Munroe Bergdorf lands big book deal with Bloomsbury

[TornadoOfSouls]

Reported rather breathlessly in the Graun

www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/17/munroe-bergdorf-receives-landmark-book-deal-for-trans-manifesto

Among other things she’s going to tell us all that the experience being a ‘ciswoman’ has changed over the years.

‘my intelligence has been undermined, and I’ve been underestimated a lot in a lot of different instances.’

Sounds a bit Dunning-Kruger to me, to be honest.

(Just to be clear I'm not defending Naomi Wolf here, she really has gone off the deep end, but comparing the utterly vacuuous Bergdorf to her seems like an example of males being held to very different standards than women.)

Clever of MB to find a gap in the market - there are literally no historians who have written about women's history up till now.

They do realize that there are women who were alive in the 50s and the 80s who will be able to comment on this, right?

Lol. Never mind your lived experience, you jumped-up menstruators!

It’s not holding men and women to different standards. It’s an observation about the likelihood of similar misconceptions. Pun intended. Also making a point about writing about a subject and making declarations without due care for historical accuracy and understanding.

I got a lot out of Misconceptions and The Beauty Myth despite the dodgy data used in The Beauty Myth.

Ghostwritten by Owen Jones?

Empress

Just guessing here, but I'd wager it hasn't been written yet,

It’s standard with non-fiction, I believe. First-time writers of novels must present an entire, well-edited book. First-time non-fiction only requires a chapter or two, plus your credentials.

@AnyOldPrion

Just guessing here, but I'd wager it hasn't been written yet,

It’s standard with non-fiction, I believe. First-time writers of novels must present an entire, well-edited book. First-time non-fiction only requires a chapter or two, plus your credentials.

None fiction?

So, just to be clear:

Women (cf. Halle Berry) can't play trans roles but trans women can play trans and non-trans roles

Women can't write about trans people (cf. YA fiction purity spirals) but trans people can write about trans and non-trans people

Women can't talk about their own experiences as women (cf. JK Rowling) let alone talk about how trans rights might conflict with their own but trans people can write entire books about women and trans people

🤔

I’m hoping for in-depth analysis of oh, I don’t know, the equal pay legislation, marital rape act, contraception, abortion, even the ability to have a mortgage. And that is just the last few decades in the UK. So many women who could have just identified out of it all...

FGM? Will she go there do you think?

I honestly think that MB feels themselves to be some sort of ‘gift’ to the world.

They really do.

This book is also going to be read by Munroe for Audible, so I can also listen to Munroe tell me what it was like to be a woman in the 80s. Thank goodness for Munroe, where would us women be without them?

If Bergdorf has been advanced a 6 figure sum

Six digits perhaps, with decimal place tending that way

Bloomsbury just published this book about womens incontinence because of birth and woman-ness. www.thebookseller.com/news/bloomsbury-snaps-raw-incontinence-book-luce-brett-1076341

I saw it in the Daily Mail, followed her on twitter, she's funny too.

I'd rater read about actual piss and shit than whatever MB comes up with.

I pity the ghost writer.

And I despair at the state of publishing. MB publishing a book on women's history is the literary equivalent of Trump taking the presidency.

Still, in the long run it has the potential to peak a lot of people's interest. Bring it.

Sorry, pique.

Just a wee tiny bit.

Well, I entirely agree the last sentence of that piece is how things should be.

'One group of society’s rights isn’t to the detriment of anybody else’s – equal rights are equal rights. It means equality, it doesn’t mean less for some, and more for others.”'

How about MB has a respectful think about the wellbeing of women, and about the diminishing of our rights?

This is penance and damage limitation.

I've no doubt that Bloomsbury were hammered after the JKR Twitter pile-on, and were lobbied hard by the activists to balance things out, in lieu of actually cancelling JKR.

They know that in terms of publishing (if not in terms of personal cost) JK is untouchable - no publisher is going to cancel her, and they knew that, so the next best thing would be for Bloomsbury to throw money at a book to (in their eyes) provide fair balance.

Hence the six figure sum, the opportunity to discover all the ways that JK and women are wrong, to create a permanent print narrative about the history of 'gendered souls' (or however MB frames it) and the history concept is to presumably cement the fact that gendered souls have been here forever, by enveloping them in a certain amount of simplistic social history about women.

Creating a duel narrative is presumably supposed to give it credibility. What worries me greatly though, is the reference to adolescence - this is possibly going to be the massive push to affirm kids - 'don't let them suffer like I did'. The framework will be designed to persuade everybody that there have always been hundreds of thousands of trans kids and this book will be the manifesto to 'educate' everyone.

Sounds like mb has been doing some research on womanning throughout the ages. Hope they learnt something!

@Flapjak

Sounds like mb has been doing some research on womanning throughout the ages. Hope they learnt something!

Mb will only learn what suits their narrative. Mb will completely dismiss anything mb knows will give weight behind women’s real lives experience. It’s not as if it’s going to actually be women’s history, from someone neutral. On the plus side, none of us will be buying it in order to burn it, like so many threatened to do with JK’s books. 🤣

I think the advance will be a scant 100000 but they will have to pay most of it back. Based on their instagram following I think unlikely to shift more than 18-20000 copies. If it sells for £10 thats £1 in royalties. £1 x 20000 = £20,000.

You have to pay advances back if the book doesn't sell enough to cover it?

Publishing sounds like a racket.

Munro has 467k followers on instagram?

yes but I've given them a generous 4% of followers buying book others say on instagram its more like 0.3 %. But yes there are some quite high profile cases of the publishers sueing authors for the money back when the sales did not match. But as others say it may well be a arse covering tactic to sign them up. I'm amazed that Munroe is prepared to be published by the same firm as JK Rowling! Why hasn't this been brought out ??