RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: On Friday, the Atlantic breathlessly announced publication of the following story:
Indeed. As David Thompson notes, in a post titled, “Don’t Oppress My People With Your Expectations Of Politeness And Basic Consideration,” the author often needs a bit of peace and quiet herself:
At which point, readers may wonder how Ms [Xochitl] Gonzalez, a novelist, manages to write her books amid the fashionably vibrant racket that she recommends to others. All that shouting and shrieking and “ceaseless music” that she finds so liberating and authentic. Wouldn’t those extended and rather complicated trains of thought be disrupted, and likely made impossible, by all the shouting and laughing, all the whumping and thumping, all those jolly sirens?
Happily, an answer is provided in the pages of Elle Décor, in which Ms Gonzalez opined some two months earlier:
Writing novels is intrinsically solitary. Which is no small part of why I switched professions in the first place. Despite wearing the coat of an extrovert, I am pure Greta Garbo. I want to be alone.
This point is expanded upon:
The early pandemic found me without a permanent residence and on a deadline. In March, while getting my MFA in Iowa, I’d come home to New York City for a quick visit to celebrate having just sold my first novel. Three months and one case of COVID-19 later, I was quarantining with my best friend, her husband, and their toddler in their Brooklyn apartment. Before long, the close quarters and endless sounds of sirens made revising my novel there untenable. I decided to head upstate.
And so, our silence-needing novelist sought out “a gorgeous historic house in downtown Kingston, New York.” Ah, yes. An “upstate vacation rental.”
Perhaps Ms Gonzalez was hoping that readers of her Atlantic article – the one about noise being so vibrant and racially affirming – would not stumble across her Elle Décor piece, published weeks earlier, which rather calls into question her own later claims. And which, it has to be said, suggests a certain pretence, a certain hypocrisy.
In short, then, your desire for peace and quiet is terribly problematic, and probably racist. While hers, not so much. Which is enormously convenient. If not entirely convincing.
Crank up the boombox and read the whole thing.
(Classical reference in headline.)