#WritersCoffeeClub 21. What can a reader know to be true about you from your work?
readers will probably get a general idea of my politics. tyranny is bad, as are racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on. knowledge is better than ignorance, intelligence and reason are important virtues.
but i think there is a limit to what you can infer about a writer from their works. to paraphrase Virginia Woolf (herself a flawed person), a writer can have 'sensitivity to the crepitations of a leaf, but not the needs of his wife and child.' there are many writers throughout history whose works have more humane values than they had in real life. probably the most well known modern example of this is JKR, whose Harry Potter books' liberal values advocate for kindness and the acceptance of difference, in a way that is markedly at odds with her anti-trans rampages.
(it's popular for people to point to the books' moral impurities as signs that They Were Evil All Along, but i honestly think these are revisionist readings that are coloured by hindsight. i found way worse values in the text of Terry Pratchett, which doesn't seem to have translated into the same kind of real world cruelty.)
ig 🏳️🌈
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2026-09-21 04:16:59 UTC
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