The Seat Not Taken

 

A writer whose work you admire A LOT turns out to be a disgusting pervert. Do you stop reading their work? Do you hold your nose with one hand as you turn the pages with the other? Do you refuse to be on a panel with them?

Trigger warning: This question wasn’t easy for me, and my answer may upset some people.

It depends.

 

I’m not talking about Issei Sagawa, who was a pervert, a cannibal, and an author who profited from murders. That’s clear-cut. But once you move away from extremes, the line blurs. ‘Perversity’ is a slippery word. I live in a country that outlawed interracial marriage until 1967. My grandmother needed her husband’s permission to buy a refrigerator. In that context, even the cowgirl position is considered deviant.

In literary theory, we talk about the death of the author—the idea that a work exists independently of who created it. But the corpse sometimes sits up.

Let’s walk the gallery.

Dickens emotionally abused his wife, possibly had a long affair with a teenager, and tried to institutionalize his spouse to control the narrative. Burroughs shot and killed his wife. Mailer stabbed his. Naipaul hit women. Koestler, posthumously accused of rape. Iceberg Slim was a pimp. Salinger groomed a teenage girl. David Foster Wallace stalked and beat Mary Karr.

Lovecraft was a racist, even by his time’s standards. Céline cheered for Nazis. Dahl was openly anti-Semitic.

Women authors, too, are not exempt. Highsmith was racist, anti-Semitic, cruel. Sexton admitted that she abused her children, incest implied. Woolf wrote racist screeds in her diaries, though she later recanted some. Gertrude Stein backed fascists. Lessing abandoned her kids and called motherhood ‘oppressive.’

Even now, we watch the halos dim on names like Gaiman, Munro, and DuBois.

If that were enough for the hallowed halls of Literature, we have a POTUS with a rap sheet that most mobsters would envy.

Crimes are on a continuum—because crimes scale.

James Ellroy broke into homes to sniff women’s underwear. Kink? Compulsion? I don’t know, but let’s continue to look at crimes and misbehavior as a continuum.

Something stolen? Replace it.

Something broken? Fix it.

I think of the victims because: Fear and Violation—those linger for a lifetime.

Americans love to clutch pearls. Fewer ask: What about the victims? I find the U.S. view on justice perverse. Cruelty lurks beneath the patriotism. Look no further than the Potomac. Or look back to Willie Francis, 17 years old, electrocuted twice in one week in 1946 and survived. A year later, they succeeded. Third time’s the charm.

Some say there’s honor among thieves. Some killers I’ve known were calm, even philosophical. Most saw themselves as soldiers carrying out orders. One told me: ‘You step outside yourself. You do what you must.’ It's a statement I came to understand because I’ve had to defend myself. Twice. Violently.

Victims live with rage. It doesn’t disappear—it just redirects.

I despise those who profit from their crimes, especially under government deals that skirt the Son of Sam laws. Gravano. Confidential informants who kept on killing. Bulger and Scarpa. Our justice system, in these cases, is a co-conspirator. Justice for the greater good? Utilitarian, I suppose.

I loathe cruelty to animals. When Cheryl Head kindly blurbed my novel Hush Hush, she asked why Shane throws a man down the stairs for hurting his cat, but barely touches the thugs who hurt his girlfriend. Fair question. It was drawn from personal experience. I couldn’t give her the answer I wanted. I’m private. Guarded.

Remember Dave in Mystic River? I was that kid.

Children bounce back, they say. Sure. Resilience is admirable but something stays broken. We all carry damage. Life is trauma. Victim and victimizer, sometimes in the same skin. Black. White. I see gray.

To answer the question:

I don’t care what you do in the bedroom—unless it involves a child.

Anything else, I’d probably sit next to you.

Hurt a child? Torment animals? No.

I can admire your language.

I can separate fact from fiction.

But that doesn’t mean I’d break bread with you.