Would You Have Published This Chapter?
Hello.
Have you heard about “Sensitivity Readers?” These are paid consultants whom publishers and editors have lately been using to read manuscripts — books in progress — and alert the clients if, in their opinion, the writer might be stepping over a line, vis a vis, say, cultural appropriation or insensitivity to physical handicaps, or whatever.
Yeah, I hate this. Here are people who are hired to be oversensitive and easily offended. And you ignore them at your own risk and liability. What can go wrong?
Adam Szetela does not love this either. He is the author of “That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing.” Szetela correctly feels that the biggest threat to free speech in literature comes from the right, which keeps trying to ban “woke” books they don’t like from school curricula and libraries and such. But Szetela reserves plenty of criticism for these new lefty vigilantes, the publishing police, who, at least in a sense, are even more extreme. They want to affect the very words that are published, not just to whom those words are marketed. (This trend sometimes get in the news, to some controversy. A couple of years ago, a cowed publisher removed every use of the word “fat” from old Roald Dahl’s novels.)
This is a sticky arena and I’m not going to wade into it. You may be in favor of sissypants editing, and more power to you. I am just just going to tell you about the chapter in my first book that NEVER WOULD HAVE SURVIVED A SENSITIVITY COP today. In fact, I am going to publish that chapter, in toto, below. I will disclose to you that after the book came out, I asked my publisher why he had allowed it in. He said: “You know, I was going to talk to you about that, but I forgot.”
That’s the way the book publishing industry should work.
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The book was “The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life. And Death,” from 1998.
It had a chip on its shoulder right from word one, about everything. It pilloried worries over cancer, heart attacks, strokes. It made fun of the sometimes hysterical concerns of expectant mothers, and of whiny men about their prostates. It dealt sardonically with ileitis, incontinence, hernias, hair loss, constipation, autoeroticism, even “bitrochanteric lipodystrophy” an obscure and antiquated medical term I found for when your body is shaped like a Hershey’s Kiss.
It even deliberately tweezed and tormented the fears of its target audience, the practicing hypochondriac. The subtitle on the cover, read, truthfully if hysterically: “Hiccups Can Mean Cancer.”
But Chapter 12 — a short chapter — was a thing unto itself, in the sense of potential insensitivity. Here it is, snipped right from the pages: