do i know anyone who has read or has got a final copy of the book of difficult fruit? i’m reading a proof copy and there’s, uh, a bit in the wheat chapter... want to know if it made it to the final version

because there is an intense rant in this book about how her ex-partner had coeliac disease and it is VERY BAD

“It was not him, exactly, I wanted to kill, but the way his body turned the food I made him into poison. That is what I wanted to kill.
That, and the part of him I thought took pleasure in surrendering to sickness, like it was a shelter that kept him safe.”

I know you’re not supposed to quote from I corrected proofs but I am really horrified/grossed out by this book suddenly turning to her kind of fantasising about killing, or killing part of her chronically ill partner!

this comes after he says she’s trying to kill him and a friend is like “well, are you?” and she thought, well, what if i said yes

on the previous page she says that... he said if she kissed him after eating wheat it would make him sick. she “conceded” the argument but presents this as something that he said that wasn’t true (afaik this is indeed true for coeliacs).

she just goes into so much detail about how much she hates him because of his illness and i was NOT expecting it and it feels very bad!!!!!

Picador published this book THIS month

anyway ha ha ha ha publishing hates chronically ill and disabled people and is happy to publish writers who talk about killing their chronically ill partners i guess!

can I get sued if i just share a few paragraphs from this proof on here?

OK Google books says this passage is in the finished book, so here it is. Personally, I hate this. I really really hate this. The constant blaming, the wondering how it would feel to say she was trying to kill him.

when he first got diagnosed she kept forgetting that he couldn’t eat wheat and would “find some incidental way to add it to our meal”

“If it is funny to tell a story that says I tried to poison the man I loved, it is because this story lends a pleasing shape to how we fell apart”

“It is true that, at any given time, I kept ten pounds of wheat flour in our house.”

“No, I did not try to poison him. But I would not stop baking.”

If you’ve ever known someone with coeliac disease you know how serious and negligent this is. I feel sick reading it.

“Can we also say that part of the weight of being ill is
protecting the people you love from your suffering?”

When he moved out she celebrated by throwing flour all over the kitchen

“I flung it on the counters, on the stove, in the sink. I smeared it on the knives and bowls and plates. I dumped it on the floor, in each groove of tile and seam of air, everywhere. He was gone, and there was flour everywhere.”

legitimately gobsmacked by this. i've looked this up line by line in the published edition using google books and it's all in there.

she also chucks in a paragraph about how wheat isn't a poison, quoting people who sell wheat-free lifestyles to people without coeliac or a wheat intolerence, and then says "purity of this kind is impossible. it is an idea, not a cure."

very irresponsible to stick this in a section about coeliac disease without making the distinction clear. it reads like she's talking about her ex-partner.

no more writing from non-disabled people about how they think disabled/chronically ill people are ~retreating into the illness and dealing with it badly. grow up. another human's health and wellbeing is more important than you having 10 pounds of wheat flour to hand to bake pies

ok she actually ALSO has a (different) autoimmune disorder so i just. what???

per the beginning of this book she has ulcerative colitis, which is managed by medication... there's a lot going on here, but being chronically ill yourself doesn't mean you can tell people they're "surrendering to sickness" if they're feeling ill bc you keep BAKING WITH WHEAT

anyway this thread is long and i don't know what to do now. i think this is a really unpleasant book that dangerously minimises coeliac disease and presents abuse on her part as somehow reasonable or empowering. do people email publishers in this situation?