A week or so ago I was tagged in a tweet by someone who had read one of my Aeon essays, Idealising the Predator about the award-winning writer, Gabriel Matzneff who also happened to be a prolific paedophile. I write it like this, because the paedophilia and his relationships with young girls was widely known by his peers – he even bragged about it in his books – but never openly condemned. It was accepted perhaps as a characteristic, as a quirk, of this otherwise redeemed figure who was so much a part of French intelligentsia. Until publisher and writer, Vanessa Springora published Consent, her memoir about her two-year relationship with him which started when she was 14 and he was 49, and he was openly vilified.
The tweet I was tagged in was a response to another tweet, which was flagging what an author saw as an apparent blind spot in publishing around publishing fiction and memoir by victims of child sexual abuse. It referenced a recent Faber novel, My Heavenly Favourite, by Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison, which, like the classic Lolita, is written from the perspective of the perpetrator himself, and is transgressive in nature.
The author of this tweet’s argument felt to me to be partly fuelled by a personal grudge, as she herself had written memoirs about her experience of being a survivor of CSA, which she had published with small presses because the mainstream houses had rejected them on the grounds that there wasn’t a wide enough audience, the subject matter too dark and difficult. She had stated there are ‘zero’ memoirs or novels of a child’s experience of CSA published in the UK by mainstream presses, which simply isn’t true. My memoir Sins of My Father is about the fallout of child sexual abuse and grooming and its lasting effects on a life, and was published by W&N, part of Orion, and Hachette, one of the big six; and another example is the excellent Putney, a novel about a child in a relationship with an older man, by author Sofka Zinovieff, which was published by Bloomsbury – a mainstream and very respected literary press.