Keep it for someone who cares
THERE’S a nifty online service that allows you to talk about blog posts, news stories, tweets and Facebook updates that offend you without sending the person who wrote the wretched article any inadvertent benefit from your attention.
It’s called donotlink.com. Use it the next time you’re moved to apoplexy because someone has, once again, called Africa a country, asked why a woman’s surname is not the same as her husband’s, gotten mixed up about the difference between love and sin, or lashed out with a tirade against negative reviews of his or her unreadable book.
I wish a similar service existed for the print media. I could then reveal the details of a recent campaign to promote a selfpublished memoir of abuse and addiction without fear of causing people to consider buying it. There are enough self-published memoirs in the world to make a pile as high as Kilimanjaro. What we need to do, with as much vigilance as possible, is avoid encouraging their multiplication.
Of course, obscurity is the greatest threat to writers, to paraphrase publishing futurist Tim O’Reilly, so creative efforts to promote books in new ways are not necessarily a bad thing.
But if on Monday the mysterious grey box you receive contains a seed bar, Tuesday’s has a three-dimensional cut-out of a toilet stall in it, Wednesday’s contains a condom and Thursday’s a Brillo pad, then on Friday you had better get something exceptional, because (a) the PR company that concocted the crass and gimmicky campaign has freighted their client with treble the normal amount of scepticism that journalists have towards items pushed under their noses, and (b) it always only comes down to how good the writing is.
Instead of something exceptional, on Friday a book arrives that smells like freshly set wood glue and is inscribed, “I hope you find my life story inspiring.”
Unfortunately, we don’t. Abuse and addiction memoirs comprise their own wellgrooved genres. We have seen this before.
Undoubtedly the writer of the book suf-
It’s a ghastly sign of self-absorption
fered trauma of all descriptions before coming triumphantly into the light, but there is one malady he failed to shake, a commonly occurring plague among people who labour, faces aglow, over keyboard and screen. To wit, the cancer of narcissism.
Woody Allen said 80% of success was showing up. Not so among the legion of scribes: 80% of writing is showing off. Books like the one that arrived on Friday remind me of nothing so much as the medals that festoon a dictator’s uniform. He’s pinned them there in an act of magical thinking, as if possessing them is the same as meriting them. Similarly, having a book is often for display purposes only, even if its author doesn’t understand this. To him, it’s a noble projection of self-fulfilment. To us, it’s a ghastly sign of self-absorption, practically sociopathic.
“I hope you find my life story inspiring.” Who says that? Far too many petty-tyrant writers.
It’s not inspiring, it’s boring. Put it on donotread.com.