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What We Lose When We Tell False Histories
Or: I wrote a whole book about a famous sex worker and of course no one wants to publish it
Quick update: I ended up just publishing the book. You can get a Real Copy or an ebook through Amazon (barf) or you can just download it from my website. I did it in a fugue state so it’s deeply imperfect but I just wanted it to be out there so that when people email me (which they do almost weekly) about it, there’s a link.
First, here’s a story.
Almost four years ago, I was approached by an academic press who wanted me to write something. I pitched a book and then signed a contract to write a book about a woman who lived in Seattle around the turn of the 20th century. I spent the next three years in weird archival spaces until the pandemic closed them all down and, at the end, I had a book that I was pretty proud of.
The entire idea of the book was to dive into some of the popular stories told about a woman whose life was fascinating — but had been completely mischaracterized by a gentleman “historian” with a known flair for “exaggerating” and also just making shit up out of whole cloth because really, why bother telling the truth if the made-up story is sexier?
Once I was finished with the book, the publisher cancelled my contract because — and this is the reason that they gave—there wasn’t enough previous publication on my subject, and thus, the book could not be factually verified.
To summarize, I wrote a book paring back the layers of mythology around a historically-significant individual but, because this individual had only been the subject of fantastical mythology, they didn’t want to publish the book.
