Literary Clusterfucks 2013

Beginning to think maybe a rolling thread might be good. Anyway:

So Alisa Valdes just publishes this memoir about this cowboy of hers and how he's a man's man and now's she's a woman like never before and etc. That link's to Hanna Rosin's review, and she's essentially going "Um...you sure?"

And then Valdes publishes this today.

That said, a lot can happen in two years, especially when you’re in a relationship with a man as complicated and volatile as the cowboy.

"what I actually wrote was a handbook for women on how to fall in love with a manipulative, controlling, abusive narcissist."

just what the world needed. like a poke in the eye.

jesus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FORoSB5JxCU

"Cowboy up."

none of these people are really writers

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, June 4, 2010 1:18 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf @ that whole story

polo shirt under a jacket, tho

I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.
You see by my outfit that I'm a cowboy, too.
We see by these outfits that we are all cowboys.
If you buy a cowboy outfit, you can be a cowboy, too.

damn nm I just actually read this shit how f'd up

i keep reading her name as alida valli

jesus

I don't know if we do this around here but there's some srs abuse and sexual assault triggers in Ned's second link

it's probably a good thing that she's posting a picture of her rapist on the internet, now we can watch out for him

man that's a tough read

cowboyfucks

How much you wanna bet that Mr Cowboy is gonna be a MRA talking head

In 2001, Valdes emailed a 3400-word resignation letter to her superiors at the Los Angeles Times. The letter was widely circulated on the Internet[ and reprinted in the St. Petersburg Times. In the letter she accused the newspaper of racism and discrimination, especially in its synonymous use of the word "latino" with "Spanish-speaker", a practice she equated to genocide.

buzza are you suggesting that alisa valdes is hysterical or otherwise to be dismissed

this is not the elizabeth wurtzel thread

And so, even though I was 43 years old and have Lupus

WHY DO THESE FANFICCY CRAP ROMANCE NOVELISTS ALWAYS HAVE LUPUS OR FIBRO WTF.

hm prob should have read the whole post of hers before making light. still, this shit brings the whole 50 shades bullshit into its awful, true light.

Considering Valdes wrote one of the single most amazing demolitions of a horrible person ever, reading/seeing all this...yeah.

okay that was awesome. thanks for linking that Ned

still cannot get over her story with the cowboy. so fucked up. I mean, just that it reads so familiarly, is so sad to me.

this is not the elizabeth wurtzel thread

oh, okay then

“An irresistible, post-feminist Taming of the Shrew. Don’t be scared by the premise. This is not a story about a woman relinquishing her identity. Quite the opposite. It is a riveting tale about how a brilliant, strong-minded woman liberated herself from a dreary, male-bashing, reality-denying feminism.”

– Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys; How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men

a practice she equated to genocide

ugh fuck this, there is like a 100% chance she was referring to cultural genocide, a term used for decades and not meant to imply the actual murder of a group of people

http://www.sptimes.com/News/110300/Floridian/The_language_of_genoc.shtml

buzza idgi are you trying to damage the credibility of the woman who basically just announced she wrote a book about a man who raped her

apparently so?

it's tough when you can only speak in the form of revived threads

seemed like zachylon wanted the context of the wiki quote so i provided it?

thank you for posting it

she does make a clear distinction between the two types of genocide tho she doesn't mark it with "cultural" or something similar. she does 'equate' the two but that's sort of the idea, while the wiki editor left out any of that context and framed it like "she compared this one tiny linguistic choice with the holocaust", fuck wiki

"literary"

I have a lot of thoughts about this whole thing and also some feelings but none are organized enough to share except for, Jesus, Lady--at least when I did that I didn't write a book about it.

considering that one of the major goals of feminism was to protect women from the power imbalances present in domestic relationships, it's not super surprising that valdes' paean to how feminism got romance wrong and how there's something special about a real man turned out to be about an abusive asshole. i don't mean to suggest that she deserves what happened in the least, but there is a sort of irony that the very political principles she decried in the context of this relationship turned out to be especially relevant to her needs.

xp On second thought that makes it sound like my experience was as extreme as hers: it was not. I also didn't put it in those terms of submission etc or posit that it revealed anything about how feminism has failed us. And I didn't have to jump out of a moving truck although after getting hit by an actual car frankly I'd take another one of those accidents over another of those relationships.

there is a sort of irony that the very political principles she decried in the context of this relationship turned out to be especially relevant to her needs.

It's not like that's a coincidence. She decried them because she was being told to.

really want some blogger to try to get a reaction out of christina hoff summers

I usually assume "How I did X and Changed My Life" memoirists are flighty, superficial and unrealistic people, because shit just doesn't work like that. This is a particularly egregious example.

This is a horrible horrible story.

btw, I regret my above post, having apparently made it without really reading most of the story in her blog post.

However, the blog post is now gone.

?!

this just got a little clusterfuckier

without the followup blog post this is kind of incoherent

she wrote a fluffy romance novel that seems to spend half its time scolding modern feminism, then revealed that the man she was writing about raped and abused her and (this is where things are fuzzy to me) the whole novel was a double-feint?

it's a memior!

ergh

so, replace "romance novel" with "memoir"; is the rest accurate?

Yup.

huh

Given some of the things she was also saying about her publisher I wonder if that had something to do with it.

Upping the ante for international literary clusterfucks

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/jan/16/call-this-social-cohesion-the-six-day-war-of-words-that-laid-waste-to-the-2026-adelaide-writers-festival-ntwnfb

Randa Abdel-Fattah was treated horribly so glad to see the show of support

not really "literary" but art...but major shit happened in r/Art last year, and I'm in awe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/Art

How the LA Review of Books destroyed itself

“All non-profits run on exploitation, but these guys don’t even try to hide it."

One of the first things Tom and Rob proposed was a first-person essay by a writer from Santa Barbara named Ben Bastomski who volunteered for the IDF. He also models part-time. “It was one of the most bloodthirsty things I’ve ever read,” says one former editor. “And it was also written like YA.”

I’ve been hearing stories about the LA Review of Books’ managerial dysfunction for years now, but the truth is, the publication has never mattered enough for any drama to boil over publicly (despite the valiant efforts of some of the writers and editors who’ve passed through there). “The best thing the founders of the LA Review of Books did was name it,” one former editor tells me, “because the name gave it a sense of tradition and belonging in this milieu of publications it just does not belong in.”

lol, so true

yeah. I have too many lit mag subscriptions as it is, but from the essays I've read here and there, the standard isn't up to what one might assume are its peer publications

The best thing the founders of the LA Review of Books did was name it

anyway, awesome and hilarious piece. it just kept getting better, but also i liked how it ended on a sincere note of well-wishing for the LA literary scene

The quality is highly variable, though I like the lit bro essay was published in LARB when it would never get anywhere near more established publications.

lindy west is at it again!

...?

Any chance of a little elaboration?

in what sense? she has an excellent track record at calling out idiots.

sorry, in the spirit of the thread title, being the center of a literary clusterfuck, I’m not accusing her of anything myself. I haven’t read her new memoir but it’s gotten a mixed response and some of the behavior of her husband has been a little eyebrow raising

my wife just listened to this podcast ep about it: https://slate.com/podcasts/icymi/2026/03/lindy-wests-polyamory-has-divided-the-internet

I must be using a different internet.

Not the kind of clusterfuck we usually talk about on this thread.

900% podcast tax on USB microphones and we should raise the bar on what it takes to get a memoir published. A platform that will win 50 states in 2028.

Guys I think it's time we started a 2014 thread IMO

Not the kind of clusterfuck we usually talk about on this thread.

― 138,683 Serious, Earnest Americans Emphasize Demand for Prepar (President Keyes), Saturday, March 21, 2026 2:00 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

??

In a New York minute
Any thread can change

famous person writes a book on hot button issues that has the internet talking, what do I know!

I think people were just looking for context that's all!

yep! Like many people here, I am very fond of Lindy from her days at The Stranger and Slog, and even more for her twitter during gamergate. I was curious about a clusterfuck, b/c I know the knives are still out for her in the edgelord-adjacent internet. Didn't mean to start A Thing.

This is the summary that I read a few days ago (the whole thing is apparently paywalled, but pretty much all you need to know is in the non-paywalled part):
https://fieldnotesforthebrave.substack.com/p/i-read-lindy-wests-new-memoir-about

Not the kind of clusterfuck we usually talk about on this thread.

― 138,683 Serious, Earnest Americans Emphasize Demand for Prepar (President Keyes), Saturday, March 21, 2026 2:00 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

??

― comrade jhøsh (k3vin k.), Saturday, March 21, 2026 9:15 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

the joke is group sex

oh lolz

HAHA

https://archive.ph/KKMRL

this was the (very fair, imo) slate profile that set her husband off

Do you hate dogs?” West asks me as ottoman-sized Barry leans his entire weight into my groin.

when the writer compared her dog to an ottoman as it this were possible to envision this in any meaningful way I bailed out

It’s a typo, the O should be capitalized.

i think this is just a "clusterfuck" because people in america are uncomfortable with the fact that life and relationships are messy and people hurt each other and often make foolish decisions in pursuit of love and happiness. most relationship discourse is just moralizing and prescriptive, not only among conservatives.

Well, and when a memoirist admits to what had previously been glossed over, it makes them a less reliable narrator and parasocial friend overall.

i think her husband seems selfish but she loves him and that is really up to her. unfortunately, pain is a part of many relationships, not just poly or queer relationships or ones that look unusual to the outside. there is a lot to negotiate when you mix your life with another person. probably everyone can "spin" the story of their life in a way that makes their spouse the villain, even if they are well meaning. i don't think people like this so they want to build rules around relationships and clear ways of deciding who is "the narcissit" or "the toxic one." but the truth is messier.

in many cases.

in many other cases there are victims and abusers, obviously. what she is describing is not really that.

idk. i feel like she was trying to be honest and that is what isn't computing. i certainly agree with ther commenters who say that her husband seems bad, but i appreciate that that wasn't the point of her book. she was going for something truer and more contradictory

i don't think people like this so they want to build rules around relationships and clear ways of deciding who is "the narcissit" or "the toxic one." but the truth is messier.

Otm. Also I've found some of the people who litigate their relationships in public the loudest are often unreliable narrators.

I get the value in going public in some cases, because victims of abuse who haven't been abused before don't know how to recognize it as easy and it often helps them discover it.

On the other hand, some people have learned this is a good way to get their friends to pile on an ex-lover for something much more benign that maybe should have stayed private

she was going for something truer and more contradictory

o lord

Not trying to be pretentious. Just saying that messiness is a virtue for memoir writing.

no it isn't but also there are enough memoirs now. temp ban for memoirs

In West's case — like Elizabeth Gilbert — can't help thinking that having this self-identity/professional life as a memoirist creates pressure to "tell all" even in situations where they haven't really processed the things they're living through. Almost like if they don't write about it they're hiding something? The best memoirs imo often benefit from distance and the ability to see things more clearly in retrospect. Hard to do when you're right in the middle of the things you're writing about.

did we ever cover this clusterfuck?

The Tell author Amy Griffin is being sued by a former classmate, who says that Griffin's story of sexual abuse — which she detailed in her bestselling memoir — was actually based on her life.

https://people.com/the-tell-author-amy-griffin-lawsuit-11922394

there was an NYT investigation a year ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/nyregion/amy-griffin-memoir-psychedelic-drugs.html

but the lawsuit is new

Veteran writer's boner: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/31/the-new-york-times-drops-freelance-journalist-who-used-ai-to-write-book-review And dig the punchline, which is just this article's writer reporting more facts.

i appreciate you using “boner” in the older more benign sense of the word

best beloved helen dewitt declines £129k/https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/helen-dewitt-declines-129k-prize-3702670275k prize due to its promotional requirements

then accepts £129k/https://archive.ph/CALHr75k, from right-winger tyler cowen, of complete fascist peter thiel's money

it's not a great look

ugh, even so

been thoroughly mulled over in her thread. current status: everyone digesting fizzles' exegesis

ah, my bad

no no it def deserves a mention itt