Transcript: Adam Szetela

An interview with the author of That Book is Dangerous

Many of us that are big readers have been scratching our heads for years, trying to figure out why so many books now are so tedious and moralistic. What’s happened to North American literary culture — and why hasn’t it bounced back? My guest on the program this week has some answers. He’s written a book about the decline of literary freedom in publishing, and a dynamic that he describes as “a circular firing squad.”

Adam Szetela is an American author. His new outing is That Book is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

---

TH: It’s great to have you on to discuss your new book about the decline of the publishing industry and the moral panics that have consumed it in recent years. This is an issue that I care about a lot. I review books, and a lot of the books I’ve been sent in this last decade are unreadable — moralistic, political, tedious, off-putting — and part of me is still really baffled about why this continues to be the case. So I was really glad to read your book. I want to start today by getting you to react to news that happened in this country last week. The Vancouver Parks Board, which has been lobbied by activists, apologized to the LGBTQ community for the harm caused by a Harry Potter-themed children’s event and publicly disavowed author J.K. Rowling. What did you make of that development, and how does it relate to the themes that you’ve been researching in your book?

AS: Yeah, so in my book I open with a number of examples of recently cancelled books, and I don’t use that term metaphorically. I’m talking about books that were scheduled to be published and then got quite literally cancelled. But one of the older books that I come back to in my introduction is Harry Potter, because it’s such an interesting book. If you look back when that book first came out, J.K. Rowling was a beloved darling, even among liberals, who interpreted Harry Potter as a progressive book. And you could actually find old videos of right-wing fundamentalist Christians holding book-burning ceremonies of her book, and people saying her book would turn kids to witchcraft and disavow Christian values. But now we’ve reached a point where you can go on TikTok and see videos of liberals burning J.K. Rowling’s books and saying they’re antisemitic and racist. But obviously the big thing is J.K. Rowling is bad because of her views on gender and therefore we shouldn’t read Harry Potter. I just quickly looked at the article [about the current Canadian controversy] before I signed on here, but it seems to fit with everything I write about in my book. I guess the only difference is that this was some sort of walk-in-the-park event with a Harry Potter theme instead of an actual book, but it’s the same sort of thing — like, author is bad according to this, I would say, minority but highly vocal contingency of people, therefore event or book or whatever it is has to be cancelled.

I’m glad you’re pointing it out, because especially in the States, there’s this idea now that “woke” was a thing of the past, or cancel culture, or whatever you want to call it. I think in some ways it is a thing of the past; it’s certainly a thing of the past inside the Oval Office. But if you look at the places where it was first fermented and given life — academia, journalism, and the focus of my book, publishing — it’s not like it has gone away in those spaces. So it’s like, yeah, I find the J.K. Rowling cancelled event to be cartoonishly stupid — in my opinion — but it’s not like I was shocked and thought, “Oh my God, I thought we had moved past woke and cancel culture.”

TH: I mean, we’re a little behind here in Canada as well. But just to stick with one more Canadian example before we dive into some of the American examples, you write in the book about Jordan Peterson in 2020 and how Penguin Random House Canada was about to publish one of his books, and held a town hall on Zoom. You had people weeping on that Zoom call. I know you spoke to some people who were on that call; I have as well. And I should just say Penguin Random House published my last book, and they also distribute this book of yours.

AS: Yeah.

TH: So we’ll just say that. But what did you learn about that moral panic here in Canada?

AS: Yeah, that one was wild. You said crying. Again, I just want to be clear, we’re not speaking hyperbolically or metaphorically — people were literally crying. And there was a town hall held. If you’re unfamiliar with the case, this was for Jordan Peterson’s follow-up book to 12 Rules for Life. I think it was 12 More Rules for Life, or whatever it’s called. People weren’t really protesting the book itself; they were protesting Peterson’s views on gender and other issues. I’ve talked to people who were privy to that controversy, but one of the most interesting people I talked to was a woman who works at Penguin Random House Canada. She’s a woman of colour. She told me she identifies as a feminist. She’s someone who’s been in publishing a while and has really worked to make publishing more diverse and produce better books. She’s clearly attuned to issues of stereotyping.

But her point to me was like, “This has gotten so insane — not just the attempt to cancel an author who was going to be, and has proven to be, highly profitable for us as a business — but to go after a book that itself isn’t even really political.” And she said, “Above all, as a woman of colour on the left, I’m afraid to say we should publish it,” because that’s sort of the chilling atmosphere. She was like, “There seems to be a profound irony at play, because ostensibly this push for better books, more diverse books, is supposed to be benefiting people like me — women of colour, et cetera — and I’m scared shitless to say anything, because people are going to start calling me a TERF sympathizer, or whatever.”

I think that example is really a synecdoche for a lot of the cancel culture stuff as a whole, but especially in publishing, where many of my interview subjects were gay writers, Black writers, people from marginalized identities who work in publishing. And they have had it up to here with this stuff that is, again, ostensibly occurring to help protect, prevent “harm” for people like them.

TH: Just so people understand, you interviewed a ton of people, from presidents of Big Five publishers to literary agents. It was fascinating that nobody would go on the record. There seemed to be such a great amount of fear here. What did you make of that fear? I mean, these are people who have office jobs, who are extremely educated — this is not a group that is in physical danger. Where is this fear coming from?

AS: On the one hand I’ll say I totally get it. I started working on this book in 2020, which I think was peak cancel culture, peak wokeness stuff, after George Floyd’s death. So I understand the fear. I have seen people who have lost jobs, authors who have lost contracts, for not even expressing conservative views, but just not showing sufficient zeal for hyper-progressive views. So I get the fear. I get it.

That said, I was writing this as a grad student who would be approaching the job market in a few years. I wasn’t a tenured professor. As someone who was totally burning my chances with a number of jobs in publishing and academia, I [still] felt a need to write about this and point it out. To then hear someone who’s, say, a vice-president or president of an imprint at a major Big Five publisher, who’s probably making a quarter million dollars a year and actually has power — to hear that they’re scared shitless about having his name attached to what I consider pretty mild criticism of an absolutely horrible turn in publishing? It was kind of infuriating too.

I’d say, for me, writing this book and talking to people — some of the people I talked to on the phone, it was two-hour interviews — my two dominant emotions were frustration at the cowardice of these people. [These are] people who are really discontent with the direction their publishers or agencies have gone, but don’t actually do anything about it, even though some of them have the power to do something. But the other emotion was, I mean, I laughed my ass off a number of times writing this book. Some of the examples are just absolutely preposterous — of what people consider racist or sexist or violent or harmful. This is a truly demented subset of people who are ostensibly on the left. But the fear is real.

One example I talk about in my book … I interviewed someone who, I can’t say their name out of respect, but they’re a very high-profile editor in the world of Big Five publishers. They’re also an award-winning author themselves. And we started talking and getting into this — and again, they knew what the focus of my book was. I sent them literally … I did this research at Cornell, so it was like an IRB-approved form, “This is the focus of my research project,” et cetera, et cetera. And we started talking and I could tell she just got very afraid. Then she ended the interview before we even started talking about anything of consequence. She was just like, “Sorry, I can’t do this. Please delete the recording, make sure it’s deleted, and don’t even mention me in the book.” Then I got a follow-up email from her that was like, “I just want to verify that the recording was deleted.” It’s like, dude, we talked for 90 seconds, there’s nothing on that recording. If you didn’t know any better, you would think I was Glenn Greenwald about to blow the lid off the Edward Snowden story. In reality, I’m just talking about some hypersensitive people who, in my opinion, are doing not-great things to fiction and poetry and stuff. But the fear is real.

My dad was in the military. I grew up pretty working-class, [among] people, for lack of a better word, confronting real problems in their day-to-day lives. To see this level of fear over this? It’s infuriating. But also funny, if you have a dark sense of humour.

TH: There are some really funny moments in the book, and some of your interview subjects, their frustration comes through in really funny ways. There are some really funny quotes that people should read, for sure. Let’s dig into this now — the moral panic idea. What defines a moral panic? How do we know when we’re in one? And how do you know that these phenomena that you’re observing are moral panics?

AS: Generally, a lot of the research that I drew on was from this subfield of sociology called the sociology of moral panics. These are folks who have written extensively about things like the Salem witch trials, who have written about the concern over rock music in the late 20th century, comic books in the 1950s — things that, in hindsight, we can say are moral panics. The generally understood definition of a moral panic is a disproportionate response to a perceived threat. Now, obviously that’s not something you can falsify in a mathematical way. There is a subjective component, which is: Is this a threat or a perceived threat? What is a reasonable response? I found it to be a conceptual framework for what I was seeing going on in publishing, and I try, over the course of my book, to draw analogies to other periods of history that are definitively considered moral panics, to make the case that what is going on in publishing is, to the detached observer, a moral panic.

TH: Some of the responses to these moral panics — which involved a lot of Twitter pile-ons and that kind of online activism — were numeric diversity, or increasing representation of diverse identities. You can certainly see that in bookstores now. Although, as you point out in the book, class has been totally erased from this discussion. You saw a lot of people with diverse identities who came from very comfortable backgrounds benefiting from this phenomenon. But then also, sensitivity readers. We had Kat Rosenfield on the pod a few years back talking about this. How can one person gauge what might offend millions of other people who share their identity group? How does this even work as a profession?

AS: Yeah, I mean it works, you just have to suspend many obvious questions for it to work. Kat’s work is great; I cite some of hers. She had a great piece in Vulture, I think, a number of years ago. She was really one of the early people doing a great job writing about this. But if you’re unfamiliar, basically a sensitivity reader is someone who shares an identity with a character in a novel, or the focus of a nonfiction book. So if I’m, say, a Black dude, I could be a sensitivity reader for a book that has Black characters, whether it’s nonfiction, fiction, or even poetry, or what have you. It’s premised on this idea that there’s something that bounds people of a marginalized community — this idea that, as an African American or as a gay person, I could speak to what would be offensive to this group of people overall.

Now obviously, if your brain is working at full capacity, you would point out, well, hey, I know Black people. I know Black conservatives, I know Black progressives; I know Black people who think wokeness is one of the biggest problems in America, I know Black people who are woke. So that immediately collapses on its head. But that idea has been enforced very stringently in publishing, in large part because the same people who sell their services as sensitivity readers have actually been part of the mob that has gotten books cancelled. In my book, one of the examples I open with is this book Blood Heir — it’s a fantasy novel published by a woman of colour, or was about to be published — and people went after her, accusing it of being racist and so on and so forth. One of the people who went after her was himself a sensitivity reader. Then later his book also got cancelled before publication for ostensibly not being sensitive enough.

But the important point is there’s a very clear overlap — and I do try to name names and point this stuff out in my book — of people fuelling this moral panic of “books are violence, books are harmful,” and then the same people saying, “Hey, if you hire me, then I can ensure that your books are not going to be offensive to African Americans,” or “I can ensure your books are not going to be offensive to gay Americans.” One of the funniest passages in my book is I actually go to a sensitivity reading service, and they list all the identities they specialize in. It gets quite granular. You start off with African Americans, Asian Americans, gay Americans, and then by the end of the list you’re talking about conception via sperm donation and all these more esoteric categories. If you’ve taken an economics course, it does look like an expanding market that’s being incentivized via these very public controversies that have happened to books.

TH: Let’s talk about the money. I had assumed that like most things in publishing, sensitivity reading would be poorly paid. But that is not the case.

AS: Yeah, I think most things in publishing, there’s a broad range. But there’s definitely some sensitivity readers who are doing quite well. I do talk about some specific numbers in my book. But particularly if you’re a sensitivity reader who is [doing media] — there are ones who have been interviewed by The New York Times, by The Washington Post, Katie Couric and stuff — if that’s your branding and your positioning, then you’re going to do well, is my understanding of that.

TH: It made me think, because I write nonfiction. I don’t know if listeners will know this, but nonfiction books are not fact-checked. If you write a nonfiction book and you want to make sure that it’s factually accurate, you have to either fact-check it yourself or hire a fact-checker. I was thinking about the allocation of resources to sensitivity readers as opposed to fact-checkers. Do you have any thoughts on that?

AS: Yeah. I’d say about a quarter of my book just looks at how publishing grapples with questions of class and economic privilege and things like that — which, for the most part [publishing] just doesn’t give a shit about. But that’s an awesome point. One of my favourite snobby pieces I quote was this article, I think it was in Publisher’s Weekly or Writer’s Digest. It was this author, it’s basically a textbook example of virtue signalling. He’s like, “I’ve hired six sensitivity readers for my book to get it right.” And he’s like, “If you’re not hiring them, then you’re doing a disservice to marginalized people.” Then he’s like, “And you better pay them.” Literally the first comment on the article is something like, “Dude, I’m a college dropout who works at a convenience store. I don’t understand how I can afford to pay six sensitivity readers.”

The sad part is everyone on the publishing side understands how this operates and how sensitivity readers do kind of function as disaster insurance. If your book, sadly, gets accused of racism or whatever, it’s much easier to negotiate that space — or even to pre-emptively defend against it — if you put in your acknowledgements, like, “Oh, thank you to all these sensitivity readers.” It’s sending that message that you’re part of the in-crowd, you’re trying to get it right, and so on and so forth. But the practical side of this is like, dude, there are already so many challenges to writing a book, much less actually trying to make it as an author as your main source of income. To now be paying these other people who quite literally have no credentials aside from their identities, and who, like any group of people, disagree on what counts as offensive? It has become, I think, sort of a badge. In the same way having an MFA is a badge for people. It’s a status symbol.

TH: I’ll just read a quote from the book: “Notwithstanding its militant rhetoric, the moral crusade over children’s and YA literature is not a radical alternative to business as usual. It is the latest version of business as usual.” I want to dig into this a little bit further. You talk about the element of self-interest to these panics. You write, “If the literature of the past is too dangerous to teach, school systems will have to turn to contemporary authors. First and foremost, books are commodities. One would have to be wildly naïve to think that presentism has nothing to do with it.” Can you unpack that for us?

AS: I don’t know how nitty-gritty we want to get, but at the end of the day … I used to say this when I would teach English at universities — I’d walk into my class, throw the book on the desk, and I’d be like, “What is that?” People would be like, “It’s a book,” or “a novel,” or whatever. And I’d be like, “Yeah, but first and foremost, it’s a marketplace commodity, in the same way toasters are marketplace commodities.” You have to think about if the end goal is to sell as many copies of a book as possible, well there are multiple ways you can do that. But one — particularly if you’re writing literature with a capital L, like stuff that might not, say, sell in an airport bookstore — people have understood that getting on university syllabi, getting on K–12 syllabi, is a boon.

I’m Zooming into a university course next week — I didn’t do anything to make this happen — but that course is assigning my book, and that’s instantly a hundred dollars in sales. I get a certain percentage of that, in royalties and stuff. If you can think about actually getting on English department syllabi, it’s not just ensuring your book is taught that semester. As we all know, many courses recycle syllabi and books, particularly K–12 schools, which are often struggling financially. If they buy copies of a book for everyone, chances are they’re going to be reusing those copies, year in and year out. So it’s really a great boon.

But basically there’s a problem and the problem is that, particularly in K–12 education, traditional English college courses, it’s very hard to enter the canon. So people like Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, these are people who are taught year after year. Their books continue to be in print because they are so widely taught. A lot of these people, I think, understand this, consciously or not. You can’t just say, “I want me and my friends’ books on the syllabus because we’re trying to make money, we’re trying to build our careers.” But you can say, “Mark Twain is an old dead white guy, and there are too many old dead white guys on the syllabus.” You can say, “So-and-so’s views are out of touch with present values,” and this is the rhetoric they use. Even if they’re being genuine — even if they genuinely believe that there are too many white men, they genuinely believe J.D. Salinger was transphobic, or fill in the blank — at the end of the day, they’re often advocating for their own books to be added to the syllabus. And it’s just like, are we just going to pretend that there’s not some very visible self-interest in this ostensible concern about racism and stuff like that?

TH: It’s interesting that we’re just starting to talk about this now, about how much of 2020 involved that. I wrote a piece about women and cancel culture. When you look at a lot of the cancel culture incidents, a lot of it is driven by women. It’s true, I’m sorry to say. You don’t really get into this a lot, but there is an element of how much of this industry now is women. It’s a lot of women editors. The median person working — I’ve heard you say this on podcasts — is a middle-class white woman living somewhere like Brooklyn.