No One 'Let' Me Write My Novel
Contrary to a recent viral article, nobody allowed me to write Victim. I had the balls to.
The line caught me off guard at first. Then I laughed. Then I got tight.
While Andrew Boryga (Victim) and Tony Tulathimutte are free to skewer identity pieties, white male millennials are still unable to speak directly to their own condition.
This comes from a viral Compact piece by Jacob Savage that was published last month, which argues that white American millennial men are “vanishing” from literary fiction. But what it really seems to be saying is: White millennial straight men aren’t winning awards and the attention of critics like they used to.
Savage points to a lack of white millennial men on prestige book lists from The New York Times, Vulture, Esquire, and other outlets (book lists I also didn’t make, for the record). He notes no white millennial man has won the NYPL’s Young Lions prize since 2020. (I didn’t win, nor was I nominated.) And he says that in the past decade not a single straight white American millennial man has been a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. (Again, I wasn’t one either. Damn, maybe they don’t know that I’m brown?)
The kicker had me rolling:
Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.
Most astonishing indeed! Look at me, clutching my gold chain.
Savage says “diversity preferences” might explain some of this, but argues the deeper issue why these white men are failing to “capture the zeitgeist” is because they’re unable or unwilling to write honestly about themselves in the current climate. “Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them.”
They turn to genre writing, “suffocatingly tight auto-fiction,” period pieces, and “anything to avoid grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America.” Anything, in other words, to avoid the messy now.
But me? I’m “free to skewer identity pieties” and write fiction that directly wrestles with the contemporary world thanks to my skin. By whose decree I’ve received this great privilege, he doesn’t say, but let’s assume it’s the publishing industry.
I’m not trying to be harsh on Savage. It’s just that over the last year or so I've heard this same whisper from podcast hosts, reviews, and a few white writers my age who don’t really say it to my face but I can tell it’s in their hearts: You only got to write your book because you’re not white.
(I can’t help but hear a lunchroom whine in that: “How come he gets to say that and I don’t?”)
Mostly, I let these remarks pass. I understand where the misguided idea comes from and the real alienation young men in letters are feeling. After all, I’ve made my own contribution to the where are the male writers debate. But that doesn’t change the fact that the assertion angers me—not only because it belittles my talent and work ethic, but also because I think it’s wrong and, frankly, cowardly.
After reading this latest piece, I feel compelled to set the record straight for once. Nobody “let” me do shit.
Victim wasn’t published because I was handed a diversity hall pass and an opportunity: Hey brown boy, wanna skewer identity politics for us? I wrote it because I was brave enough to.
From 2020 to 2022 when I was in the throes of what would become the final draft, after many years of tinkering away and mostly failing, I wrote it in stolen hours at 5 a.m. while raising two kids, working as a full-time journalist, and actively thinking the whole time: I might get canceled for writing this, but fuck it.
I had things to lose. I had no real connections or cache in the publishing industry. I was a no-name debut submitting a book that pokes holes in the aspirational aims of the same industry I was trying to break into. As NPR noted in their review, it was “kind of bold.”
It’s true.
I wrote it against the grain of everything publishing supposedly wanted from a debut writer of color with a background like mine. I didn’t package trauma. I didn’t sanitize my urban characters for the white gaze. Nobody was out here telling it me it was a good idea to write about a POC race and identity hustler. I knew it could confuse people. I knew it might piss people off.
But I took a risk and wrote the story I desperately wanted to see in the world. I had something to say, I took my time to say it right, and I said it with my chest.
I think any writer—whether they’re white, brown, black, or what have you—who wants to challenge norms and speak honestly about their modern world has the right to do the same.
But that doesn’t mean they will. And it also doesn’t mean that if they do, their gambit will be critically or commercially successful.
I think Savage showed his true hand when he rattled off all those white men missing from awards at the start of his piece. I wondered: Do these men feel left out because somebody is stopping them from writing? Or because they’re no longer getting pat on the head after they write? Do they miss capturing “the zeitgeist” or do they miss those stickers on the front of their books? Are they feeling left out? Or are they feeling jealous that other people are getting some shine?
I’m not sure, and honestly I don’t care. If you’re scared to write what you want to write, that’s fine. But don’t blame me.
What really gets me about this framing Savage sets up—a framing other critics who talk about this issue regularly employ—is how much it erases the individuality they claim to care about. The truth is, the buzzy white male millennial writers that critics like Savage mourn couldn’t write Victim even if they tried.
Not because they’re white. But because they’re not me and don’t have my unique perspective.
They haven’t hugged my block. They haven’t played double-dutch on class lines 'til their feet went numb. They haven’t seen what I’ve seen, or done the inner work to process and make sense of it. In short: They don’t have my particular swag, and they never will. They have their own, and what they do with it is on them.
And do with it they should!
I don’t have beef with Savage or any of these other critics. If they want to write searing, probing white male millennial novels, I will be the first to encourage them. I might even blurb them if they’re good. In fact, I think that if more white male millennial writers wrote more white male millennial novels instead of think pieces about why said novels are missing, we’d probably be having a much different conversation.
Publishing is hard for everyone. Lines will always be drawn around what the “market” wants at any given moment, and coloring outside those lines will always remain a gamble.
People like to focus on my book deal or the reception Victim has received, but they don’t focus on the risk of writing it in the first place. Writers of color get boxed in, too. Did my particular background make my book more palatable right now? Maybe. Maybe not. But that conversation only happened after I put the work in. After I risked something.
I fear that too many writers are trying to forecast the industry's reaction before they’ve even stepped up to the plate.
The truth is, if you want to write something you aren’t seeing in the world, the math is the same no matter the color of your skin, your gender, or your sexual preference: You have to take a swing. And your power to take a swing doesn’t rest in someone else’s hands, it rests in yours.
You can say what you want about Victim and why it got published or didn’t, but you can’t say that I didn’t take a big ass Juan Soto cut.
I implore all writers out there: Stop waiting for a permission slip. If you feel so strongly about something, say it with your chest. But don’t do it expecting a parade, a cookie, a fat publishing contract, a call from Oprah, or a nice trophy from the Center for Fiction.
Do it because you have to. Because you have a burning need to see it on the page.
Peace,
Andrew
Thank you for writing this, Brother.
Whenever I hear about this topic, where white cishet men, particularly young white cishet men, don’t feel like they’re welcome in the literary world, I wonder about the metrics being used to measure this phenomena.
According to research conducted by The New York Times in 2020, 95% of books published in the United States are published by white authors. Exactly who do white cishet male writers think is taking away their literary spots?
From elementary school to high school, my school reading curriculum was exclusively white cishet male authors. If there was a prize to be won, it was won by a white cishet male author and when anyone other than a white cishet male author won a prize, it’s was BIG NEWS because of how rare it was.
The complaint I’m hearing sounds, to me, a lot like white cishet male writers saying: “Why are we no longer the only ones who matter in the literary landscape like we have been the only ones who mattered for centuries, like literally since the Bible days?” It sounds to me like they’re angry and bewildered as to why they are no longer considered the center, the default, the standard in an art form where they have forever been considered the center, the default, and the standard.
It used to be that white cishet men got to write about the world and the world had no choice but to view itself through the eyes/minds of white cishet men, which helped white cishet men believe that the world was not only shaped by them, but made in their own image and created solely to service their every whim. It has to feel terrible for them to now witness the world recognize the danger of that narrow vision of itself and seek to broaden it such that the white cishet male view is no longer singular and no longer central, but is simply one of many. As the old adage goes: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
James Baldwin said something to the effect of there being a kind of terror involved when white cishet male writers have to contend with the fact that those they have written about, almost always scandalously, now have the ability to speak for themselves and write about them. The terror stems from a truth being revealed; a truth that white cishet men have spent a good amount of time, effort, and resources trying to prevent from being heard: that they are not special; they are not unique; they are not above anyone else; that any advantages they have come not through intelligence, but malevolence; that it is John Wayne—not the Native Americans—who is the villain of the story.
And for readers, most of us have spent decades being forced to read white cishet men’s works to the exclusion of every other demographic that now that we are out of school and free to read whatever we want, most of us don’t want to read white cishet men’s work anymore because we have had so much of it and had to endure as they wrote about us in ways that were false, dangerous, stereotypical, and demonizing. Now we want to read the works that academia denied our access to, the perspectives that mainstream literature marginalized.
Some of us have felt traumatized by the ways white cishet men, literary or not, have long represented us—as inferior, as savage, as rapeable, as killable (which has had a tangible effect on how we’re regarded in real life)—that we’re afraid to go back to their works and be reminded of how they see us; of how their rage—their juvenile obsession with being the benchmark for anything genius, their believing that they’re really the only human beings on the planet, their thinking that God, Himself, put them in charge of the planet—leads them to forfeiting their own humanity in the effort to disprove ours.
Frankly, I don’t read white cishet male authors anymore because after reading them for over half my life (I’m 54), I already know what they have to say; they’ve been saying some version of it, in one way or another, for millennia now: “The throne belongs to me. Thus, bow down.” And also, I have a lot of catching up to do with the myriad of perspectives that were intentionally kept from me.
I have no problem with white cishet men authors being able to write. But I have the sneaky suspicion that they don’t just want to write. They want to dominate. They want a crown bestowed. They want us to regard them as brilliant even when they’re mediocre because that’s the entire point of whiteness and that’s what they have been promised.
What is it exactly that young white cishet male writers want to say that they’re not able to, At the heart of their pissed-offness, it seems that they’re angry that they don’t have the uninterrupted right to write about others in the way of their forefathers—without accountability, responsibility, or consequence. They are stunned that the world is largely no longer on board with them doing so. They feel stifled that they can’t, for example, use the N-word or make rape a masculine rite of passage like in the olden days; and they define their freedom precisely by how much harm they’re allowed to bring to others.
But as sad as that is, they just might get all of that again now that the worst of unchecked white cishet male pathology in the form of Trump/Vance/Musk has once again ascended.
SOME SOURCES:
https://boingboing.net/2020/12/21/number-crunching-the-overwhelming-whiteness-of-the-book-publishing-industry.html
https://bookriot.com/diversity-in-the-publishing-industry-2023/
You are gracious to even use your time and swag replying to this inane essay. White males born before 1984? How is being published in the New Yorker by ones 40s a reasonable aspiration for anyone?? Tony Morrison was in her 60s and had won the frigging NOBEL PRIZE for literature before she started contributing to the New Yorker. The whole platitude of quality feeling like oppression for people with unearned privilege seems viable here. But you demonstrate great warmth here by side stepping such finger-wagging to simply remind writers per se that taking risks is on them, and they are welcome to do so.