Why I’m Starting My Substack with Neil Gaiman I Could Not Tell You

I did not know I would be starting my newsletter by writing about Neil Gaiman on Substack, but somehow that's what happened. I don't know if I'll stay on Substack, but if I move somewhere else, you'll be the first to know.

So. Neil Gaiman. (For my mom and anyone else who is wondering: Neil Gaiman is a beloved author who was revealed over the course of the last several months to be quite the sexual predator of mostly quite young women.)

Actually, not quite Neil Gaiman yet. First, you might want to take a look at something I wrote five years ago this week on Alice Walker, the Women's March, antisemitism, and what to do about art by people who do things we don't like. You might have read it back then, but if you remember, you're better memoried than I am, because I had no recollection and just happened to find it as I did my daily scroll through my Facebook memories in search of my oldest friend who died nine months ago (which is another post or maybe six). I still stand by my pre-Claire Dederer take on art by people who do things we don't like, which is essentially that it depends...on so many things, and we all have to choose where we draw our lines.

Except I don't have any lines to draw on Neil Gaiman because I don't care about Neil Gaiman. The only book of his I've read is The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which I thought was fine. I used to think he was a good guy. Now I think he's gross, for fucking the nanny before we even get to the rest of it, but Neil Gaiman being gross makes no difference to my life - if you have a different adjective or noun for him, that's great, I support you, but I don't even care enough to come up with more precise language. That said, Lila Shapiro’s New York article, which broke the story wider open this week (Mom, you do not need to read it), did raise some Gaiman contexts and connections for me, so here they are.

I googled "Neil Gaiman Arthur Munby" and found basically nothing: nine hits for bookstores, Goodreads, and a library, but none that actually include both Neil and Arthur. So it's probably safe to say that Neil Gaiman never read Arthur Munby, or if he did, he stayed quiet about it. It may also be safe to say that I am the only pop culture obsessive/(former) Victorianist who read “He said, ‘Call me ‘master,’ and I’ll come’” in Shapiro’s article and immediately thought of Arthur Munby.

Munby was an ordinary Victorian barrister except for one thing: his obsession with working class women. Actually, make that two things: his obsession with working class women and his compulsive diary writing habit (over 100 volumes in total), which were closely linked. As I wrote in my book:

Munby used his diary, as biographer Derek Hudson put it, to ‘investigate…the moral & physical statistics of labouring women’…He wrote about maidservants and milkwomen in London, pitwomen in Wigan, and fisherwomen in Boulogne, not to mention sackmakers, trotter-scrapers, coster girls, and milliners. He described their faces, bodies, and clothing, recounted their life stories and the details of their work, and speculated about their pasts and futures.

Most of all, Munby wrote about Hannah Cullwick, a maidservant he met on the street one day in 1854. He kept company with her for years, made her keep a diary of her days and work to send him (it’s generally considered the first working class woman’s diary in English, though there were likely others that did not make it to posterity), and eventually moved her into his apartment as his servant, then married her (which did not work out well). He also made her black her face when she was with him, lick his boots when she cleaned him, and CALL HIM MASSA, all of which she obligingly did.

Master? Massa? Licking? Licking? (There is cleaning and licking in the Gaiman story.) Potay-to? Potah-to?

Sex and the slave is an endless trope. In Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (yikes), Arthur Munby is central to Anne McClintock’s deft explication of how that trope has figured “the transmission of white, male power through the control of colonized women” over the last couple of centuries. Gaiman insists that he is innocent of coercion and at most careless and self-centered. Plenty of evidence strongly points otherwise, including to his failure to follow even the most basic norms of BDSM. Regardless and nevertheless, the sexualized play acting of slavery with women in culturally lower strata (age, class) undoubtedly figures the assertion of white male power, even and especially for two men who played self-effacing in real life.

One last similarity between Gaiman and Munby is that they both used their writing to almost coyly position their desires on the line between private and public. Nobody appears to have read Munby’s diaries during his lifetime, but he repeatedly annotated and indexed them and left them to his college library (where I was able to put on white gloves and read the actual pages he wrote on). Meanwhile, Shapiro finds the shadow traces of Gaiman’s predilections across his fiction, and his depredations activated a whisper network among young women in the book world. I lean toward reading this hiding in plain sight as the place where shame and pride are one: knowing that you shouldn’t while believing that you should and proving that you can.

Sue Miller is more palatable than Arthur Munby, but Shapiro’s article also made me think of her excellent 1986 novel, The Good Mother (which became a 1988 movie starring Diane Keaton and early Liam Neeson), except my memory was only partial. The Good Mother is about [spoiler alert] a divorced mother who loses custody of her preschool-aged daughter because of sexual activity. My recollection was that she has furtive sex with her boyfriend while her child is asleep in the same bed, but I couldn’t imagine how that became known. So I went back to the book and was reminded that its inciting incident is the daughter telling her father that she touched the boyfriend’s penis - and then the mother inadvertently reveals the sex in the course of the custody battle.

Child sexual abuse was high on the cultural agenda in the 80s, both rightly and hysterically, and Miller tries to walk a line. It turns out that the child asked the boyfriend if she could touch his penis and he agreed, thinking he was going along with the mother’s approach to parenting and sex. The mother of course loses everything, for at the very least she has been careless and overly countercultural, neither of which are ok for mothers in the 80s or today, though Miller clearly sympathizes with her plight, as do I, though I also want to shake her.

So what about Gaiman? Some of the most horrifying moments in Shapiro’s article involve Gaiman’s four-year-old son. Gaiman initiated unwanted sexual contact with women while his son was present, once asleep, once on an iPad (shades of The Good Mother). At one point, the son, clearly imitating the father, “began to address [the nanny Gaiman fucked] as ‘slave’ and ordered [her] to call him ‘master’” (dark shades of Munby).

I don’t want to go so far as to say that divorce inherently sexualizes the family arrangement, but a parent having sex with an adult who is not their child’s parent does take sex out of the (supposedly) inherently safe realm of cozy procreativity with a little sneaking around for cozily dangerous fun. If there is anything out of the sexual norm already happening, the stakes skyrocket. That said, my husband and I agreed last night that while Gaiman has lost professional opportunities, fans, his marriage, and potentially his son, for whom he is apparently custody battling hard, he still has a lot of money and probably a lot of women who want to fuck him, so once again, at least in this paradigmatic Miller-Gaiman gender comparison, the woman who did a lot less loses a lot more.

Finally, I didn’t read Rachel Aviv’s superb New Yorker article about Alice Munro until the day before the Gaiman article dropped (Mom, you can read this one). The connections between the two pieces have been made all over the place, including by Maris Kreizman, who hones in on the way both articles surface the nearly explicit ways in which both writers worked their lives into their fiction. What was particularly striking to me, having followed both stories from the beginning, was how much deeper these articles went. I listened to the Gaiman Tortoise podcast and thought I didn’t need to read the article. When I saw the Munro article, I ignored it because I assumed I’d already read it, having read a lot about Munro last year when her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter was revealed, including in the New Yorker, Munro’s literary stronghold. But a deeply researched magazine article by a skilled writer who has time to go to the places, get to know the people, read the books, and reflect at length offers more, every time.

Yet here we are on Substack. Sigh.

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Can you add a PS to a Substack post? I’m going to, so I guess you can.

I was a tad disingenuous when I disavowed any interest in Gaiman. It is true that I don’t care about his work or him, but I have followed Amanda Palmer, his ex-wife, on social media for a very long time…in fact, I was paying attention when they got married in 2011, a date I promise I only know from the article. I’ve seen Palmer in concert, we have mutual friends, we chatted once outside our shared favorite bookstore. She’s a piece of work, which is probably why I’m fascinated with her, and she does not come off well in the Gaiman story.

She’s also made their son a public figure by featuring him heavily on her social media - which I get, I have featured my children heavily on my social media, but I am not a minorly famous musician married to a majorly famous writer (I also don’t have boundary issues, which Palmer is famous for). That said, this week Palmer issued a shockingly brief and appropriate (for her) statement that basically said “I’m in a custody battle, I can’t talk, leave me and my kid alone.” So my PS is that I really hope that child can live in privacy and peace, now and in the future. And I wish the same for the women Gaiman hurt.

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Because we still deserve nice things…

As a palate cleanser, I highly recommend “Flowers for Rosa,” a lovely piece by Jenny Odell about how socialist heroine Rosa Luxemburg was also a an amateur naturalist who compiled a pressed flower collection in prison. She deserved nice things too!