Times Interview with Kate Clanchy - shared article in post

I didn't read Adam Kay's book but I watched the first episode of This is Going to Hurt and I didn't want to watch any more.
I like Ben Wishaw (Paddington Bear). And I like Jarvis Cocker who did the music but I didn't want to continue after the doctor deliberately sewed up a woman wrong who had a dolphin tattoo which he ruins and he laughed about it. His malpractice was justified because the patient was racist.

Sexism / misogyny is fine but perceived racism or transphobia ends your career.

Why was it ok for the slightly fictional / dramatised version of Adam Kay to be spiteful but not ok for the slightly fictional version of Kate Clanchy to sometimes give judgemental descriptions of composite characters (in the introduction to the memoir she says children's identities were protected, names were changed, no individuals should have been identifiable).

I think this is part of the problem, separating reality from fiction especially with memoirs where we expect them to be non fiction but really they're a mix like Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit which was originally marketed as a fictional novel but is a memoir / semi autobiographical.

When I hear Kate Clanchy talk about the Kate in her memoir it's clear in her mind that the written Kate is a fictionalised or dramatised version of herself but we the reader (or podcast listener) don't know the real Kate from the fictional Kate so how are we able to compare?

I have now listened to the whole 'Anatomy of a Cancellation' and in my opinion Monisha Rajesh was let off lightly. She was asked why she called Kate "KKKlanchy" and Rajesh said she felt attacked by Kate! Who didn't call her any names.
Rajesh never apologised and played the victim when she was the bully.

This article might explain some of her twitter outbursts. She says she raged during lockdown and needed anger management for postnatal 'depression'. It must have been quite scary for her kids to witness. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/aug/31/moment-changed-me-smashed-toddlers-toy-kitchen-smithereens-knew-i-needed-help

Rajesh mentions being bullied as a kid and having abusive teachers and I feel her whole response to Kate's book has been Rajesh projecting her experiences onto Kate. Kate is now viewed as the abusive teacher Rajesh had and she is again the child experiencing racism. To which I can only suggest you need more therapy Monisha rather than continue the cycle of abuse.

Yeah it was all very overheated and intense at the time. I think they had a lot of staff who were upset too.

this was during 2021, at that point where no one was thinking clearly from staying indoors for too long and things online seemed more real than they actually were.

But these 'responses' seem to be limited to a tiny number of people with an axe to grind on social media. Overall, reviews seem to have been positive. It won the Orwell prize.

Some of his output is utterly horrific.

What fecking 'community'?

This is what they said at the time:

"We have been listening to the responses to what we said about Kate Clanchy’s Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me and we want to apologise profoundly for the hurt we have caused, the emotional anguish experienced by many of you who took the time to engage with the text, and to hold us to account.
“We realise our response was too slow. We vigorously condemn the despicable online bullying of many of those who have spoken out. This has no place in our community.
“We understand that readers wish to know specifically what will be done about the book, we’re actively working on this now and we will communicate this as soon as possible."

She's visible. The publishers are behind the scenes and it's harder to find out who the actual people are who made the decisions. They might even turn out to be male. The witch burners need a witch to burn.

How many men have been cancelled like this compared to women?

What did they apologise for?

Adam Kay's This is Going To Hurt is quite viciously misogynistic in my view in several passages. Of course that is, rather than career-ending, turned into a successful TV and lauded TV series (where a brown woman co-protagonist is created that didn't exist in the book)

I think it’s because Picador apologised but Kate Clanchy is still banging the drum and seems unrepentant.

I just don't get why all the ire has been for Clanchy. Someone else took the decision to publish it and therefore their responsibility is much greater.

I mean, publishers are just people. The book had plenty of redeeming qualities, it was engaging and entertaining.

Adam Kay’s professional memoir had been a massive bestseller just before Kate’s was published and in that book he is humorously rude about his patients. I wonder if it’s a feature of that genre of book.

Neither Christina Lamb not Kate Clanchy deserved horrific online abuse and threats to their career. But both used descriptive phrases (even if CL was alluding to Prince Phillips gaffs she said 'we rather enjoy them, and used the 'slitty eyes' gaff as the direct illustration') that were pretty problematic. It's interesting that CL apologised quickly and copiously, it seems, though I missed the furore at the time. I wonder, if KL had engaged with her critics and done the same, if it would have changed anything. I think it was the right thing to do anyway. But I suspect an apology would have done very little to ease the hostility. Of course there is zero context in any of it. It should be possible to consider KC's thirty years of working with under privileged kids and nurturing extraordinary creativity, without saying it negates the questionable descriptive terms, but concluding, contextually, that her work with those kids is extraordinary. But there is no nuance of course. The social and psychological mechanics of purity spirals are pretty terrifying. And so much of it seems to come down on pre established tribalism lines which seem an awful lot to do with Israel vs Palestine and the gender wars (which also seem to line up tribally quite a bit which I am a bit surprised by) What has happened to Rachel Rooney, an autistic poet of great talent, is also deeply upsetting - also because she has done absolutely nothing wrong and written nothing of controversy, but her book My Body is Me is a transgression against the Divine Book of Transgender Ideology and therefore she must be burned. The misogyny and hypocrisy (and subsequent lack of interest in it) for her, and the way her career has been destroyed, is appalling. What really gets me though, is how men see women. White men try to appear to hate brown/black women less than white women, because that would be racist, which, finally, after far too long, is seen as a Very Bad Thing, whereas misogyny is still pretty meh. So when white men get a chance to jump on a bandwagon at a white woman - my god the outlet. This is also a large part of the energy behind the gender debate wars imo. Anyway, my two pence worth.

I read the book. In it, Kate Clanchy is just generally mean and unkind about loads of kids’ appearances. The overall tone is just a bit icky.

Why did the publishers publish it then? Why aren't they taking responsibility for their actions?

Anyone can write a book about anything, there are no rules. But the publishers are the ones who take the decision to unleash it onto the world.

I also thought it was interesting that even the sensitivity reader they interviewed on the podcast thought that a post-publication sensitivity read was pointless and actually recommended they add a new introduction instead.

I read the book. In it, Kate Clanchy is just generally mean and unkind about loads of kids’ appearances. The overall tone is just a bit icky.

If she had ever once apologised for causing offence, however unintended, and then stopped engaging, this all would have stopped. She did so much to fan the flames, and kicked off the row to begin with.

her publisher seems to have behaved appallingly spinelessly but from the internal emails it seems they were frustrated she refused to follow their advice about how to handle this so were often on the back foot.

The three women who led the campaign against her must regret this now and when you see the tweets resurface the tone & language used is just shocking and so unprofessional. This will follow them for the rest of their lives.

Wow, that attack on Christina Lamb quite something, isn't it? These people just enjoy making other people's lives a misery. It's malice, pure and simple.

Thank you for that link. Christina has been relentless in exposing the violations of women in war zones. Given the unhinged and abusive language used by her detractors it's unbelievable that they reserve the right to use abusive language while criticising the use of a quotation that Christina has apologised for using.

Christina Lamb explains what she did in this article.

Nothing could prepare me for the online war: Christina Lamb on being attacked by the trolls

Nothing could prepare me for the online war: Christina Lamb on being attacked by the trolls

Second link is to the archive version.

I've always thought (always being relatively recent) that sensitivity readers are in a bit of a bind. They're getting paid to do this job so I imagine they're under pressure to have something, anything to show for it. If, despite their sensitivity, someone does find something to get offended by and gets some traction then they've failed. They may never work in that field again. Whose feelings are they protecting? What's the baseline? It used to be it was the everyman on the Clapham omnibus. I don't think that's the case anymore.

I think in situations like this, people create their own consequences, tbh.

ISTR recent years have seen some shit and unforgivably cowardly responses wrt Salman Rushdie's experiences, also.

I don't want to see them hounded, or abused, or 'cancelled', either.

Maybe not, but I think they should face some consequences for the awful things they said.

c) Are the three women nice or nasty

I can’t imagine any scenario in which those three women, Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, could be described as nice. Their hounding of Kate Clanchy and others has been truly shocking. As a pp has said, jealousy may be a driver.

Kate's article in Unherd is so beautifully written. I love what she says about the word "small":

'Besides, “small” is one of the glories of the English language, a word for “little” that we use for knobbly, close, personal things, a word infused with the tenderness we feel for pets and children but which can never be confused with lesser, or petty, a word that never carries scorn. Not to understand that — or to have put up barriers in the mind so you cannot hear it — seems so sad.'

It's obvious, ironically, that the one quality "sensitivity" readers lack is sensitivity. They are apparently completely tin-eared, closed to the nuances of words or meanings.

The mystifying thing in all this, as others have observed, is why the publishers take any notice of these people. How can you take seriously a supposed sensitivity reader who uses "compulsorary" - a non-existent word? Why, when faced with vicious attacks on one of your star authors by people who are, apparently, deranged, do you not mount a robust defence of the star author? Why cave into people who readily reach for the most vile slurs, such as "cunts", rather than stand up for an author you should be proud of, someone who has both won the Orwell prize and whose book is a best-seller?

The whole business reflects very badly indeed on the publishing industry and the people who work in it.