Yellowface

Fine. Here’s how I really felt, when things came down to it.

At Yale, I once dated a graduate student from the philosophy department who did population ethics. […] Some of his arguments were a little extreme—he didn’t think, for instance, that there is any moral obligation to follow wills of the deceased if there is an overriding interest in redistributing wealth elsewhere, or that there are strong moral objections to using cemetery grounds for, say, housing for the poor. The general theme of his research was under what circumstances someone counts as a moral agent that deserves consideration. I didn’t understand much of his work, but his central argument was quite compelling: we owe nothing to the dead.

Especially when the dead are thieves and liars, too.

And fuck it, I’ll just say it: taking Athena’s manuscript felt like reparations, payback for the things that Athena took from me.

I have to steel myself before I walk through the doors. My publisher for Over the Sycamore set up a “multi-city” bookstore tour for me, but each store I visited never had an audience of more than ten people. And it is painful, truly painful, to struggle through a reading and Q&A when people keep leaving in the middle of your sentences. It’s even worse when the store manager hovers and makes awkward small talk about how it’s probably because it’s the holidays, and people are busy shopping, and they didn’t have quite enough time to advertise that the attendance numbers were so low. After the second stop I wanted to call it quits, but it’s more humiliating to cancel a book tour altogether than to struggle through it, minute by minute, your heart sinking the entire time as you realize your irrelevance, your foolishness to ever hope.

I’ve put on a stiff upper lip in public, but Geoff’s Twitter antics rattled me more than I let on. Athena Liu’s Ghost. A grotesque choice of name; surely chosen to surprise and provoke, but there’s more truth to it than even Geoff knows. Athena’s ghost has anchored itself to me; it hovers over my shoulder, whispering in my ear every waking moment of the day.

It's maddening. These days I’ve started dreading the thought of trying to write, because I can’t write without thinking of her. Then, of course, my thoughts inevitably spiral beyond the writing to the memories: the final night, the pancakes, the gurgling sounds she made as she thrashed against the floor.

I thought I’d gotten over her death. I was doing so well mentally. I was in a good space. I was fine.

Until she returned.

But isn’t that what ghosts do?

But enter professional publishing, and suddenly writing is a matter of professional jealousies, obscure marketing budgets, and advances that don’t measure up to those of your peers. Editors go in and mess around with your words, your vision. Marketing and publicity make you distill hundreds of pages of careful, nuanced reflection into cute, tweet-size talking points. Readers inflict their own expectations, not just on the story, but on your politics, your philosophy, your stance on all things ethical. You, not your writing, become the product […]

And once you’re writing for the market, it doesn’t matter what stories are burning inside you. It matters what audiences want to see, and no one cares about the inner musings of a plain, straight, white girl from Philly. They want the new and exotic, the diverse, and if I want to stay afloat, that’s what I have to give them.

But as I dig into the past, I find myself lingering on good memories, too. There are more of them than I realized. I haven’t let myself dwell on college for so long, but once I scratch the surface, it all comes bubbling to the fore. Starbucks every Tuesday after our Women in Victorian Lit seminar […] Nights at slam poetry events during which we’d sipped ginger beers and giggled at the performers, who were not real poets, and who would one day certainly grow out of this nonsense. A Les Mis sing-along party at a drama major’s apartment […]

As I transcribe all of this, I wonder if our friendship had indeed been as strained as I’d perceived it. Was that jealous tension always there? Were we rivals from the start? Or had I, in the throes of my insecurity, projected it all against Athena?

It’s hard for me to really feel sorry for Geoff. This is, after all, the same man who once threatened to leak nudes of Athena on Reddit if she didn’t back him up against a Locus reviewer. But I can see the truth in his eyes, the pain. Athena always thought that what she did was a gift. A distillation of trauma into something eternal. Give me your bruises and hurts, she told us, and I will return to you a diamond. Only she never cared that once the art was made, once the personal became spectacle, the pain was still there.

But the normal methods of dispelling ghosts, the ones that worked in all the stories, seem insufficient. I doubt Athena will be happy with offerings of food, incense, or burnt paper. Which isn’t to say I don’t try. Deep down I know its stupid, but I’m desperate enough to hope the rituals might at least calm my mind. I order incense sticks on Amazon and kung pao chicken from Kitchen No. 1 and place both before a framed photo of Athena, but all it does is stink up my apartment. I print paper cutouts of the things I imagine Athena could want in the underworld—stacks of money, a lavish apartment, the entire IKEA catalogue—and light them up with a match, but that only sets off the fire alarm, which pisses off my neighbors and lands me with a hefty fine.