life, is there one moment that stands out to you as a case of "expectations crashing into reality" ? And is there any lesson you learnt in the aftermath ?
With regards to expectations, when my first book sold at auction, I thought on some level, *I have it made!*. Then two months later, my acquiring editor left, and I was orphaned. I was upset, and I was like, why did she even make an offer? I turned down another great offer for her! I'd read lots about peoples' editors leaving, but somehow I thought it wouldn't happen to me. Like when you read about someone getting a twenty-year headache, and you're like, that's unfortunate. You don't view it as a warning for yourself. But I realized that everything you hear about in publishing--it's *all* going to happen to you. Since then, I've had a deal canceled, I've had books rejected, books go to acquisitions and not get picked up, have fired and been fired by agents, have been extensively ghosted, have had a book get called out on Twitter, have had a book launch in the first week of pandemic lockdown, so all the bookstores are closed. It will *all* happen to you. Like when my friends sell their books, they usually go through a phase of discussing everything the publisher promised to do for them, and I'm like, yeah most of that won't materialize, and they're like no, no, no, and when it doesn't materialize, they go through a phase of thinking *WHY ME? DEAR GOD WHY ME?*. Hopefully they eventually realize they're not special. This happens to everyone. But unfortunately most of them persist in believing that they've been uniquely screwed over. It's like people think being a New York Times best-seller or NYT notable book is their natural destiny, and every obstacle is just something getting in the way. But that's just meritocratic thinking imposing itself, when really it's not about merit at all.
In terms of closing, I want to say...when I look over this discussion (which I've enjoyed immensely), I see the two of us circling around the idea of aspiration. I admire aspiration, and I admire ambition. At the same time, I get frustrated when people don't recognize that an ambition is more praiseworthy when it derives from some deeply held principle. So many people only want to be seen as great, but they have no inner concept of what greatness entails. I think one thing we get from literature (and this is one of my themes in my non-fiction book) is a concept of greatness. And, moreover, we get an idea that a thing can be good in itself. It doesn't matter if a thousand people hate a book, if I like it, then the book is good. Of course, then the natural corollary becomes, does that apply to everyone? Is anything good so long as one person likes it. Of course not, precisely because things are good in themselves. When I find something good, I am recognizing its goodness. For other people, that goodness might be invisible or effaced, but the goodness is still in the object itself. People are way too democratic. They think just because we are all equal in dignity, then our opinions ought to be given equal weight. And that's true when it comes to societal decisions, but the question of your own values is not societal--it's personal. Nobody else gets a vote on what I believe. So when I think something is bad, I believe there is a strong chance I am correct, even though someone else might like it. I trust my own opinion more than I trust other peoples'. And if my mind is changed, it's because I've been taught how to recognize what others recognize--I don't just accede to their opinion because it's more popular. And that's what I expect from other people too! I expect them to be critical and to value their own opinion. Over the course of fifteen years, I've developed my own set of values. Like, all the time people are like, oh I can't tweet that or post that or whatever. To me that's absurd, if you think something is true and valuable, then how can you not say it? I think if people have that sense of the value of their own work--not in demographic terms, not just in "the world needs more trans writers" term, but as an aesthetic object with whatever value that entails--then they can weather failure and rejection with much more equanimity. And I want other people to know that it really is possible to value your own work--not in an egomaniacal way or arrogant way--but simply to have the calm certainty that it belongs in the world.
And when it comes to publishing, I think a concomitant truth is that you do whatever you can to put the work into the world. Micro-press, self-publish, whatever you can do. I see people worrying so much about things outside their control, but they're not doing _their_ job--they're not out there, sending the submissions, following up on queries, and doing whatever else is necessary. And it goes back to the sense of value. People are waiting to be validated by publishing--they want to be told they're good enough. The truth is, most people aren't very good. I don't really care about them, though. But if you are good, then just _know_ it. Something in you made the work, so trust that thing and believe in it.
Finally, I just want to say, publishing isn't meritocratic, but it is much more democratic than most other fields. You can't sit in your house in North Dakota and become an actress (well I guess with TikTok now you can, but it's a circuitous path). You can however query the top agents in the world, and they can send you to the top editors. One of my acquaintances worked for a tiny college in a small town--she wasn't particularly well-connected. Her book sold for a million dollars, and now she's one of the world's best-selling YA writers. That can happen. So if you're going to have a dream, being a writer is much more achievable than being an actress or screenwriter or concert pianist.
This conversation was A LOT more than I would’ve dreamt of. I’m so glad I asked Naomi to be a part of this and I’ll be re-reading her answers over time.
And now, action:
Buy Naomi Kanakia’s books (the link brings you to her website)
Read Naomi’s blog, Woman of Letters
Catch up with Naomi’s published essays