internalize

Release the files.

Lately, my thoughts return to I’m the Girl in ways I’ve wanted to talk about but did not feel was entirely appropriate, as I don’t want to be misconstrued as attempting to leverage the latest Epstein news into a sell. The counter to that, I suppose, would be that by writing and publishing I’m the Girl in the first place, I already have. But a connection made unavoidable does not permit every relevant moment exploitable, and caution is the side I tend to err on.

The truth is, I often wish I had the freedom as an author to more explicitly post-mort the publication of I’m the Girl because certain responses to that book from supposed allied perspectives were so challenging to metabolize, they ended up upending and expanding my understanding of victim-blaming and what our collective complicity continues to pave the way for. This, after Cracked Up to Be, Some Girls Are, and All the Rage. This, after Sadie. This, when I thought I already knew. What sits at the heart of this desire to share feels like it might be worth something in this present moment, though, so I will try to do my best from inside these lines.

I’m the Girl was meant to contribute to the larger conversation about rape culture, about how we place the burden of responsibility for sexual violence on its victims and survivors through the warped lens of perfect victimhood. Justice is a non-starter when the standard of behavior we hold abused girls to frequently absolves or appoints the advantage to their abuser. It was about grooming, about patriarchy, about class, about power, about the ways in which sexuality is and can be weaponized among many other branches of the same rotten tree. It was heavy and hard and shattering to write, but it felt necessary. I have never made myself more publicly vulnerable for one of my books for reasons I still do not think were right, but I remember why I thought I needed to, and who I was doing it for, and that still means something to me.

When you write a book that is so intensely in conversation with this kind of subject matter, the response it generates then, too, becomes a part of that conversation. As an author, I’m not supposed to ‘see’ them, but I do, and what I turn from for the sake of community boundaries still faces the world, still has an impact all its own.

My objective in writing it was to make people care about a girl in a space they’d have nothing to lose by doing so, with the knowledge that I was bound to fail. It was holding that knowledge alongside the reality that inspired it. Because Georgia’s story is so excavated from and built upon a very deep well of research, it became difficult for me to separate the character some readers call a stupid bitch from the girls and women who informed her. It was hard to hold responses that weaponized Georgia’s naivety, lesbianism, and experiences of grooming and abuse against her after reading about lived-experiences just like hers. Before I’m the Girl released, I thought I would be able to absorb it by virtue of having been an author for so many years, but by the time it came out I was struggling desperately with the idea of a girl like Georgia being put in the direct path of those viewpoints and feeling worthless as a consequence, instead of seen. I sometimes wondered if I had inflicted a wound, or the book was a carrier of the very disease it was railing against. These feelings influenced Greetings from Sunny Los Angeles, which, in many ways, was an exploration of that very unsparing perception.

While I’m the Girl is about Epstein, it is also, critically, a response to Sadie. Sadie is the book that broke containment, the revenge story with the irresistibly commercial podcast hook. I’m grateful to everyone who counts themselves among my readership, but before Sadie, I think it’s fair to say I had a modest audience that was locked into the unlikable protagonists in support of the overall thesis of their narratives: that they were worthy of love not in spite of who they were and how they behaved, but because of it. Those stories were attuned to that audience and were always relatively successful in meeting their expectations. The privilege of having a book like Sadie positioned in such a way it expands your reach is that it can shift the balance of those expectations and as such, transforms your understanding of your own work. This can be a gift that encourages creative growth—even if it takes you farther from meeting the expectations that fostered the circumstances that encouraged it.

It wasn’t until The Project that I realized Sadie herself had managed to achieve angel status, and that was something I contemplated for a long time. No more or less raw-boned than the protagonists that preceded her, and the ones that came after, it seemed there was nothing Sadie could do that was wrong because she would pay for it in the end. Her death, for some—not all—made that difference. I love Sadie fiercely for the mirror she holds up to the world, but also for the mirror she held up to me: if she had been honed from a series of unpalatable female narrators into what would become my most palatable, I wanted to explore the implications, and the ramifications of that. It did not feel right, or responsible, to have a body of work that culminated in such a suggestion, but rather challenged it and reinforced the value of each respective story, and the girl at the center of them. I would not have been able to write these books without the continual interrogation of myself and my novels, before, during, and after their releases.

Georgia was born of that kind of interrogation. A girl so painfully naive, and selfish and self-involved, and so desperate to be liked and validated, she is a prime target to be groomed and exploited by the book’s Epstein avatar. Georgia is innocent, and her innocence is a mirror reflecting a deeply guilty world. I’m the Girl is my favorite of my YA books and the most consequential of my career. There is nothing in it I do not stand by. The responses she engenders from the readers she was written for, those readers who have been her or hold space for her, further affirm my choices. But part of that exchange, I think, is how acutely I continue to feel the reactions to it that are so entrenched in the misogyny that inspired her story. (And I trust I do not have differentiate those from general reviews. I am not talking about people who simply do not like the book.) I will always feel it because so would she. I should always feel it because so would she.

With the news of late, I am reminded.

I think of the public feasting on and chanting the names on Epstein’s list, names that their victims and survivors have for years been screaming. I think of how many people want the edification of a triumphant narrative arc they long participated in denying these brave women, who at the time were children. The NYTBR reports a moment in Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, where she begs readers not to stop reading by “acknowledging the cumulative effect of her trauma reel.” What justifies a world where victims must beg forgiveness or apologize for or hold the shame of their abuser’s actions?

Imagine a culture still so anchored by victim-blaming the most you can hope for is that the public somehow ends up hating your abuser more than they ever hated you. Consider that all of these current revelations were heavily dependent on the tide of public opinion turning against Epstein’s sick fuck friends more than believing and supporting his victims the times they repeatedly begged us to. While I believe in and support Epstein’s victims and hope they get the justice they have so tirelessly fought for on behalf of themselves, each other, and the girls everywhere who have gone through something similar, it should have never been this way and it should never again be this way. Men like Epstein are enabled not only by their connections to power, they are upheld by our subtle and overt condemnations of their victims, who were stupid, who asked for it, who should have known better than to drink too much or dress that way. Filtering victim-blaming rhetoric through the lens of likability or fiction or pop culture or casual conversation does not change the nature of what it is and what it becomes complicit in, and that too, deserves a reckoning.

Last month, Kat Tenbarge of Spitfire News and several of her colleagues posted “a call to improve how journalists and content creators talk about violence and abuse” and shared a list of guidelines for survivor storytelling “that aim to guide ethical reporting and dialogue about power-based violence.” You can read them here. I was struck by how easily many of them can be modified and employed outside the work of journalism, within the larger field of writing, and to check in with ourselves and with each other on a personal and community level. We are not always aware of who our words might inadvertently condemn, whose actions they uphold, and who they fail to support, and it is always worth questioning. While I am long past the thought and the feelings that I should take responsibility for those who use my books to platform misogynistic and violent perspectives, I do feel in this moment that I have an opportunity to use my platform to invite you to join me in making an even greater commitment to how we engage with victim and survivor stories, wherever we encounter them—in real life or on the page.

Buy Virginia Giuffre’s memoir.