Since no one is following me on Twitter anyway, hardly, I am gonna say that I think it is a mistake to cancel the Bailey Roth biography based on allegations alone. I ordered that biography on Kindle and am glad that I did it when I did it.

The allegations against Bailey sound credible although some more than others. I don’t know about the “grooming” allegations because “grooming” is such a nebulous term. But nothing nebulous about rape and sexual assault. If that happened, that’s appalling.

And it’s almost more shocking to hear about a figure like Bailey than it is to hear about, well, Roth, who one expects this sort of behavior from. You expect biographers to be straitlaced and objective. So yeah I am disappointed, if this is true.

I am a fifty one year old woman and I grew up with a macho Southern dad who I adore and I had a lot of male mentors as a young woman who both ogled me and took me seriously as a writer. I am used to being baffled and disappointed by men.

And I am glad that a certain kind of male behavior is becoming less and less acceptable and I have learned a whole lot from the MeToo movement, including about myself and some power dynamics that I used to really take for granted.

You all can probably see the “but” coming here. But. Everyone I am reading here on Twitter is so quick to condemn Bailey and Roth and to draw a direct line between both of them and their writing.

This is an especially...surprising attitude to me coming from writers. Not to mention from book publishers. I am sorry, but I like Roth’s writing. Bailey’s book I have not read yet, but I do want to read about Roth’s life.

I recognize that there is a lot of hateful misogynistic shit in Roth’s work. But what are you going to do? He was also brilliant and funny. I don’t think it serves us to censor complicated figures like that.

I think rather that we need to face them with our eyes open and to take from them what we can. And with that, whatever, I will probably end up deleting this thread, my lack of Twitter followers notwithstanding.