Please Stop Canceling Authors, and Their Books

Especially when there's a whole other group you can cancel.

It’s happened again. Another author has been cancelled.

This time, it’s celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and his children’s book Billy and the Epic Escape, which, according to The Guardian, received “condemnation from First Nations communities” so the publisher withdrew the book and provided an utterly obsequious apology.

The call to cancel the book was led by the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Commission, which is a very unwieldingly-named group that got its panties in a twist.

Now I have no idea what’s in the book. If it hadn’t been for this uproar, I would have no idea Jamie Oliver had written a children’s book. I just had to Google Jamie Oliver, in fact, because I wasn’t entirely sure who he was.

BUT PLEASE CAN WE STOP CANCELLING WRITERS?!!

I know we live in cancel culture—a time which feels to me like it started when a publicist landed in Africa and learned her life had been ruined by a tweet—and I’m tired of all of it. But I’m especially tired of it when it comes to books.

Do people understand that if we keep at it, writers will be afraid to write, well, anything? Writing is hard enough without having to worry at every second that you could be humiliated and have your hard work not only dismissed but actually shamed because you inadvertently offended people.

People inadvertently offend me all the time. I’m guessing they offend you, too. It’s part of dealing with being a human being. It’s taken me far too long to learn that sharing your feelings about whatever it is with them tends to be entirely ineffective. So why do we get out the torches to try to take down a writer who is simply trying to express him or herself?

Last year, when Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert stopped the publication of her highly anticipated novel The Snow Forest after Ukranians expressed “anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain their disappointment over the story being set in Russia,” I thought it was ridiculous.

(Again, I didn’t read the book; I’m not even clear if the offended Ukranians did. But I’m familiar enough with Gilbert’s work to safely say she in no way meant to offend anyone by setting her book in Russia.)

Then there was American Dirt author Jeannine Cummins, who had to cancel her tour because her publisher believed that threats to booksellers and the author presented “real peril to their safety.” Cummins’ sin? Daring to write a novel from the point-of-view of a Mexican migrant, when she is neither.

Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t a guy who got rich thanks to mobsters and threw awesome parties and S.E. Hinton wasn’t a hoodlum dude that would be played in a movie by C. Thomas Howell. And I loved both The Great Gatsby and The Outsiders. It would never have occurred to me to be offended by the fact that the authors were not their main characters because fiction is made up.

This has been on my mind because I decided to do a new version of Party Girl—a more PG version, if you will. And when I went in to tone down the main character’s antics I saw a whole bunch of things that were perfectly acceptable to write in 2005 that would risk getting me decimated today. While redoing it, I ended up really taking out any mention of race for fear that if I made a character Black or Mexican, I could be accused of racial stereotyping unless the character was absolutely perfect.

If we’re going to get upset about Jamie Oliver’s book, why don’t we get upset about the fact that celebrities seem to be getting all the children’s book deals and what’s more, some don’t even write them themselves? (To be clear, I’m all for ghostwriters; my company is based on getting talented writers to tell the stories of successful entrepreneurs. But ghostwriting fiction is different. And a celebrity hiring a fiction ghostwriter is just…wrong.)

Since I’m ranting, I should mention that, as a mother of a 16-month-old, I can attest to the fact that many of these celeb-penned children’s books are bad. Jimmy Fallon’s #1 New York Times bestselling books, including Your Baby's First Word Will be DADA, Everything Is MAMA and This is BABY, are literally stories where the words DADA, MAMA and BABY are repeated over and over.

I get it. Lots of people like Jimmy Fallon. But if we’re going to crazy cancelling authors, can’t we cancel the ones who aren’t really authors and are doing bad work and not those who are only guilty of placing their books in sensitive locales or imagining characters different than them?