Yellowface

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高开低走，读到一半有些烦躁。但又因这本书窥得写作与出版的内幕——与学术写作出版有些许相似：出版的形式远远大于写作的内容。这本书足以击碎我年少时的作家梦了，读到主人公精疲力竭回到家乡，眼含热泪翻阅少年时代的习作，我也湿了眼角。最后一击是如此年轻的作者已经有这样的笔力，将社会议题信手拈来，还剧透了叙写历史的野心。

Maybe it was Highlander Syndrome—I’ve read about that before, the way members of marginalized groups feel threatened if someone else like them starts finding success.
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Please. I’ve always found that line to be a cop-out. There’s no need to dress it up. We are all vultures, and some of us—and I mean Athena, here—are simply better at finding the juiciest morsels of a story, at ripping through bone and gristle to the tender bleeding heart and putting all the gore on display.
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There is nothing solid to this smoke monster; only the fleeting memory of lots of people yelling over nothing.
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Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.
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Nothing in these dream worlds ever became a fully formed product—I didn’t have the discipline or craft skills then to write a complete novel. They’re more like a smorgasbord of creative churning, half-formed doors to other worlds, worlds in which I lingered for hours when I didn’t want to be in my own.
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But enter professional publishing, and suddenly writing is a matter of professional jealousies, obscure marketing budgets, and advances that don’t measure up to those of your peers. Editors go in and mess around with your words, your vision. Marketing and publicity make you distill hundreds of pages of careful, nuanced reflection into cute, tweet-size talking points. Readers inflict their own expectations, not just on the story, but on your politics, your philosophy, your stance on all things ethical. You, not your writing, become the product—your looks, your wit, your quippy clapbacks and factional alignments with online beefs that no one in the real world gives a shit about. And once you’re writing for the market, it doesn’t matter what stories are burning inside you. It matters what audiences want to see, and no one cares about the inner musings of a plain, straight white girl from Philly. They want the new and exotic, the diverse, and if I want to stay afloat, that’s what I have to give them.
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My therapist taught me once that the best way to deal with panic-inducing flashbacks is to think of them as scenes from a horror movie. Jump scares are terrifying the first time you see them because they catch you off guard, and because you don’t know what to expect. But once you watch them again and again, once you know exactly when the demon-possessed nun jumps out from behind the corner, they lose their power over you.
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