THAT TIME MY BOOK WAS BANNED

It wasn’t a library. It wasn’t a school district. It wasn’t a bookstore. 

 

No, it was my sister-in-law.

 

It happened eighteen years ago, but I only remembered this yesterday. I’m good at repressing. Family matters can baffle me. I don’t like being baffled. But then, I also don’t like being banned.

 

The book, Fouling Out, is my only one to be published…so far. I keep knocking on agents’ doors and they keep turning out the lights and pretending no one’s home. To be clear, I don’t go door-to-door, throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan, my manuscripts resting in crisp manila folders in each hand. Yes, I’m pitching two novels at present while abandoning hope on a third. I email agents in the manner set forth on their websites. I wonder how long it takes them to clear their new messages. I picture agents sitting side-by-side in cubicles, opening up emails and pressing the delete button like it’s a duel, like it’s preparation to be contestants on Family Feud. It feels like the old days of online dating. I just need one to love me…or my work, at least. Alas, neither manuscript is set in a dystopian amusement park and involves queer body horror. (Yes, that’s “of particular interest” to the agent I thought of emailing this morning. I don’t think my funny, sometimes hapless, relatable main character navigating the West Hollywood gay scene technically includes body horror even if there is a certain scene that would qualify in my mind at least.)

 

Fouling Out, published by Orca Books once upon a time (i.e., 2008) is a middle grade novel which means the target audience is kids in grades four through seven. I was at the family cottage when my sister-in-law informed me that she’d read the book but wouldn’t let my niece or nephew read it. They were both in or around the targeted age group and I tried my best not to show that her matter-of-fact announcement felt like a gut punch. I’ve only seen my niece and nephew a handful of times in my life. When my brother’s family lived in North Carolina, I was in Los Angeles; when they returned to Texas, I moved to Vancouver. Our lives and locations felt worlds apart.

 

I’d been excited about the prospect of my niece and nephew reading my book. I hoped they’d get a kick out of knowing their uncle was a published writer. I thought they might get a better sense of me based on my humour, my storytelling and my connection to kids’ perspectives. (I was an elementary teacher when I wrote it and a principal by the time it came out.) But, no. The book was not available to them. I feel my own sense of horror imagining my sister-in-law telling them their uncle’s book was off limits. Like my work was chock full of sex, gore and gratuitous drug usage. Like I bashed puppies. Like I overtly promoted my vegetarian lifestyle. (That might have caused a sweeping book ban across the entire state of Texas.)

 

The intention of my novel, which features two grade seven boys, was to portray young male characters with expressed feelings while dealing with real challenges. (Sorry, no zombies or vampires. No empires in peril due to a deep-seated conflict between Starman and his evil nemesis.) I wanted to show that reputations embedded at thirteen could be undone. Boys had the power to be better.

 

One of my writing challenges was realistically portraying one of the characters who was seen as an obnoxious bully by his peers. My publisher did not allow any profanity. A bully who doesn’t swear? (I guess they had an idealistic view of how twelve- and thirteen-year-olds talk.) I wonder how many times I had to resort to “He swore” in lieu of actually dialogue. It’s been a while since I perused the book, but I hope I refrained from using, “Oh, fudge” and “Shootsy.”

 

To be sure, the book included some dicey issues like racism, family abuse and homelessness. Early in the book, one character fires a gun but a squirrel is spared due to the quick action of his buddy. Only a window in an unoccupied house is harmed.

 

My sister-in-law said nothing about racism, abuse or the use of a gun. (Why would someone from Texas have any issue about guns anyway?) Instead, her problem was with the language in the book. 

 

I was dumbfounded. Had my editor and I missed a swear word despite multiple readings during the editing process? Had I unknowingly chosen a word that has a derogatory meaning in slang? Had the printer slipped in some offensive phrase? (Backwards, the darn trickster!)

 

No. Up until that moment, I’d been proud of my writing and the word choices I’d made. My editor was a top-notch wordsmith who knew which passages and plot points needed revision. I loved that her job was to point things out while leaving all the rewriting to me.

 

As far as I know, shopping at
Walmart on a Sunday is okay...
even in Texas.

What my sister-in-law objected to was the fact that I had apparently written “oh, my god” once or twice in the 168-page manuscript. In her mind, I’d taken the Lord’s name in vain. I’d broken a commandment. Not murder, not adultery, not coveting my neighbour’s wife. But still a commandment. It’s funny because, for the most part, I don’t swear. It’s even rarer that I take the Lord’s name in vain. I say “gosh,” “oh, my gosh” and “gosh darn it.” I’m an atheist, but I still consciously opt for “gosh” because I was raised with an awareness of the commandments…even though they weren’t yet legislated to be posted on classroom walls when I was going to high school in Texas. I don’t recall being in a quandary when I typed, “Oh, my god” as part of a line of dialogue from one of my characters. I’m certain it fit the context—say, after the gun went off—and it fit the character’s age and way of thinking. As a stickler, I don’t even view lowercase god is sacrilege. When one chooses to use the word as something other than a proper noun, I think this distinguishes the word as something ordinary rather than religious.

 

But I’m defending my word choice too much. Let’s say the commandment was specifically spat upon to cause a stir and to out myself as an egregious sinner. It may come off as blasphemy, but I don’t believe each commandment is equal. This might be an appropriate time to admit that I questioned that whole ark tale, too. I always wondered how big an ark would have to be to get all the animal pairs aboard. And didn’t they get hungry during the forty days and forty nights? Wouldn’t a lion or tiger have eaten the zebras and the antelope? What about the rest of the food chain examples I’d learned about (and been disturbed by) in elementary science class? 

 

It would seem to me that, if my sister-in-law was so duly offended—and I have no doubt that, as a devout Southern Baptist, she was—she could have scribbled through the reference(s) or, better, used it/them as a teachable moment. Your uncle may have been good enough to be a published author—ONCE—but let’s review the commandments, shall we?  

 

Alas, it wasn’t even worth a teachable moment. God comes before some rarely seen uncle—a heretic, no less. My niece and nephew were home-schooled. One attended Baylor, a Baptist university; the other went to Letourneau, an evangelical Christian school. Shelter and protect thy children was probably one of the principles at play regarding their education but I am absolutely certain they were exposed to swearing, sexual references and, yes, “oh, my god” many times at school, in shopping malls and at parks. The world doesn’t always conform. 

 

But I guess the idea was control what you can and so my book was banned. I suppose I repressed this because it breaks me more than a little bit when I think of it. My book was studied in many classrooms. It had a place on many school and public library shelves. I’m proud that every print copy was sold, the publisher turned a profit and the book can now only be accessed as an ebook. Still, there’s a part of me that would have loved it if my niece and nephew had been proud of me, too. Gosh golly, if and when one of those evasive agents takes on one (or more!) of my manuscripts and successfully woes a publisher, my niece and nephew will be sure to pass. I will never write a cleaner novel than Fouling Out. 

 

Maybe it’s a good thing they’ve had such little exposure to me. There are things beyond books they would surely find objectionable. I’ve heard that some authors come to view book banning as a badge of honour but, considering how close to home this incident was, I’m not going to get there. I don’t feel shame, but I find myself shaking my head a lot. Time to repress it for another couple of decades.