I Wasn’t Canceled. I Was Problematized.

Maybe it's worth aspiring to.

Photo by epidersia on Unsplash

Last week, someone I know from the literary world emailed me to ask if I’d be her interlocutor when she came to my city on her upcoming book tour. I was elated. I used to do this sort of thing all the time but haven’t been asked in years. 

In fairness, no one gets asked to do anything anymore; at least it can feel that way. Live events were decimated by the pandemic and are unlikely to make a complete comeback. But in my case, something else might be in play as well. When it comes to literary events, I might be a tiny bit canceled. 

Or maybe not. Honestly, I don’t know. But falling out of favor with your old crowd is kind of like being exposed to a virus. Whether or not you’re actually sick, you still risk spreading your contaminant to others, so there’s a moral obligation to tell people what they might be getting into by being in your presence. That’s why, as excited as I was by the prospect of sitting in the event space of an indie bookstore with a handheld mic and asking a fellow author “about your writing process,” I felt the need to make sure my friend was comfortable putting me on the bill. 

So I explained that while everything would almost surely be just fine—besides, this was her event, not mine—there was possibly a certain kind of (purely hypothetical) indie bookstore employee that maybe kinda sorta would be less than jazzed about my participation. I added that since she and I had last crossed paths, there was also possibly a certain kind of book buyer who might wince at the sight of my name on an events calendar. I suggested that she might want to contact the bookstore events manager and float my name alongside a few others and gauge the response. (The fact that authors are now charged with coordinating their own events is a whole other pitiful matter.) 

I also suggested that I was probably crazy for thinking all this and she should take it for what it was worth. Also, I had no idea what it was worth.

Of course I’m crazy. Writers are crazy. I’m also not blind.

Ever since the publication of my last book, which made an honest appraisal of the culture war, I’ve been somewhat non grata in certain literary circles. There’s nothing too special about this, since it’s a pattern that has played out for all kinds of people in all kinds of milieus since the Trump election. The exact opinions and observations that had made me the toast of the town in 2015 were getting me removed from guest lists little more than a year later. 

When my book came out in 2019, publications that had once heralded me were running reviews with lines like “There are so many potential angles of attack on this deeply silly book that it is hard to know which to choose.” Sometimes the reviewers were people I knew socially. On my own book tour, more than one purportedly friendly interlocutor seemed to turn on me as soon as the show started, framing questions as sly accusations, as if afraid the audience would see them as being on the wrong side.

Or maybe I was just paranoid. That’s the worst part of this whole mean-girl, gaslight-y racket. You’re never quite sure if you’re just imagining things.

It’s possible you stopped getting invited to the party because you didn’t toe its ever-narrowing line. But it’s also possible—in fact, it’s undeniably true—that there aren’t nearly as many parties as there used to be. Or maybe you fell out of favor not because of anything you wrote or said but because you’re older than you once were and the party organizers favor the young. Or maybe you should just publish another book already. After all, it’s been a few years. With all that extra time on your hands, you’d think you could have written a couple hundred continuous pages and slapped them between two covers. (As long as it wasn’t about the culture wars, which is the only thing you’re interested in, and maybe you should examine that.)

This is the thought sequence running on a constant loop through my mind. It’s torturous in its solipsism, but it’s also pretty typical of people who, like me, once traveled freely through the universe of ideas but have in recent years been encumbered with baggage we’d never imagined carrying. That the suitcases are mostly empty—what’s in this baggage is all reputational, a feeling people have about us—is immaterial. 

I’m not talking about being canceled. I am not canceled and never have been. A few times, people have implied otherwise to me. What is it like to be canceled? I’ve been asked. How do you handle it? Are you upset? But this is absurd. I am not the least bit canceled. I walk the earth. I go to restaurants and have friends and get zillions of emails from people asking for favors and advice. In what I can’t help but regard as the definitive barometer of writerly viability, I still get asked to review books for the New York Times. How canceled can you be in that case? 

I haven’t been canceled. I’ve been problematized. 

That’s my word for it, anyway. I’m not a pariah, just problematic. I’m canceled-adjacent at most. 

What does it mean to be problematized? It means instead of people getting in your face and calling you a fascist or a TERF or a Karen, they just talk behind your back. Complaints against you are mostly confined to the back channels. As a rule, you don’t present useful opportunities for virtue signaling, since you’re neither famous nor legitimately controversial. So instead of dragging you on Twitter, they cluck about you in Slack channels. They add you to Reddit lists of baddies to watch out for. They don’t get you fired; they just keep you from getting hired.

Something I’ve noticed about cancel culture over the past year or so is that it’s acquired something of a cool factor. As much as no one wants to be actually canceled, there’s a certain street cred in saying you were. I’ve heard people say, “I got so canceled over that!” and then go on to describe a single incident wherein a few friends or colleagues got angry about something they did and gave them the cold shoulder for a few days. 

Public figures are routinely referred to as having been “repeatedly canceled,” an oxymoron that calls to mind the countless deaths of Wile E. Coyote in the old Warner Bros. Road Runner Show cartoon. In each episode, he’d be blown up in a dynamite explosion, flattened by a train, crushed by a boulder, or otherwise hoisted on own roadrunner-obsessed petard. Yet he was always right back moments later, unscathed and ready to continue upholding the classic parable of quantum insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Does that make Wile E. Coyote the ultimate “cancel-proof?” Or does it just show how little cancellation means anymore?

Don’t get me wrong, legitimate cancellation can be devastating, especially when it involves ordinary citizens permanently losing their livelihoods over hysterical nonsense. (And to anyone who tells you they’ve never heard of people like that, I say: of course you haven’t; those people have been canceled.) But the number of canceled wannabes running around makes me think that cancel culture has canceled itself to the point where it’s just well . . . culture. Often when people say, “I was canceled,” what they’re really saying is, “I was noticed.” 

Frankly, I’d rather be problematized. At least that comes with a little mystery.  

After a few emails back and forth, my author friend decided it would be fine for me to be her interlocutor. As long as you don’t think it would keep people away, she said. I conjectured it might be the opposite; perhaps it would bring in a crowd. (No guarantees, obviously!) People are drawn to those who embody the complications they can’t untangle in themselves. That’s why we read novels. That’s why we love hearing stories about the problems of others. Problems are inextricable from the human condition. So maybe being problematized is a form of being humanized. 

I’m starting to think that being problematized is something to aspire to rather than avoid. Unless you lead a very boring life and never open your mouth to speak, you’re going to be problematized sooner or later. It’s a virus, after all. So you might as well stop living in fear. Just don’t call yourself canceled. It’s an insult to canceled people. And to yourself.