Tag / resentment

by Edward Champion

On Literary “Influence,” Success, and Resentment

Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi has been taken to task for its alleged plagiarism. But this is really more of a case of commonplace literary influence. The manufactured “controversy” is built on resentment and it’s a waste of everybody’s time.

I decided to read Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi — released this week — on the basis of a controversy that erupted last summer. Conroe had allegedly appropriated the work of Sam Pink. I’ve exposed plagiarists before. I’m always happy to do so again. Plagiarists are great enemies to anyone committed to creativity and originality.

But I’ve compared dozens of passages from Fuccboi against Sam Pink’s work just to be sure. Fuccboi isn’t a plagiarized work. It definitely owes some influence to Sam Pink. But it’s hardly the grand theft that Pink advertised it to be.

Fuccboi is an okay book. Nothing special. Not really all that “fearless” — to use a buzz word that’s been tossed around by the hype machine. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. It just didn’t grab me. I honestly don’t care enough about the book one way or the other to write an expansive opinion.

The Conroe-Pink controversy is actually something far more cliched than an act of plagiarism. It’s a case where someone who deserves more success complains about someone who actually has success. A tale as old as time, except with an eager social media poised to pounce on the key players.

This was something we saw with the controversies that have plagued Kristen Roupenian. Roupenian had great success with her short story, “Cat Person,” which appeared in The New Yorker and went viral. She then netted a $1.2 million advance and an HBO development deal with her collection, You Know You Want This. And the weirdest thing about the reviews is that male reviewers were largely okay with the book while women went ballistic. Why? Because they were resentful. They were the ones who deserved all the gravy! In The Washington Post, Emily Gould devoted most of her “review” complaining about Roupenian’s success, even writing, “I felt absolutely enraged by its weaknesses.” Enraged? You’re just angry because you didn’t land the big book deal. Then, last summer, Slate stepped into the manufactured media smackdown and published an essay from Alexis Nowicki pointing to certain details that Roupenian had inadvertently plucked from her life. Turns out that Roupenian met up with a man who had a much younger girlfriend (Nowicki). She heard some of the details and used her imagination to jump off from them with “Cat Person.”

Now this was hardly Wallace Stegner plucking verbatim from Mary Hallock Foote’s letters in Angle of Repose. But apparently it was enough to enrage Nowicki. Nowicki emailed Roupenian and Roupenian replied with a considerate note of apology.

But come on now. As Lauren Groff tweeted in response to the Roupenian social media uproar, “I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets.”

Which brings us back to Conroe and Pink.

On August 15, 2021, Sam Pink published a blog post, claiming that Conroe completely stole his style and publishing correspondence between him and Conroe. “You’ll see the influence,” wrote Conroe to Pink. “My only hope is you won’t feel it to be flagrant. That you’ll view it as flattery. As gratitude. People go around with this idea of originality, where they tryna front like they got no influences. My shit is, fkn draw from everything you fuck with most. But then shout out who you fuck with. Pay homage to the Ogs.”

But Pink certainly didn’t see Conroe’s email that way. In his post, Pink wrote, “In addition to him admitting it, there is similar slang in the book, it’s divided in seasons like garbage times, the opening is very similar to garbage times, he even uses the trick from person where a word scrolls through his head.”

Conroe’s novel certainly has a loose nod to the structure of Sam Pink’s The Garbage Times. Both novels open in January. Like Pink, Conroe is fond of using truncated and often verbless one-sentence paragraphs to generate reading momentum. And he did indeed “use the trick” from Person.

But is this outright plagiarism? On the level of Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams ripping off Marvin Gaye? No. Anyone who reads knows damned well that authors test out their own spins on other author’s stylistic tricks. Pink himself is no exception.

In The Garbage Times, Pink shows, to my mind, a clear debt to Martin Amis by including a ruffian named Keith — a wastrel with “slicked-back hair and a boiled-looking face” and “tiny busted teeth.” Amis, of course, has slicked-back hair, has had dentition issues, and, of course, included a memorable scoundrel named Keith Talent in his very underappreciated novel, London Fields. Amis’s Keith wears a silver leather jacket. Pink’s Keith wears a leather trenchcoat. Amis’s characters in London Fields smoke half-cigarettes and Pink’s Keith also smokes a half-cigarette. Should Amis raise a stink against Sam Pink? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Especially for a man of his age and renown.

This is really about resentment.

And, look, I get it. I’m not a jealous or a competitive person. But during moments in my life when I have felt devalued and hopeless, I have become pissed off when mediocre “talents” who have hurt me in monstrous ways go on to have success. A pair of two-bit lowlifes in the audio drama world who led a vicious campaign to defame me get their audio drama adapted into an awful Netflix TV show? What the fuck? It’s only human to feel upset when your hard and careful work is devalued and underappreciated and someone else comes along and reaps all the success and riches that were seemingly denied you.

But moments like this are incredibly rare for me — usually arriving at the worst and most depressing moments of my life. I’m too busy focusing on getting better at my craft. That’s what I can control. I have no sway whatsoever over who gets selected to shoot into the stratosphere. And I try not to pay too much attention to it. It’s a waste of time and energy.

Sam Pink is a talented novelist who should be more widely read. Personally I feel that he has far greater talent than Conroe. And it’s criminal that he didn’t land the coveted $200,000 publishing deal.

But it’s a waste of time to let someone who is successful — especially someone who isn’t all that talented — live rent-free in your head.

by Edward Champion

The Droppers, the Ghosters, and the Grifters

An examination of friendship, pointing to several cases where admirers of my work turned into fierce rivals.

I am blessed to have friends who are far more brilliant than I am. I am fiercely loyal to all of my friends. And if my friends happen to toil in a creative field like me, then the admiration I have for their work, which is always honest and never false, only helps to seal the deal. But I am also someone who has stood out simply for being who I am. I try not to second-guess life. The universe could throw you an unanticipated curveball tomorrow. Thus, it is better to be instinctive and decisive and expressive and idiosyncratic and true to who you are. Still, people like me tend to attract a particular form of fawning admirer — usually a younger man on the make — who eventually turns into a peculiar rival.

They start off as fans in apparent awe of my talent. I am hopelessly confused but grateful. And I like them. For I am a congenial wiseacre who tends to be very fond of people and deeply curious about them. My curiosity in them greatly exceeds any interest I have in myself. I usually sense that someone who admires me and who reaches out is probably going places or that they are certainly on their way somewhere. And I spend months or years steering our dynamic towards one in which they are not so much acolytes, but creative and human peers. Being a self-effacing type, I have always felt strange being placed in the role of outlier sage. Thankfully, that happens less often these days.

I hedge my bets against this unanticipated game of impostor syndrome by expressing honesty and vulnerability and gentle truth about my life so that they understand that I am highly fallible. I would rather be a human being than a cult leader.

There comes some point in which they achieve some hard-won success and I congratulate them and I am never jealous but always in admiration. But the fame floats to their head much like a hot air balloon drifting over wine country. And the relationship swiftly careens into a spectacle. That’s when they drop me. That’s when they finally recognize the truth that I’ve known all along: that they are better equipped for achievement than me. That they can negotiate the false metric of fans and gigs and hosannas simply because they relish the guise of being a somebody who others look up to and I am more interested in admiring other people without a comparative yardstick. They are better at playing the game of ingratiation and sucking up and flattering other people — as if frangible souls who happen to be in the public eye are ridiculous superheroes being paraded and marketed before a horde of rabid zealots bedecked in cosplay. Maybe this was always their game with me, but I don’t look back. Maybe they recognized that I was the type of man who would quickly puncture their outsize estimation by being real and they needed to meet me for their hubris to swell.

1. The Ambitious Writer: He started off publishing chapbooks at very small presses, but he was hungry for attention. His ambition was limitless and this was certainly reflected in the massive and awe-inspiring volumes he published years later. I didn’t recognize how voracious he was when he first contacted me. But back then, I was being bombarded by everyone. I misconstrued his hunger to be hyperbole. He landed press and attention by starting feuds with other literary people. But before he did any of this, he contacted me with a fawning email, telling me that I was one of the most important voices writing about books. A few years later, I ran into him at an event and introduced myself. And he said nothing and stared right through me. As if I was an eidolon. Not even a friendly hello. What a stark contrast from the obsequious email from only a few years before! I couldn’t find it within me to read his books until years had passed and one friend who reads him told me that he didn’t have anybody else to discuss his books with (being a good friend, I obliged by reading the ambitious writer’s work). Another friend told me of his phone calls with the ambitious writer and this allowed me to see from a distance that this guy was human. Still, this isn’t someone who I would go out of my way to talk with. Far better to keep him at a distance so that I can read his books without prejudice.

2. The Fawning Podcaster: For many years, he ran a very smart podcast on a niche psychogeography topic that was unlike anything else out there. So he had my admiration already. But he also thought that I was terrific and even wrote a piece in which he didn’t understand why I wasn’t a huge star. So I wrote him an appreciative note and opened myself up slightly. I sent listeners to his podcast. And that was when he suddenly wished to have nothing to do with me. Now I am wondering if what he had to say about me had any genuine validity. I have stopped listening to his podcast. And I haven’t communicated with him in any way for many years.

3. The Chicken Farmer: On TikTok, there was a lonely man who lived with chickens who became a huge fan of my commentaries. Being an affable sort, I sincerely expressed my empathy for his situation and marveled over the fact that he expressed such affection for his chickens. Then, out of the blue, he left a number of vituperative comments on my feed, claiming that I wasn’t very intelligent and so forth. And I was forced to block him. What changed? Could it be that he resented me for taking the time out of my life to offer him solace and interest? There was no warning for any of this. I never said an unkind word about him.

4. The Admiring Commentator: I had read her work for years and admired it. Then we met. We became friends in San Francisco, meeting regularly to write together in coffeehouses. We had many hilarious and honest conversations. Perhaps my mistake was not letting her more into my life. But I’ve talked with other people she’s known and she’s done the same thing to them. She seemed convinced at one point that I was a one-in-a-million voice. At one point, when a major development rightly landed in her lap (she is incredibly smart and ferociously talented), I delivered a protective monologue urging her to be careful about having her writing voice compromised in any way and declaring that she was a vital writing voice. It’s not that I didn’t think she couldn’t handle herself. It’s that I wanted to see her blossom and I knew certain inside information about the editors behind the operation. Perhaps I overstepped. One day, she seemed to disregard me. She offered a writing job to a friend as I was sitting right there, never once considering that I might be in need of work. I was hurt. There are more discreet ways to handle an offer like this. When I went to revisit San Francisco after several years of living in New York and I met up with her, I was pushed to the side, feeling like an afterthought rather than a human being and I knew the friendship was over. But I do know that she pushes many people she befriends away until they are not useful to her. I haven’t communicated with her since.

5. The Competitive Blogger: I am not competitive with anyone other than myself. And when this blogger started out, he fawned over me. I hooked him up with publicist contacts and told him how he could get review copies and gave him several suggestions on how he could become a major literary website. Like all my other admirers, I got the gist that I was a “vital voice” and so forth. And then one day, he turned on me and turned into a wild egomaniac. Not just to me, but to friends who I had introduced to him. He started a literary criticism outlet. I sent a few people his way. He then decided that he was better than me and took on the practice of exploiting these people, who later came back to me. And I was forced to apologize to my friends for the competitive blogger’s conduct and buy them many beers.

* * *

These are only five exemplars of an underlying pattern. There are dozens more. The common element is me. So I clearly must be the problem. There must be some fatal flaw within me that allowed these relationships to veer into the dynamics I have described. It’s quite possible that I simply don’t possess any particular draw that allows a reader or a listener of my work to stick around for the long haul.

I have found, of late, that I am better at keeping friends. But that is only because I have never allowed my friendship to be defined by the art that I make. I usually never mention what I do. I am more keen on listening. I am not so in need of approval, as so many other writers are, to require constant validation for my work. If I send anything on, I do so because I know the friend is going to be entertained by that side of me. Or it may be referencing something we’re talking about and this allows me not to repeat myself. Or, if the friend is a fellow writer, I know that I can trust that friend to rake me across the coals, tell me what’s wrong, and not bullshit me.

But I do need to be validated as a person sometimes. And I find that, on the whole, people in the media world often make the worst friends. If your default position in life is admiration for a slice of someone rather than an appreciation of his totality, warts and all, then I think you’re doing friendship very wrong.

by Edward Champion

On the Problems with Selective Empathy and the Promise of Reintegration

Empathy is needed in our age more than ever. But even when we call for more of it, empathy is too often selectively applied. This essay argues for more gently honest dialogues and a culture that is more driven by rehabilitation rather than stigmatization.

There are people who have seriously wronged me and I have said nothing. I don’t give them a whit of my thoughts and I do everything in my power to avoid running into them, even as I leave the door open for reconciliation if they want to approach me and seek amends. That is the least we can do as human beings. It is a focus that took me five years to figure out. And I’m a lot happier and more creative as a result.

But every now and then, you find out about someone who is still unhealthily fixated on you. There is someone online who has been obsessed with me now for a good nine years. Nine years. It’s almost as if she thinks we were married or something, but I’ve never met her and I’ve had a grand total of two interactions with her.

Even so, I would rather be honest about my inadequacies rather than bask in the sham panacea of feeling better about myself. The truth of the matter is that, while I have made great strides in finding more compassion for people, I am clearly not extending enough unconditional empathy in my life. Rather than holding grudges, I simply erase people who have hurt me from my existence. I do this because to dwell on them further is to invite more anger I don’t need into my life. I view this as a great moral failure and I am hoping to make greater strides in being more understanding towards other perspectives. Some may argue that there is nothing wrong with avoiding toxic people and there is certainly some truth to this. You don’t want to surround yourself with people who belittle you. On the other hand, the definition of “toxic” has become highly malleable in recent years. We are more content to write someone off over a minor disagreement in opinion rather than an assiduous assessment of what our actual relationship is and could be with another person.

The person who is obsessed with me doesn’t seem to be happy. I keep waiting for her to stop being obsessed with me. For goodness sake, when do you let something go? It’s clear from an objective analysis that she hasn’t done much with her life and that she has creative aspirations that she hasn’t tried to pursue (or, if she has, it didn’t go as planned; Ed, you’ve been there; so what’s with the paralysis?). So I suspect that’s one of the reasons she’s projecting her wanton fury onto me. She keeps publicly comparing me to the likes of Bill Cosby, Alan Dershowitz, and other terrible people with whom I clearly share no qualities. My response has been to stay resolutely silent and keep her blocked on all social media. I suppose she’s the Annie Wilkes to my Paul Sheldon. I suppose that I should count myself fortunate that I haven’t been in a car accident in her neighborhood.

I really don’t comprehend this kind of obsessive jealousy. But if you’re actively busting your hump on the creative front and being transparent about your process to provide help and inspiration to others, it is an inevitable and unfortunate reality. Hate and jealousy tends to bubble up from people who aren’t doing anything with their lives. We rarely talk of thwarted ambitions and the way in which people project their own failures onto others rather than taking the time to see how they can make their lives happen. The jealous grudgeholder looks at some figure who is actively seizing the reins with originality, good will, and a solid work ethic and perceives weird opportunities to resent the target and tear him down. This is to be distinguished from reasonable criticism, which allows an audience to thoughtfully comprehend another person’s work and is often quite useful, but should never be taken personally.

I suppose I’m thinking about this person because there is a part of me who wants to empathize with her crazed zeal and redress this weird grievance she has with me, even as I simultaneously recognize that doing so may not be good for my wellbeing and will probably not result in anything more than further grief on my end and renewed obsession from her. There’s also the question of whether I have the emotional energy to fully empathize with her position and provide the appropriate closure for both of us. Dylan Morran has a podcast called Conversations with People Who Hate Me in which he talks with people who have made him the object of their anger. Even though I greatly commend his efforts to reach out to his enemies, I still think that Morran isn’t being entirely transparent about the selective manner in which he practices his professed empathy. Because that’s the thing. Empathy isn’t just about listening to your enemy. It’s about finding the visceral space inside you to truly feel and understand your enemy’s perspective. You can’t extend an olive branch through a pro forma gesture. You really have to demonstrate that you genuinely care.

The excellent British TV series, Back to Life, written by Daisy Haggard and Laura Solon, is one of the few recent offerings that deals with the double-edged sword of trying to empathize with someone who has committed a monstrous act. Miri Matteson (played by Haggard) has served an eighteen year prison sentence for murdering one of her best friends and returns to her small town in Kent to rebuild her life and find a second chance. The show is brilliant in the way that it doesn’t dwell specifically on Miri’s crime, but rather Miri’s life as it is now. The town vandalizes her parents’ home, where she is staying. She manages to land a job at a fish and chips place gentrifying the neighborhood (a beautifully subtle metaphor for the need to accept change), but a brick is thrown through the window during one of her shifts.

All this leaves the audience contending with a vital moral question. Does anyone deserve such treatment? If a transgressor has done her time and is peacefully trying to forge a stable life, shouldn’t we grant the transgressor that opportunity? The show counterbalances Miri’s struggles to readjust with benevolent gestures from a neighbor who is unfamiliar with Miri’s past, but who accepts Miri on her own terms, even going to the trouble of fixing her childhood swing in the dead of night and extending decency. The show suggests, through humor and a nimble attentiveness to behavior, that there is a certain human strength that emerges from simply accepting someone on their own present terms. Moreover, as the truth of Miri’s past becomes more dominantly recognized in the present, we are forced to consider the question of how prohibiting a transgressor from having a second chance may cause the transgressor to repeat the old patterns. Sure, nobody owes anyone a second chance. But what great possibilities and connections are we denying by insisting that someone’s transgressive nature is permanent? The idea of not giving a transgressor a second chance used to be a conservative staple, but now it has become increasingly practiced by ostensible liberals.

The criminologist John Braithwaite has written a number of very useful volumes on restorative justice — particularly, Crime, Shame, and Reintegration, in which he points to many statistics where disintegrative shaming — meaning the permanent stigmatization of someone who has transgressed — often leads to recidivism. Whereas reintegrative shaming, meaning a period of shaming followed by forgiveness and a slow acceptance of the transgressor back into a community (rather than making him an outcast), usually results in greater peace. Among Braithwaite’s many examples is the fact that American offenders are more than twenty times as likely to be incarcerated as Japanese offenders. The difference is that Japan takes on the shame as a collective community rather than passing the shame onto the individual.

So if reintegration works better than shaming, why then can I not find it within me to settle the dispute with the person who is obsessed with me? Obviously, Braithwaite, writing in 1989, could not anticipate the rise of social media weaponized to destroy lives and careers. He could not anticipate how instant spurts of 280 character tweets result in people forming cartoonish impressions about people, such as Sady Doyle falsely accusing opinion writer Liz Bruenig last week of threats without producing a shred of evidence. What rational person can blame Bruenig for her response? Most people, faced with the mania of impressions and accusations, just want to be left alone. (The above screenshot is from a tweet that Bruenig deleted. To offer full disclosure, Doyle has also lied about and libeled me, as well as some of my friends. But I also understand from people who know her that she is suffering from mental health problems. My hope for her, despite the hurt she caused me and the translucent relish she took in meting it out, is that people close to her can get her the help and the treatment she clearly needs so that she doesn’t have to behave like this again.)

Even when we talk about the need for more empathy, you can’t escape the fact that it will always be selectively and individually applied. I’m willing to own up to my own flaws on this front. But the people who have advanced careers through this philosophical position don’t seem to have the same ability. After all, they have books to sell rather than hearts to extend. Five years ago, Jon Ronson wrote a book called So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed?. While Ronson’s volume was certainly progressive in the way that it asked us to consider the lives of people who had been hounded by the hordes, the problem with Ronson is that he can only perceive disproportionate punishment with “people who did virtually nothing wrong.” I’ve read and listened to a lot of Ronson interviews and I’ve yet to find a case where he has shown willingness to extend true empathy to people who have done something wrong and who want to make their lives better. The whole point of justice is to allow for rehabilitation and reintegration. While Ronson demonstrated how perceived transgressors suffered undue hardship, you can’t even begin to have a conversation like this until you consider how people who have been “canceled” live out their lives. Nobody’s life ends just because you decided to wipe him away from your windshield.

Perhaps we do have some collective obligation to reach out when it’s difficult. I recently settled a dispute with someone who had falsely and belligerently accused me of behavior that I never committed in a support group. Instead of getting angry with him, I took a deep breath and wrote a very careful message with him pointing out that I understood his feelings and that I had been carefully listening to him the entire time while also declaring that I genuinely cared for him and refused to feel angry towards him. He then sent a message to me apologizing for his previous message and declaring me a “good guy.” We were able to patch it up, but that’s only because we had actually met face to face and had taken a little bit of time to know each other.

Social media, despite its professed “social” qualities, doesn’t allow us that pivotal face-to-face contact. It doesn’t allow us to better understand another person’s motivations and perspective and find common points of empathy. It is a common truth that most disputes can be settled easily in person. But we have increasingly shifted to an age in which people pine for the easier method of erasing someone from existence. It is far easier to stigmatize someone if we have never gone to the trouble to know them. But it also reduces complex human beings into little more than one-dimensional transactional vessels. One can look no further than the rise of ghosting and people writing others off on flimsy pretext if you have the misfortune of being single in the metropolitan New York area.

The question we now face is whether reintegration as a virtue for a better and happier world that allows more people opportunities to live positive lives overshadowing their worst mistakes is something that we can implement in an age driven by castigatory social media. It’s certainly a tough sell. But I also recognize that, as more data about individuals becomes increasingly public and more past episodes are dredged into the bright xenon lights of public opinion, we’re going to need to find more ways of embracing this necessary difficulty. It isn’t feasible to ask anyone to live up to an impossible virtue. But there is always something very beautiful in learning how to empathize with someone once we have come to understand why they committed their worst mistakes and once we see that they, like us, are willing to change.