Consensual stories
Ethical fiction in an age when anyone can be a narrator
The open mic night crowd had so far been sleepy and respectful. Most of the crowd was there because one of their English professors had made attendance mandatory, and they simply aimed to make it through the two hours as they would a sluggish Thursday night class. The change in atmosphere when the next presenter began to read his work was not immediately apparent. The tension came on slowly, steadily.
The speaker was a shy-seeming, skinny guy I had seen loping around the English building, but never remembered having a class with. His story was a violent, convoluted horror/action riff. He burst past the time limit, which otherwise might have been rude, but in this context seemed sinister. Sitting in the back of the room, I had a hard time catching everything he said in his low, mumbling voice, and a hush had fallen over the crowd. When his fever-dream narration ended, relief lit the room.
Later, I would hear from a friend that characters in this open mic night submission were clearly based on real friends and classmates of the author. Enough people were implicated in distinct detail that the story became a hot gossip topic.
I’ve never seen something so eerily dramatic as that performance. That guy pushed some strange boundaries that night, and even before I heard the backstory of it all, I left the event with a voyeuristic guilt. It was a weaponization of vulnerability on his part to vomit out his intimate, violent thoughts about others on stage. Who was going to stop him? Who was willing to name the violation he had committed?
I was reminded of this night recently while falling down a literary drama rabbit hole online. I hadn’t sought this controversy out; it was a coincidence to find such intrigue surrounding the newly-published novel Consensual Hex, which I had picked up at the library with little thought.
The book’s Goodreads summary begins:
“A coven of queer witches at an elite women’s college employ their powers to exact revenge on the frat boy warlocks who are using magic to cover up sexual assault on campus.”
The jacket was enough to appeal to my angry, feminine heart. I thought I was in for an absorbing, magical tale of justice.
Within the first 30 pages, I could tell something was wrong with Consensual Hex. The first-person narration seemed especially limited, as if the protagonist were blind to most things, overwhelmed by her near-constant angst and anger toward … well most things in her upper middle class New England life. Everything and everyone she encounters is a target for a side comment from Leisl, a newly arrived college freshman at Smith College.
She attends a campus event for sexual assault awareness. Tripp, an Amhearst student who Leisl flirts with, has a tense, confusing interaction with a girl from Liesl’s dorm, and another woman gets dragged away by campus police after suffering an apparent mental breakdown at the event, throwing a vibrator into the crowd. The narrative, which is already disorienting and difficult to follow, suddenly transitions to Tripp taking Leisl on a date and subsequently raping her. The author does tastefully eschew graphic specifics, writing “There doesn’t need to be a rape scene, but let me tell you, everything you’ve heard is true.”
Liesl has difficulty processing her traumatic night, and is soon in her anticipated first class, “Gender, Power and Witchcraft.” The professor, who will likely be our protagonist’s guide into the magical arts, is introduced as “a willowy black woman in a fluttery dark ensemble, a sort of Angela Davis/Stevie Nicks hybrid, complete with clogs and a crown of dyed-gold coiled hair.”
This description chafed for me. Though this could be my own bias showing itself, the few characters that had been introduced so far had seemed to be white and privileged. To have a striking Black woman enter the narrative to be a guide for our snotty Connecticut private school graduate felt grimy. I wondered if the book was suffering from Magical Negro syndrome. The intimate, stream-of-consciousness narration made me curious about the author, Amanda Harlowe. The narrator had the trappings of a self-insert character, but Harlowe could possibly be Black herself despite my assumptions, and the professor could be a dynamic, nuanced character instead of the stock charaticture I was anticipating.
I Googled Harlowe, and the floodgates to the broiling sea of drama surrounding this book opened. My first stop was Goodreads, to see if she had a detailed author profile. Before I could get to the profile, I couldn’t help but check whether other people found the protagonist’s narration as confusing and grating as I did. I was immediately distracted by the top reviews.
A reviewer with the username ‘Sunny’ begins their review: “If you’re here to read about the drama/controversy surrounding this book: I decided to delete my review because this got WAY more attention than I was bargaining for, and frankly I started getting concerned about my privacy and safety.”
The review beneath, from ‘Ash’ starts: “Removed the bulk of my review for privacy concerns, but you can get the gist of what happened by reading the rest of the reviews here or searching up any of the articles or twitter threads written in response.”
Googling around for a bit, I discovered this helpful post on the blog Truly Booked explaining the controversy. It was posted Aug. 1, though the book wasn’t published until Oct. 6. I’ll break it down for you:
Before the book was published, three former friends and Smith College classmates of Harlowe came forward on various online platforms to allege that three main characters of the novel were blatantly based on them. They claim that in the advanced copies of the book, details of their lives and, specifically, traumatic memories are barely changed. Ash wrote the story “includes an immense amount of identifiable personal information about me, including shockingly specific details of my medical history, the name of the hospital I was born in, the house I lived in at Smith, the name of my hometown, details of my sex life, my preference in menstrual products, and much more.”
As if the ripped-from-real-life distortions weren’t infuriating enough, one accuser, ‘Izzy,’ found many parallels with the villain of the piece. Consensual Hex’s blurb on NetGalley calls it “The Craft for the #MeToo era,” and Izzy’s paramore Gabi seems to be the story’s Fairuza Balk. She will get corrupted by power in the girls’ righteous quest for revenge, and be violently assaulted by the protagonist.
According to Truly Booked’s synopsis, “Gabi isn’t just a villain, but a comically evil one who is assaulted with a sex toy at the end. We’re supposed to think that she deserved that treatment.”
The published book seems to have been edited to take out the bulk of the identifying information the reviews cite. In an update to her review, Izzy says “it looks like some details were changed to make the similarities slightly less transparent, but the meat of what’s awful about this still stands.”
The accounts reference a falling out between Harlowe and the Smith group. It seems that this novel was in part a rumination on petty drama between toxic young friends. It’s unfortunate that it would take on such heady material as sexual assault alongside disturbing score-settling, but I think there’s a larger, less black-and-white conversation to be had here.
Of course, in reading people’s outrage to the situation in the other reviews left on Goodreads, I was reminded of the day or two of Twitter discourse inspired by the New York Times Magazine’s ‘Bad Art Friend’ story. I won’t get into all of the specifics of that nuanced case (it is truly worth a read if you’ve been even a little interested in this rambling column), but I will say I mostly sided with imperfect author Sonya Larson.
Larson’s opponent in this debate is once-colleague Dawn Dorland, who comes across as a troubled attention-seeker upset that Larson didn’t engage with a Facebook group she created specifically about her donation of a kidney to a stranger. When Larson uses kidney donation as the crux of a short story, Dorland accuses her of mean-spiritedly ripping off her life. Text exchanges revealed through the legal case that resulted from this drama show that in some ways, Larson was being mean-spirited, and was inspired not only by Dorland’s kidney donation, but the smugness she perceived Dorland to have over the “selfless” act.”
In Larson’s defense, however, her short story did not sound like a one-to-one, violent revenge fantasy in the vein of Consensual Hex. She took strokes of an acquaintance’s life, and transformed them into a broader story, with a fictional kidney recipient at the heart of it. There are many specifics to the real-life story of Larson’s writing process to be parsed, and I don’t think she comes off well in the end, but I do think her storytelling had a higher aim than Harlowe’s novel.
Storytelling has exploded and fragmented across the internet in our uber-connected world. Anyone with a social media platform can easily share their perspective in telling a story, and nosy people like me can easily dive into the accounts of multiple unreliable narrators whenever there’s a controversy like Consensual Hex. Most Goodreads reviewers who have caught wind of these accusations are blisteringly angry, affronted at an invasion of privacy and dignity that likely occurred, but these reviewers can’t verify.
I must stress this: I do not know Amanda Harlowe. I don’t know Sunny, or Izzy or Ash. I don’t know “the truth.” Writing has always been influenced by authors’ surroundings and acquaintances, and I won’t condemn every story that includes strains of real-life happenings. To do so would probably be to condemn most every novel ever written. But, there is healthy art and unhealthy art. There is art that transforms and art that contemptuously mimics. Consensual Hex seems to be the latter. A review left by Goodreads user Mrs. Basil models a pretty good litmus test:
“There is a deep bitterness toward these thinly fictionalized characters on the part of the protagonist and the author that overpowers any semblance of plot, and makes it feel clear that this is more about the author’s unprocessed attachment to and resentment of former friendships than it is about witchcraft, social justice, or survivors of sexual assault.”
In trying to determine if writing about former friends in a nasty way was enough of a moral transgression for me to stop reading the book, I remembered why I started my internet research in the first place. Consensual Hex was strange from the start, and as a reader, I could tell it wasn’t written in good faith. Whether or not Harlowe is a bad art friend, I’m not qualified to say, but Consensual Hex certainly is bad art.
Barnard Street Tattler 