Salman Rushdie and author danger: a cautionary tale

Last week’s attack on Salman Rushdie underscored, for me, one of the harder realities of being a writer. You get hated by total strangers. And sometimes they go berserk.

Its sad that authors get targeted, physically or otherwise. One might argue that Rushdie was a special case; but on my experience it’s a risk all authors face. Just writing something is enough to provoke somebody. It’s actually true for all the arts. Look at what happened to John Lennon, or the time someone pushed Frank Zappa off stage in London, seriously injuring him.

My own experience is salutary: I write academic and popular stuff on history and science, which you’d think is innocuous – yet I’ve been spat on by strangers, confronted by strangers quivering with anger and clearly barely able to stop themselves hitting me, and serially abused by viciously hostile strangers whose sole lifetime goal, apparently, is to destroy my good name and income. Just writing stuff to educate or entertain those who share my fields of interest is, it seems, all it takes.

A selection of my books – I mean, who could find any of this so offensive they have to destroy me?

Why strangers attack authors

Why do strangers explode out of nowhere, frothing with hatred? First off, this has to be put in proportion. As even Rushdie’s case reveals – the ‘haters’ are a small minority. Again in my own case, based on my sales figures, only a tiny minority of those who buy my books respond at all, either by approaching me or publishing some commentary – it’s a tiny fraction of a percent. Still, the fact remains that more than 90 percent of the feedback I do get is abusive. The pattern is clear: people who like my stuff aren’t motivated to tell me. Those who dislike it explode with open hatred and have to destroy me.

In non-fiction, I’ve found the worst examples are academics. Not all of them, of course. Just the ones who view the field as a zero-sum game and have then wrapped ‘their’ topic around their sense of self-worth. The fact of my writing in ‘their’ territory becomes an insult to their very soul and means I must be utterly destroyed with all the frenzied anger they can muster. I have never understood this – to me, everybody has something of their own to contribute to any field and all should be welcomed. But I appear to be a minority. I’ve had academics run crusades against me for intruding into their property – there’s one who’s been abusing everything I do for over twenty years, all without once actually approaching me for a discussion. But I first realised this attitude might put me in physical danger when I was accosted in the Archives New Zealand reading room by a stranger who stood over me with balled fists and roared at me, quivering with anger and clearly having trouble stopping himself hitting me. I felt that if I stood up he’d have clocked me one. Turned out he’d had books rejected by my publishers on the same topic as mine. This became my fault and when he saw me in the reading room, it seems, he saw red.

I’m far from alone – it’s a common problem in non-fiction writing. Last year a friend of mine was physically pursued out of a reading room by a stranger who accosted him, demanded to know what he was researching, and openly told him to ‘keep out of my territory’. It wasn’t subtle.

A fellow writer responding to my writing in their personal territory…

Reader feedback

I also get reader feedback of the same style. Again, it’s from a tiny minority of readers – at most I’ve had one per book – but all fall into the same pattern: ‘Dear Mr Wright, I liked your book —-, but on page…’ Inevitably it’s some data-point they think diverges from whatever they believe to be true, for which it’s my fault even though I’m correct to source. The worry is the persistent ones. There was the car enthusiast who wrote multiple times to my publisher of the day, Random House, to ‘correct’ captions in a series of pop-culture books I wrote. ‘Gentlemen,’ he would begin, collectively addressing the Random House editorial team (who were all women, incidentally), before outlining the latest ‘error’ he’d decided I’d made. His ‘correction’ letters eventually began arriving to my home address. Yup, I had a stalker.

My favourite is a multi-page rant from a university academic, who’d decided every publication on a topic was wrong. That included mine – but he blamed me, personally and alone, for everybody else’s ‘errors’. He told me he’d been dissuaded by colleagues from writing earlier, but when he saw a newspaper article by somebody else, repeating these ‘errors’, he had to let me know I was personally responsible. The fact that the article didn’t cite my work wasn’t apparently relevant: I, alone, was to blame. Ouch.

I suspect the people performing this way have entangled validation of their self-worth with their enthusiast interest, defining ‘knowledge’ as a measure of that worth. If I publish something that differs from what they believe to be true – let’s say my source says the distance between bogies on a railway carriage is 18.101873363190981 cm, but they are convinced it’s 18.101873363190891 – then I have insulted them at the deepest level, and that has to be avenged by ruthlessly destroying me at all cost. No discussion. No compromise. And they have to win.

Actual photo of an enthusiast responding to one of my books.

Beware of strangers offering favours

One might suppose most people have good-will, and I think they do. But I am cautious. There was the time a gentleman wrote offering to ‘help’ with a book he’d heard I was writing; I politely thanked him, but declined the offer, as the book had gone to print. A week or so later, the local newspaper printed a full-page attack on my work. Apparently I hadn’t replied according to the script in his head, so he avenged himself by going behind my back to the media. They then failed to approach me for comment before publishing – a serious lapse of journalistic protocols. The editor agreed they’d erred.

What frustrates me is that if somebody has a problem, all they need do is talk to me in civil fashion. But it never seems to happen. Luckily all this reflects only a minority – as I say, a very tiny minority – of people who read my stuff. But they are rather noisy about it.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2022