literary secrets & scandals

stranger than fiction?

Feb 18, 2025

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ALSO NOTE!

it is my birthday tomorrow so i decided this is as good a time as any to allow ardent admirers of the rolling ladder to express themselves! these shelves take like 2-6ish hours each to create1 and my dearest hope is that they bring amusements to your day, ideas to your brain and books to your library queue or bookshop cart. if so please let me know by reading! hearting! commenting! sharing! more reading! and if you are so moved

you can 'buy me a coffee' here

many thanks for browsing the shelves of the rolling ladder!

While I was working at a cookbook store in 2014, we received a galley2 of The Whole Food Pantry. This cookbook looked like almost every other ‘wellness’ book of the time; lots of white space and overhead shots of bright, colorful fruit and vegetable dishes held by a pretty, blonde woman smiling with all her might. Written by Belle Gibson, a young Australian single mother who survived multiple cancer bouts, this was set to release as a companion to a successful app and contained recipes focused on detoxing, clean eating and all those fun healing thyself with food messages. You know, all the natural foods that helped Belle overcome her cancer. Until (drumroll please) it was abruptly pulled from production and its publication canceled. Why you ask? Because it turns out that Belle was not a cancer survivor at all. Belle was actually just a pathological liar.

Once news about this broke, my coworkers and I ate up any information we could about this scandal. We could not get over this clip from 60 Minutes where Belle cannot admit her actual age3— it just cracked us up and the accents added to the hilarity. What wasn’t funny though was the money she stole from people who donated to her ‘treatments’ and charities, the false encouragement she gave to actual cancer patients who looked to her for advice and the idea that society can be so vulnerable to people who just completely invent their own reality, manipulating others with their fantasies.4 We held on to that galley for a while, but unfortunately it may now be lost to time. But Belle’s fictions continue to flourish and fascinate especially now that Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar has just come out.

Today’s books are about salacious scandals and long buried secrets inside the literary realm, and while they are all fiction some feel truer than is quite comfortable. What definitely is true is that our modern online landscape at once creates, gobbles and then re-creates stories behind the stories like a great, big ravenous ouroboros.

Read these with a healthy dose of skepticism and curiosity.

DEAR EDNA SLOANE by Amy Shearn

Seth is an aspiring writer but his day job churning out online content is slowly chipping away at his soul. Hoping to move up the ladder and prove himself, he decides to profile the author of his favorite book, An Infinity of Traces, Edna Sloane. He just needs to find her first. Because in the 80s, after releasing her debut novel to much acclaim and controversy, Edna disappeared. Seth’s dogged internet sleuthing takes him down many a rabbit hole and eventually reaches mildly concerning levels of obsession as he questions the realities of growing up, his ambition to write A Great American Novel and even the worthiness of art itself. His existential quandaries only grow when one day, Edna writes back.

This is an epistolary novel consisting mostly of emails and letters but also a smattering of other formats like podcast transcripts, Reddit posts, Goodreads reviews, course syllabi5, editor notes, Twitter6 threads and articles that flesh out the world. The variety of tones and formats are amusing and energetic as they dole out puzzle pieces of information for the reader to assemble alongside Seth. Our dopey protagonist is going through a quarter life crisis and oscillates between oblivious and sweet as he earnestly pursues Edna and answers. Struggling with post graduate life, Seth is all of us attempting to adult and desperate to pursue our ambitions, even if we don’t exactly know what those ambitions are. His occasional lack of self awareness, desperation and idealism as well as his very common frustrations with loneliness, purpose and identity made him endearing instead of annoying. He is self deprecating and maybe mediocre but I was still charmed by his humorous tangents, judgy diatribes and always appreciated how much he loved what he loved. Also in love with her own voice, Edna is brusque, blunt and darkly funny even as she mines a painful past. Her charisma, voice and pen have only sharpened with age and I gleefully ate up all her various insults and rants.7

Though comedic and unconventionally told, the themes here are rich for dissection and I was sucked in again as I skimmed while prepping for this post. Edna and Seth are from different spheres and generations but wrestle with the same questions. They both see “art as a way of accessing the meaning of life” and most of this novel is them working to understand themselves and each other’s approaches. I loved being a voyeur to their debates about the nature of storytelling, the importance or not of authorial intent, how to consume art and the power dynamics in its creation, the quandaries inherent in creating art for consumption, the angst and vulnerability of creative work, the trap of nostalgia, how to deal with constant reality checks and the hunger and exhaustion of living an examined life. Though they ask and attempt to answer questions like What is a Reader? What is an Author? How should one read a book?8 it never felt annoying or heavy handed, but genuine, interesting, thought provoking and entertaining.

Neither of our characters are one thing. They are complicated, weird, and maybe even ‘unlikable’ but I cared about them both because of their comedic wit and willingness to soul search. Because this book deals with broad themes, I really appreciated the whimsy evoked by its epistolary format. The silliness allowed the nature of the story and characters to stay grounded and feel tangible, human, mistake prone and approachable. They are working through some existential questions that could be boring or excessively heady but the limitations of the format added a lightness and a delight that invited participation instead of just observation. I appreciate when a novel’s ending isn’t tied up too neatly but I never want it to be a cop out, so this ending struck the right tone to me.

Subject: Re: Re: Seeking Edna Slone

I hesitate to even dignify that digital invective with a response, but honestly it seems like you are very troubled. And no, no I don't think it's obvious from her work that she is at heart an "immoral shrew"—I think biographical readings of fiction are reductive and unsophisticated, for one thing. And for another, her novel happens to be one of the most sensitive, emotionally acute, and gorgeously stylized works published in English in the last half century, which I'm sure you were able to acknowledge at some point, if you ever did have any life or imagination in your ossified, tumescent soul.

Don't you have an assistant who can answer your emails for you?What kind of doctor are you?

Regards,

Seth Edwards

YELLOWFACE by R.F.Kuang

Though they’ve been friends since college, Athena ‘so fucking cool’ Liu is everything June Hayward isn’t: successful, beautiful and Asian American. When Athena accidentally dies as they celebrate her latest milestone, June blinded by shock and grief9, re-homes her latest manuscript. For safekeeping. Struggling to get anywhere with her own work, June decides to tweak Athena’s book about the unrecognized Chinese laborers of World War I and submit it as her own. When she and the book become The Next Big Thing, the newly christened Juniper Song finally gets what she’s known she’s deserved all along. But with acclaim, awards and invitations comes backlash, social media takedowns and threats of ‘cancellation’ because someone knows what June did and isn’t going to let her get away with it.

This is engrossing from the very first line as we’re thrust into June’s glib and sometimes deranged first person narration of events. At times, June addresses the reader10 which lends an air of confession, evoking an emotional response that isn’t necessarily deserved. Indeed June’s unreliable POV is one that I at once enjoyed tremendously and was also very relieved to escape. Which is exactly right for this satire about the dark side of publishing and the rise and fall11 that happens so often in our modern content rich landscape. As a reader you don’t root for June but neither can you stop watching the various catastrophes she creates, suffers and re-works in her never ending quest for relevance and recognition. She is bitter, resentful, bratty and blithely racist in ways that felt shocking but also, unfortunately, normal. As she warps reality around her though, we do get a few glimpses of backstory rounding her out just a bit from a pure ‘villain’ which I appreciated. I always want more complication in my characters though it does require more attentive energy and introspection. Give me nuance or give me death I always say.

Written by someone who knows the world intimately, this can feel dizzying at times with all the narrative spinning, language crafting and ‘backlash to the backlash of the thing that’s just begun’ that goes on both behind the scenes and in full view of the public. It is a terrific and terrifying satire of all aspects of the book world; writing, editing, production, sales, marketing, reviews, awards and the overall publishing machine. I appreciated its laying bare the ways we can pretzel ourselves into justifying the motivations of our actions and the demands that capitalism has for more and more content to consume even as the nature of art and creativity cannot thrive under such paralyzing conditions. This is full of delicious irony, some true ‘oh my god’ moments with suspense, mystery and even a bit of ‘descent into madness’ thrown in which all work together for a compulsively fast read as it adroitly12 mixes snark, reverence and comedy. I also appreciated the call outs of call out culture and how absurd it all can be while still feeling all too real to those involved. The never ending quest for relevance and attention is a labyrinth of nonsense if you give it that power.

As R.F. Kuang mentions on Goodreads

You’re supposed to feel sick to your stomach, and sick of everyone involved, and unsure of what to believe except that you still can’t look away. If reading it feels a bit like watching a train crash in slow motion, then I’ll have done my job.
I am interested in how every social media interaction is a performance, how we build parasocial relationships with constructed personalities, how easily snippets of misinformation can turn into a wildfire, and how we all go to pieces when it’s revealed (as is always the case) that things are not as they seem.
There are no easy answers in YELLOWFACE about cultural appropriation. Only a train wreck of questions. Only mess. Have fun with it, dear readers; I certainly had a gleeful cathartic time writing it.

I appreciated that everyone and everything here is complicated without easy answers or ideal bad guys and good guys in neatly wrapped packages which caught me up inside the story on every page. I loved the ending which felt sort of Sunset Boulevard-esque and leaves a grimy feeling behind (in a good way). Also, this cover is perfect, no notes.

The truth is fluid.

There is always another way to spin the story, another wrench to throw into the narrative.

DISORIENTATION by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Twenty-nine year old PhD student Ingrid Yang has been writing her dissertation for four years and is so over it that lately she’s been googling “fastest way to contract mono” just for a break. She’s been pressured by her university’s East Asian Studies Department into writing about the ‘Chinese Robert Frost’ or the ‘Father of Asian American Poetry’, the recently deceased Xiao-Wen Chou, though she thinks everything about his fairly rote poetry has been done to death. All Ingrid wants is to put this chapter behind her and marry her nerdy, adoring, Japanophile fiancé Stephen. But when she finds a mysterious message hidden inside the poet’s archives and investigates further, she discovers a truth that, if revealed, could have unimaginable consequences.

This is another satire, this time focused more on the academic side of literature rather than the publishing side and is divides its chapters into semesters. This incisively toys with themes of artistic ownership, cultural appropriation, racial identity, worthiness of study and the colonization of ideas as one woman’s quest for understanding moves beyond the hypothetical and into the practical. I appreciated the comedic yet thoughtful way the novel treats the challenges that arise when a person confronts long held beliefs that are proven untrue, when their faith in people, communities, authority and institutions is shaken and they must secure power within instead of without. I identified with Ingrid’s creeping disillusionment of the structures around her and her slow realization that we’re all just sort of playing a game called ‘Society’. I especially appreciated how the world of academia is a sort of microcosm of society with its own esoteric rules, regulations and politics as Ingrid goes through her lonely, bewildering journey to discover and battle the accepted narrative and challenge accepted, comfortable ‘truths’.

I laughed aloud many times reading this. Witty and sharp, the tone treats the mundane, buttoned up world of academia with an eccentric irreverence that I couldn’t get enough of. The titles of various think pieces and scholarly articles were especially amusing; mocking their self seriousness held a particular snarky delight. Each character is hilarious in their own special way— full of specificities, idiosyncrasies and their own unique worldview so they all felt tangible and add to the plot and Ingrid’s arc. The weirdly lame Stephen often cracked me up, especially his proposal, while the earnest and ridiculous Eunice was an unexpected pleasure. All their amateur sleuthing shenanigans were hysterical. Power hungry archivists, bullying academic advisors and self indulgent cult leaders all work well inside the tapestry of Ingrid’s identify crisis that takes the format of a literary mystery with some racial reckoning thrown in. There’s even a slight descent into madness element here which I always love to see13 and I was very happy with the ending. This dealt with very human themes in such a sharp, entertaining and ingenious way so I was thrilled to learn Chou has a new book coming out this year.14

…Ingrid was obsessive and neurotic, traits well suited for academia. The real world, or nonacademic world, frightened her with its largeness and unknownness-far better to cozily burrow into old texts, to safely engage with dead authors who couldn't talk back. To live inside the past was to debark from contemporary events and concerns, floating away until she landed on a minuscule, highly specialized planet where only a dozen other beings spoke the same language. Ingrid could conceive of nothing better. She even imagined a new wardrobe to complement her future title as Professor Yang: brooches, practical but devastatingly fashionable eyeglasses, perfume that reminded people of their great-aunt (in a good way).