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I had planned to sit down today and give you guys the Handbook For Con Artists recap you crave, but a Twitter conversation prompted me to write this post, which has been coming for a while. I’ve talked on social media (and maybe here) about the fact that my teenaged son is autistic. And I’ve finally got the courage to say that I am, too. I am autistic.

This might have been why I didn’t consider the possibility that my son was autistic until he was seven years old and someone suggested it to me. A lot of the things he did at a young age, like flapping his hands and walking on his toes, melting down when he was overstimulated, becoming passionately engrossed in specific singular interests that could change in an instant, and other behaviors I won’t go into just, you know, because it’s not entirely my stuff to share, were things I had done when I was child, and I wasn’t autistic, so it never occurred to me that he was anything other than neurotypical. Even after diagnosis, I assumed that those were things neurotypical children all had in common and that other things “made” him autistic.

Now, I look back at my own childhood, much of which I don’t remember accurately due to my inability to recall what parts were real and what parts have been obscured by the elaborate fantasies I’d constructed. I was the weird kid in middle school, so I retreated into my head. While I sat at my desk physically, in my mind I was in my “head house,” a space that I constructed after learning about something called the method of loci (not to be confused with the genetics term loci). To this day, when I’m stressed almost to my breaking point, bored to the edge of literal tears, or caught in a situation I don’t want to be in, I fully check out of reality and go there. It’s not a case of idly daydreaming; I am completely immersed in that world and fully absent from this one. It has evolved over time, the decor has changed slightly, and there’s a big giant button on the wall that turns off intrusive thoughts if I push it. It’s a great self-preservation strategy that had a disastrous effect on my education. Teachers asked me why I wasn’t paying attention, why I wasn’t turning in my homework, why I wasn’t completing tests. I couldn’t give them an honest explanation. I told them what they wanted to hear because I already knew I was “a handful,” but lying to them because I thought I was giving the right answer made me even more of a handful, and I couldn’t figure out why.

“Jenny’s a wonderful girl. So imaginative. But she’s a handful.” I’d heard that so many times. Once, back in my elementary school days, I was playing with my cousins after Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s house. Seemingly out of nowhere, one of my uncles became furious at me. I didn’t know why; his kids and I had been playing a game where I was a mad scientist, one of us was an Igor, and one of us was a zombie creature that didn’t have a brain. To this day, I have no clue what I did wrong. Maybe I was too loud and obnoxious. Maybe I hurt one of my cousin’s feelings and didn’t notice, which I was prone to do because I didn’t understand which actions resulted in which reactions. What I do know is that one second we were playing and having fun, and the next my uncle stood up and said, “I’ve had it with that god damn kid!” and stormed out. Everyone sat around stunned. I was humiliated, but I didn’t feel like I deserved to cry, though I wanted to. My mother was furious with my aunt and uncle for weeks. My grandmother fielded hours of mediation phone calls over the incident. That became kind of a hallmark of my otherwise happy childhood: somehow, I would do something wrong, an adult would shout at me in front of people, and I would go off on my own away from the other kids because I saw how much my badness hurt the relationships in my family.

In second grade, I was diagnosed with ADD, like so many kids of my generation, and fed a steady diet of Ritalin. I’m not anti-pharmaceuticals as they’re used today––for god’s sake, take your pills, no matter what indie movies say––but I do believe that Ritalin was over-prescribed in the 1980s as a sort of “make your kid a behave” pill, based on anecdotal evidence from other people my age. Though Ritalin was supposed to make me focus, it did basically nothing. I ended up in some kind of group therapy situation where we all learned coping skills, and that worked better than anything. It was like a guidebook on how to be a normal kid. All I had to do was painstakingly imitate the way other people were acting? I could do that! I loved acting! It didn’t fix everything, but adults stopped yelling and I didn’t get into trouble as much, except where education was involved.

Again, this is stuff I still do. I recently told a friend about one of my most secret desires: to successfully say, “Don’t eat that, it’s horrible,” as a compliment. You know, the way people will tell someone, “Oh, don’t eat any of that, it’s just horrible,” in a joking way that implies they don’t want anyone else to eat it because they want it all? If you’ve never botched the landing on this particular phrase, trust me: there is no coming back from it. I’ve tried it on a few occasions and it did not go over well. I end up replaying it over and over like a gymnast watching themselves on video to see where they made a mistake in their routine. I spend a lot of my time studying neurotypical humans and their interactions as though I’m a complete outsider to the entire species, trying to figure out how to best camouflage myself. It’s just as much work and just as alienating as it sounds. I’m always woefully behind by a decade or so of social development, it seems like. But one day, I fully believe I’ll be able to pull off a chuckle and a “don’t eat any of that, it’s just awful.” I was gently informed that most people don’t practice these types of easy social interactions with the goal of someday doing them correctly.

When my son was diagnosed, I began to seek out other parents of autistic children, because it was something I was told would be very important in helping me “deal” with my child. I didn’t see what I needed to “deal” with; as far as I knew, he was growing up exactly the way I did. I mean, how could I really be sure he was autistic? He was just like me and (all together now), I wasn’t autistic.

One of the things I noticed very early on was that “autism warrior mommies” (and yes, there are people who call themselves that) were easily sorted into three camps. One type became so obsessed with their child’s autism that having an autistic child became their identity and the kid was kind of an afterthought if they were a thought at all. Or, they suddenly started diagnosing their neurotypical children with autism in a sort of Munchausen-by-proxy-by-proxy kind of deal; when the kids would be evaluated and deemed neurotypical, whoever administered the evaluation didn’t know what they were talking about, didn’t listen to parents, shouldn’t be in that profession, had a personal vendetta, etc. Then there was the third kind of parent: the self-diagnosing autism mom.

A note here: Some parents do have to fight to get their kids a diagnosis when resources are denied by schools and government programs. Some parents are autistic and don’t know it until their children are diagnosed, specifically because healthcare providers and educators weren’t as familiar with autism in previous generations as they are now. But as someone who has spent a lifetime carefully studying humans, I feel I can say with confidence that some people are just insistent on being the center of the universe. And that’s pretty evident with some of the self-diagnosing autism warrior mommies. I became highly suspicious of some mothers who would self-diagnose, then start speaking with authority on their children’s’ experiences, even if those children were able to communicate their ideas, feelings, and opinions themselves. They asserted themselves as experts on autism and would become intensely defensive if another autistic person contradicted them or suggested they not share intimate details of their child’s life online. One self-diagnosed woman in a Facebook group graphically described her seventeen-year-old son’s toilet accidents and admitted that he didn’t want her to continue doing it, but she asserted that she was “far more autistic than him,” and therefore had the right to do so. I began to see self-diagnosis as fake and selfish, an attempt by a parent to center themselves when their child was getting too much attention or starting to rebel in the ways children are supposed to rebel.

I wondered why any of these “autism warrior mommies” couldn’t understand that their kids were people. That no tragedy had befallen their families. That they had never been guaranteed a neurotypical child, and that the idea of an autism “cure” was abhorrent when there were already constructive therapies and special education programs that could improve the quality of life for autistic people living in an unforgiving and aggressively neurotypical world. So much of their “activism” was performative and self-pitying. It was never about autistic people at all, but all the ways neurotypical people were burdened by the existence of them. Why couldn’t they see that?

Earlier this year, someone tweeted a link to a diagnostic tool being developed to evaluate adults for autism. I’m not entirely sure about all the specifics about it, but from my understanding, they were looking for both neurotypical people and people on the spectrum to take an online test to…I don’t know. See if their test worked? I’m not a scientist, so I have no idea. I thought, “okay, I’ll bite,” and took the test. When I say “online test,” I’m not talking about some kind of thirteen question, Buzzfeed-esque “design your dream wedding and we’ll guess how autistic you are” quiz. I recognized a lot of the questions from the tests administered to my son and the exhaustive questionnaires my husband and I’d had to fill out during the process. When the results were displayed, it didn’t say “YOU GOT: AUTISM!” with a twee description and a gif from The Gilmore Girls or anything. It just suggested consulting a professional and showed me that my final scores were about a hundred points over the threshold they were using to describe neurotypical people in their diagnostic criteria.

I called my friend Bronwyn Green immediately. “Do I seem autistic to you?” I demanded, and she said yes. I asked why she didn’t tell me: “If I thought you seemed autistic, it would have been the first thing I said to you! I would have been like, ‘hey, you seem autistic!'” She said, “Jen?” and waited silently for me to make the connection. And then the connections kept coming. I showed my husband the scores and he said, “Yeah? You’re autistic.” It was some kind of open secret I had never been in on. And soon, I was a self-diagnosing autism mommy. And I hated it.

Here’s where things really go sideways to me: I believe it when autistic people tell me they’re autistic, even if they’re self-diagnosed. If someone is suffering from anxiety, depression, OCD and they self-diagnose it? It makes perfect sense to me. But it picks away at me to think that maybe I’ve gaslighted myself into becoming self-diagnosing autism mommy. Occasionally, it occurs to me that maybe there’s such a thing as autismdar. Like gaydar, but for autism. I maintain that LGBQA+* identifying people have an innate ability to tell if other people are straight or “one of us” after years of painstakingly pretending to be heterosexual while we’re closeted. Is the same true for autism? Is the reason I resent and doubt the mothers who use their self-diagnosis as both a weapon and a shield because I’ve spent so many years studying neurotypical people as a means of protective camouflage that I can now spot them from a mile away? I’ve met parents who self-diagnosed and thought, “Yeah, sounds about right,” while others I’ve rolled my eyes at and thought, “Yeah, right.” What creates the difference? I can’t diagnose them, so why do I doubt some people but not others?

At this point, you might be rolling your eyes at me and thinking, “Yeah, right.” Because a lot of the times, I’m doing that, too. Despite all the evidence, despite it seeming absolutely natural and right to me to think, “I am autistic,” I worry that those moms who say, “Well, I’m autistic and I support Autism Speaks!” or “I was autistic, until I started focusing on my gut health,” feel like it’s natural and right, too. I’m not the gatekeeper of autism. I don’t know who is. Do I have the right to doubt some self-diagnoses but believe others? Do I even have the right to diagnose myself?

In the middle of all of this soul-searching, two books have been hot topics in the literary world. One of them, written by a woman referred to as the Elmo Mom, details all the ways she’s using “exposure therapy” (i.e., dragging her screaming, terrified child into situations that traumatize him) to right the wrong the universe did when it saddled her with an autistic son. In it, she daydreams about abandoning her son to have a new and better life with her neurotypical daughter. She expresses open hatred and abusive, neglectful behaviors then tries to justify them by imploring the reader to consider her own pain. She relates “and the whole bus clapped”-style anecdotes about kindly strangers coming to her rescue and praising her for her saintliness. She recently wrote an online essay about bystanders cruelly judging her for bodily wrestling her resisting, screaming child into a Sesame Street Live performance, asserting that her son has every right to be there. She never considers that he has every right to not be there, as well. In the end, he does sit through the performance, and she receives her reward: an hour or so of being able to deny that her son has autism.

Another book, the title of which I’ve forgotten, is the memoir of a woman who has no qualms about stating that she plans to have her autistic teen sterilized, lest he impregnate someone and she’s forced to deal with it. You’ll have to forgive me for not looking up this title and author; I just can’t handle reading her sickening garbage, yet I’ll still find myself compelled to.

Several readers of this blog have contacted me about these books, wondering if I would write a post about them or bring attention to them on social media. Like a coward, I ignored those emails. If you were a person who contacted me and didn’t receive a reply, I apologize for my rudeness, but this is all fresh and raw to me. It’s not that I’m struggling with the tragedy of finding out I’m autistic. That part of the experience is very much like the time I found out I have a deformed blood vessel in my brain. It was a thing I didn’t know, then I knew it, but ultimately it hasn’t demonstrated any impact on my life, so it’s just a thing that is. Realizing that I’m autistic was just a moment of, “Oh. Okay, that actually explains a lot of stuff.” It didn’t change who I am as a person or how I view myself. But it very much changes the way I view the people in my life during my childhood.

Now, when I read the disgusting thoughts of the autism warrior mommies who write their memoirs about how sad and tragic their children have made their lives I see myself in the role of that child, rather than as a parent criticizing another parent. I read about Elmo Mom fantasizing about abandoning her child for a better one and wonder if my mother had those same thoughts. Being the consequence of an unintended pregnancy had already put those seeds of doubt in my mind with regards to whether my mom ever regretted having me because of the life she might have had otherwise. It never occurred to me to worry that she might have regretted having me due to me not coming out as advertised. It never once crossed my mind to view my family with suspicion, to think that they might not have been annoyed or disdainful of my behaviors because I was a handful, but because of circumstances that were out of my control. And never in my life have I ever considered that I might have been in danger from the adults who had to care for me. All of this has made me think things about people I love that I don’t want to think. And for that reason, I’ve been unable to write about or think too deeply about these horrible, abusive women who have monetized hating their children.

This post might be super ableist. I can’t tell. It might be unfair of me to opt out of autism activism when other people can’t. That’s a valid criticism. Right now, I’m not even entirely comfortable labeling myself as autistic without some kind of paperwork or certificate to prove it, but I’m unable to separate myself out as an ally, either. I’m interested to hear from those of you who are actually autistic if you’re comfortable sharing your thoughts on self-diagnosis in the comments, whether you’re formally diagnosed or self-diagnosed. It’s a strange experience to be the same person you were yesterday, yet doubt everything about the narrative of your life story today.

*The “T” in LGBTQA+ was removed because I was speaking specifically about sexuality and I don’t know if transgender people have a gaydar equivalent. I excluded the T from the acronym so as not to make assumptions or erase heterosexual transgender people.

Hark, all ye citizens of Trout Nation! There won’t be posts this week because I’m not only hard at work on the next Ian and Penny novels, but I’m also knee deep in tech week for Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery at the Kalamazoo Civic Theater. I’m a dresser (a person who stands backstage and helps actors change their clothes quickly), and that’s a big job on this show, where five actors play forty characters!

If you’re in the Kalamazoo area, I highly encourage you to come check out the show. It’s funny and farcical and I’m snort-laughing backstage every night. For tickets and more information, please visit here.

Next week there’ll be another installment of The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met, as well as True Blood Tuesday, Handbook For Mortals, and hopefully a Big Damn Rewatch post.

Every year, I make a post where I highlight what I believe to be my very best posts from the year. But this year, I’m not sure I had that many truly “good” posts. Yet so many of you continue to visit and support this site. I’m blessed by your continued presence and participation, but I’ve obviously lost my drive and focus, not just here, but in my fiction writing, too. So, with that in mind, I’m going to try to enter 2018 with new drive.

That said, here is the Trout Nation year in review:

January

I re-released Surrender, a book of my heart that I poured massive research into only to see the publisher crash and burn a few short years later.

I ranked every song in Galavant, a stunning work of epic silliness that you should definitely watch if you haven’t already.

Chronic pain patients were thoroughly insulted by Veronica Roth’s Carve The Mark, a New York Times bestseller filled to the brim with racism and ableism.

February

I offered some helpful tips to the jackass journalists gleefully using Fifty Shades Darker as a vehicle for their desire to demean women.

And I offered some helpful terminology to enhance your Mario Karting experience.

Have a writing question? This is when The Big Damn Writer Question Box debuted.

March

People with enough time on their hands to obsess over wanting to break up an actor’s marriage decided I was a terrible person. Captain Kirk was on my side, though.

Say Goodbye To Hollywood, a somewhat-inspired by Fifty Shades Of Grey novel, released.

I hated Beauty And The Beast so much that I loved it.

Abortion was a big theme in March, with my stance on cis male allies and a review of a fantastic HBO documentary posting within days of each other.

April

I got plagiarized. Again. This has got to stop happening. Luckily, you all had my back.

I showed you how to make a waffle, via a weird video.

May

My mental health took a crash.

And I absolutely had it with MAGA and their fake concern for the LGBTQA+ community.

Why even are male writers? And other tips for incorporating bear-death into your writing career.

June

Wonder Woman was, despite popular criticism, really darn queer.

Did you know that panhandlers make more than minimum wage workers do?

July

Twitter continued to protect Nazis.

My daughter’s reaction to Jodie Whittaker’s casting as the Thirteenth Doctor went viral. I even got interviewed about Doctor Who on BBC Radio, so basically that was a dream come true.

My husband had a problem with my proposed career change, and we made another waffle!

August

Neil and Sophie returned in The Sister. Sadly, it didn’t become a legitimate New York Times bestseller like Handbook For Mortals did.

September

We finished our re-watch of Buffy season three and started season four. Which seemed like a perfect time to come clean about some weird shit I keep in my office.

October

I got the opportunity to review Una, one of my favorite films of 2017.

We dove into a parallel rewatch of Angel. I’m pretty sure I messed up the title on that recap.

November

I started an ongoing series about the worst person I’ve ever met.

December

Bronwyn Green Leslie Knope-d the absolute fuck out of Christmas, but even her beautiful gift was nothing compared to the blessed visit from our favorite con artist, Zade Sarem.

So, here we go, into 2018 and a brave new world of however this plays out. Thanks as always for going on this incredibly weird journey with me.

Yesterday, someone left a comment on one of my Handbook For Mortals recaps.

Actually, I work in a Vegas show on the strip and yes this kind of stuff does happen. Automation is a fairly new thing (last 15 years) and doesn’t work properly all the time. Also, performers in Cirque and Cirque type shows get injured all the time. If you think an investigation of that kind would happen every time there was a serious injury well we would be doing that every day. That is why we get paid well. Most of us are athletes, a lot of us Olympic athletes and we know what we signed up for. Injuries happen during the shows all the time. We are doing crazy stuff and it’s dangerous that’s why people pay a lot of money to see it. People get injured during the show and you don’t even know and we keep going. We don’t stop the show. The one and only time someone fell to their death was actually during KA. DURING A ACTUAL PERFORMANCE IN FRONT OF A AUDIENCE. They witnessed it even…I think the show was back in a day or so. Accidents that happen during rehearsal that only leads to injury an injury like this, wouldn’t even stop the show that night. The show must go one is a real thing in our world.

I have also fallen asleep in my theater before the doors. I find it odd that you tear apart something that you don’t know. You have never worked at a Vegas show (you admit that when you talk about the falling asleep in the theatre scene) yet you INSIST that’s not how this works.

Catwalks lead to platforms in these types of theaters. Perhaps, she should have described it better since most of you wouldn’t know this, but I understood exactly what she’s talking about.

If I remember reading somewhere, she lives in Vegas and works in entertainment. They say write what you know. Maybe the things she wrote are more rooted in reality than you know.

I have also run into Carrot Top (not with Wayne Newton though) in that very mall.

I don’t think this book is the greatest book of all time and I don’t think I’ve ever heard Lani compare her book to THUG. I think the story is overall fun and while if you want to run a fine tooth comb over it, you will find mistakes. You can do that with almost anything. Huge budget movies that cost over 100 million dollars have some errors. There are websites dedicated to finding them. Though those websites are more like a scavenger hunt fun type of find the error. Not a tear someone apart, the way you have engaged in here. All of you really. I bet most of you who are commenting and putting her and the book down have never even put out a book. I wonder what we could all say about your own book. Some of what Jenny says is funny but if you were actually being objective here you would point out the good stuff too. There is lots of it, but your whole point is to bring someone and their art down as much as possible. And you are criticizing her for being some kind of bad person?
You should really try checking your own moral compass here.

If you need to a place to turn for accurate helpful advice. It takes a Village. Reader Village. http://www.readervillage.com  coming soon.

Actually, I work in a Vegas show on the strip and yes this kind of stuff does happen. Automation is a fairly new thing (last 15 years) and doesn’t work properly all the time.

Also, performers in Cirque and Cirque type shows get injured all the time. If you think an investigation of that kind would happen every time there was a serious injury well we would be doing that every day. That is why we get paid well. Most of us are athletes, a lot of us Olympic athletes and we know what we signed up for. Injuries happen during the shows all the time. We are doing crazy stuff and it’s dangerous that’s why people pay a lot of money to see it.

People get injured during the show and you don’t even know and we keep going. We don’t stop the show.

The one and only time someone fell to their death was actually during KA. DURING A ACTUAL PERFORMANCE IN FRONT OF A AUDIENCE. They witnessed it even…I think the show was back in a day or so.

I find it odd that you tear apart something that you don’t know. You have never worked at a Vegas show (you admit that when you talk about the falling asleep in the theatre scene) yet you INSIST that’s not how this works.

Catwalks lead to platforms in these types of theaters. Perhaps, she should have described it better since most of you wouldn’t know this, but I understood exactly what she’s talking about.

If I remember reading somewhere, she lives in Vegas and works in entertainment. They say write what you know. Maybe the things she wrote are more rooted in reality than you know.

I have also run into Carrot Top (not with Wayne Newton though) in that very mall.

This is how I knew it was you, by the way. You’ve name dropped Carrot Top in more than one interview. We get it. You know Carrot Top. But the point wasn’t whether or not he’d be there. The point was whether or not Carrot Top and Wayne Newton would be strolling around a mall together after a publicized appearance. And I still call all the bullshit on that one.

I don’t think this book is the greatest book of all time and I don’t think I’ve ever heard Lani compare her book to THUG.

We’re in agreement on that. But while you didn’t compare your book to The Hate U Give, you have mouthed off about its author more than once, telling readers at a signing that it’s “not my fault Angie is black,” and accusing her of jealousy in a Facebook post that God and everybody saw.

I thought it was a particularly nice touch that you asked to friend someone who said that The Hate U Give is only popular because it’s anti-white people.

 I think the story is overall fun and while if you want to run a fine tooth comb over it, you will find mistakes.

You do not need a fine-toothed comb to catch your mistakes. You could run a yard rake over this book and find the mistakes. You could run a combine harvester over this thing and find mistakes, and that’s because you thought you were smarter than anyone else in the industry, that you were going to be able to easily scam readers, retailers, publishers, and Hollywood to get the movie deal you dreamed of.

Huge budget movies that cost over 100 million dollars have some errors. There are websites dedicated to finding them. Though those websites are more like a scavenger hunt fun type of find the error. Not a tear someone apart, the way you have engaged in here.

The “tear someone apart” aspect you’re seeing here is because I don’t like con artists. I don’t like scammers, I don’t like people trying to cheat their way to the top of an industry that they don’t know anything about and frankly don’t belong in because they couldn’t be bothered to pay their dues and learn just like the rest of us. I’m tearing you apart, Lani, because I don’t respect con-artists who aren’t good at conning people.

I bet most of you who are commenting and putting her and the book down have never even put out a book.

This is an author’s blog. And many of the regular commenters are authors, themselves. You would be surprised at how many people here and elsewhere on the internet are critical of you and your book because we’ve written one ourselves.

I wonder what we could all say about your own book.

I wonder, too. Why don’t you head on over to Amazon and pick up my free book, The Boss? I mean, there are already 601 reviews for it and 60% of those are five stars, leaving it with an overall rating of four-and-a-half stars. In fact, most of my books are highly rated there, but I’m sure you could find all sorts of things wrong with it. Go ahead and leave the link to your review in the comments, I would love to get some tips from a real-life bestselling author.

Some of what Jenny says is funny but if you were actually being objective here you would point out the good stuff too. There is lots of it, but your whole point is to bring someone and their art down as much as possible.

First of all, everything I say is funny, because I’m fucking hilarious. And if I were being objective, I would still struggle to find anything good to point out about your book. It was clearly written as quickly as possible by someone who was more interested in grabbing fame than actually giving readers a decent story for the ludicrous price you were charging for it. I notice you’ve changed the price on Amazon, but when I bought the ebook, it was $9.99. You’ve admitted in interviews to selling the hardcover for $35.00 at conventions. And as for bringing down someone’s art, you published a book with a cover that literally steals another artist’s art.

And you are criticizing her for being some kind of bad person?

Yes. I am absolutely criticizing you for being a bad person. Because you are. Bad people tell endless lies to paint themselves as the victim of situations they caused through their own shadiness. Which is what you do. You scammed your way onto the bestseller list. You lied repeatedly about it. You changed your lies multiple times when you got caught. You wrote an op-ed for Rolling Stone and were the subject of a lengthy feature on Vulture yet you continue to tell people that you haven’t been given a chance to tell your story. You intentionally miscategorized your book as YA when it’s clearly not, simply to take advantage of a popular genre. You talked shit about the book industry, my industry, because your scheme unraveled, but somehow that’s our fault because we don’t understand how to run things as well as you do. When none of that turned in your favor, you blamed another author for your downfall, an author who did the work and got something she deserved. And now you’re here, lying yet again because you just can’t help yourself. Lies, lies, lies, upon lies and lies and lies. You are a liar.

You are an outsider who barged in and not only wanted instant glory but a complete overhaul of publishing to suit your goals. Are there issues in the industry? Yes. Were you the scam-artist savior we needed? No, and nobody fucking asked you for your opinion or your overpriced, under-edited dreck that you insist deserves a place beside legitimate books and legitimate authors.

The worst part about all of this? You think we’re dumb enough to believe you. You think we’re dumb enough not to see through your ineptitude.

You insult authors.

You insult readers.

You insult the entire publishing industry.

That’s why people don’t like you. You’re an egotistical, delusional liar who can’t even pull off a convincing sock puppet on the internet.

You should really try checking your own moral compass here.

Just checked. It’s pointing directly to the magnetic pole of fuck you and the pseudo-famous friends whose coattails you rode in on. You and your technicolor dream hair can stay the entire fuck away from my blog from now on.

PS. When you’re trying to stage a fake picture of your book in a bookstore, Sarem doesn’t fall alphabetically between Lowry and Lieu.

Hey guys! This is a short update. If you follow me on Twitter, you have heard of my shitty weekend. Two cars, a refrigerator, my laptop and the only keyboard in the house compatible with my iMac broke. the fuck. down. Seriously. Then last night, our Kindle Fire remote stopped working and poor Mr.Jen was like, “WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO US?!” But he’s been pretty dramatic recently, anyway.

The point is, the reason I haven’t had a Handbook For Mortals post this week so far is that I was having to use text-to-speech to write it, which makes everything take roughly twelve times longer than just typing. Trying to finagle rides for kids to appointments and activities without a car was equally time-consuming. Now, the reason I’m telling you all of this is that I’ve been very open with my mental health issues and I don’t want anyone to think I’m sliding back down to the low point I was at earlier in the year. I’m fine, just everything I own is broken.

That said, tomorrow there’ll be a Handbook For Mortals recap instead of the advice column, and then next week hopefully everything will be calmed down and returned to normal. In the meantime, I expressed myself through the medium of video. Please watch me talk about my creepy Anthony Head memorabilia collection:

Apologies in advance for the lack of captions. When I have a working keyboard, I will absolutely add some.

Anyway, I should have a new keyboard today, USPS willing. Cross your parts for me.

In every generation, there is a chosen one. She alone has a zit on the side of her head that just will not go away. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

1. Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
2. Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
3. Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
4. Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
5. Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
6. The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
7. All the monsters look like wieners.
8. If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
9. Angel is a dick.
10. Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
11. Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
12. Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
13. Science and technology are not to be trusted.
14. Mental illness is stigmatized.
15. Only Willow can use a computer.
16. Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
17. Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
18. Oz is the Anti-Xander
19. Spike is capable of love despite his lack of soul
20. Don’t freaking tell me the vampires don’t need to breathe because they’re constantly out of frickin’ breath.
21. The foreshadowing on this show is freaking amazing.
22. Smoking is evil.
23. Despite praise for its positive portrayal of non-straight sexualities, some of this shit is homophobic as fuck.
24. How do these kids know all these outdated references, anyway?
25. Technology is used inconsistently as per its convenience in the script.
26. Sunnydale residents are no longer shocked by supernatural attacks.
27. Casual rape dismissal/victim blaming a-go-go
28. Snyder believes Buffy is a demon or other evil entity.
29. The Scoobies kind of help turn Jonathan into a bad guy.
30. This show caters to the straight/bi female gaze like whoa.
31. Sunnydale General is the worst hospital in the world.
32. Faith is hyper-sexualized needlessly.
33. Slut shame!
34. The Watchers have no fucking clue what they’re doing.
35. Vampire bites, even very brief ones, are 99.8% fatal.
36. Economic inequality is humorized and oversimplified.

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it.

In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone is seriously, so bloated from pie right now. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

1. Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
2. Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
3. Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
4. Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
5. Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
6. The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
7. All the monsters look like wieners.
8. If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
9. Angel is a dick.
10. Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
11. Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
12. Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
13. Science and technology are not to be trusted.
14. Mental illness is stigmatized.
15. Only Willow can use a computer.
16. Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.
17. Cheap laughs and desperate grabs at plot plausibility are made through Xenophobia.
18. Oz is the Anti-Xander
19. Spike is capable of love despite his lack of soul
20. Don’t freaking tell me the vampires don’t need to breathe because they’re constantly out of frickin’ breath.

Have I missed any that were added in past recaps? Let me know in the comments.  Even though I might forget that you mentioned it.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it. 
Before we go any further with this recap, I need to share my gender swap Giles cosplay with you all: You can’t see it in the picture, but underneath that tight white shirt, I’m wearing a leopard print bra. Because you know Giles has a little freak in him. Also, yes. That is the Handbook for The Recently Deceased in my hand. It seems like a Watcher would have a copy of that for emergencies.

In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will finish Hemlock Grove and sit there for an hour going, “What the hell did I just watch?” She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

1. Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
2. Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
3. Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
4. Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
5. Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
6. The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
7. All the monsters look like wieners.
8. If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
9. Angel is a dick.
10. Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
11. Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
12. Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
13. Science and technology are not to be trusted.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it.


The episode opens with Cordelia and Harmony strolling the hall with some random guy who has his arm around Cordelia. They’re talking about the Spring Fling dance that’s coming up, and how Cordelia is having her dress specially made. And I have this painful and crushing memory of what a bitch I was in high school, when I had my prom dress specially made to copy one that Nicole Kidman wore in Vogue, because I thought I was that damn special. With the money I spent on it, I probably could have bought someone else a dress and a prom ticket. God, teen me sucked.

Anyway, the guy walking with Cordelia says she should wear a dress that’s blue like her eyes, and Cordy points out that her eyes are hazel. She also calls him Helen Keller, and I’m like, “No, Cordy! Bad Cordy!” and I smack her cute little nose with a rolled up newspaper.

Ever the sycophant, Harmony is quick to tell Cordelia and this dude that they’re going to look awesome when Cordy is May Queen. Cordelia is trying to downplay her chances, in a really phony, self-gratifying way when Buffy spills her ass into frame. You know, for a slayer, she’s kind of clumsy, isn’t she? I mean, she can do all this cool arial kick fighting shit, but this is at least the second time she’s tripped and spilled all her weapons out.

Buffy: “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing with this stuff, huh?”

Cordelia: “Wow! I’m not.”

Buffy: “Uh, for history class. Mr. Giles has this, like, hobby of collecting stuff, which he lent me… for… show-and-tell. Did I mention it was for history class?”

If anyone in Sunnydale isn’t guilty of #8, it’s Harmony, who says:

Harmony: “She is always hanging with that creepy librarian in that creepy library.”

Unfortunately, I’m betting money that Harmony isn’t creeped by inappropriate student/teacher relationships, just the fact that Buffy seems to have an interest in knowledge and learning. Still, she shows more self-awareness of the situation than any of the faculty members or Buffy’s own mom.

Cordy, the random dude, and Harmony all walk off laughing at Buffy and the time she attacked Cordelia at The Bronze, and Buffy looks all dejected and hopeless.

In English class, Cordelia answers a question about The Merchant of Venice by calling Shylock self-involved and too wrapped up in his own oppression to see the pain of other, less oppressed people. Did I mention she’s saying this to a woman of color? Because she’s saying it to a woman of color, who appears to be not real impressed:

Cordelia: “People who think their problems are so huge craze me. Like this time I sort of ran over this girl on her bike. It was the most traumatizing event of my life, and she’s trying to make it about her leg. Like my pain meant nothing.”

You want to imagine something wretched? There are probably people who were like, “Yeah, right on!” when they watched this for the first time. Probably the same people who agree with Spike and Giles on the subject of Native American oppression in season four.

But we’ll get there.

The teacher looks super relieved when the bell rings, but when Cordelia approaches her to talk about her final paper, the teacher congratulates her on her “good observations” in class, and Willow does the most epic background eye-roll ever caught on film:

Xander: “What kind of moron would want to be May Queen, anyway?”

And Buffy looks like this:

Snyder: “Where do you think you’re going?”

Buffy: “Um, Mitch wanted me to get his comb. He- He likes his comb.”

Snyder: “I don’t think Mitch needs his comb right now. I think Mitch needs medical attention, and you need to stay away from the crime scene. Always sticking your nose in.”

Man, the Buffster is really not on her game this episode. I mean, of course she was going to get caught. Look how close she was to Snyder when she said she was going to go check out the scene:

Giles “It’s a bit of a puzzle, really. I’ve never actually heard of anyone attack by a lone baseball bat before.”

Xander: “Maybe it’s a vampire bat.”

And this is the response he gets:

Whatever, Xander. I thought your pun was masterful. You combined my love of grisly murder and my love of baseball in a way a baseball bat normally couldn’t. Or… no, you know what, baseball bats can do the grisly murder on their own, can’t they? Especially in Sunnydale.

Giles suggests a few options. Either the bat is possessed, someone is pulling a Carrie, or they’ve got an angry ghost on their hands. Though I’m not sure how angry a ghost you would have to be to give in to the temptation of beating Mitch nearly to death. He gave off a real date-rapey frat jock vibe. If I were a ghost, I’d probably have taken a few swings at him.

Buffy tells Willow that compiling a list of dead and missing students would be a good start. Yeah, Willow, get right on that, and in forty years when you’re done, we’ll pick up the investigation. Giles asks Xander to help with research, but Xander isn’t keen on doing anything extracurricular with regards to vampire slaying. He says he wants Buffy’s job of asking around to find out what happened to Mitch, but when she points out he’d have to talk to Cordelia, somehow Giles starts to look like the better option.

In that cool outside upstairs hallway thing Sunnydale has, Harmony finds Cordelia and asks her why she wasn’t in fifth period. Cordelia says she went to the hospital to see Mitch, and when Harmony asks if he’ll be okay, Cordelia says:

Cordelia: “Well, the doctor says he’ll be fine. They’re gonna send him home tomorrow, but you should have seen him lying there, all black and blue. How’s he gonna look in our prom pictures? How am I ever going to be able to show them to anyone?”

So, once again, Cordelia isn’t concerned about someone else’s suffering, just how it affects her. Mitch was beaten and terrorized by a bat-wielding poltergeist, and Cordelia is just worried he’ll embarrass her with his terrible face. Just as Harmony comforts her about the wonders of airbrushing, we’re invited into a grainy flashback wherein Cordelia tells Harmony of her plans to date Mitch if he makes the varsity baseball team. Then we hear someone (from the POV of the camera) say hello to them, only to be cruelly rebuffed for daring to speak to them. Then we resume the scene the flashback interrupted. Buffy stops Cordelia at the top of the stairs and asks to talk to her, and Harmony is about to deliver some scathing verbal beat down when an unseen force pushes her down the stairs.

Okay, let’s leave poor Harmony falling down the stairs a minute to talk about something I feel is important. I know we’ve discussed how BtVS isn’t the icon of feminist television it gets credit for being, and there are underlying themes that really squick me out now that I’m older and, if not wiser, at least slightly less ignorant than I used to be, BUT. Harmony’s friendship with Cordelia is a part of the show I really like. Yes, Harmony joins in with Cordelia to bully people, and later she turns on her, but in the first and second seasons, we see Harmony being a caring and supportive friend to Cordy, even when she doesn’t deserve it. Should Harmony tell Cordelia to suck it up, at least she didn’t get beaten nearly to death? Well, Harmony can’t, because she’s just as selfish and short-sighted as Cordelia, but that’s beside the point. As crappy as she treats everyone who isn’t in her social sphere, Harmony displays actual care and concern for Cordelia in this episode, and this lays the groundwork for our #10.

Where were we?

As Buffy and Cordelia rush to Harmony’s aid, Snyder comes up and sees just another potential lawsuit on his hands. Cordelia insists that Harmony just fell down the stairs, but Harmony swears she was pushed. The same disembodied laughter from the locker room can be heard again, but only Buffy seems to hear it. She follows it up the stairs and sees a door closing as if it had been opened by no one at all. Inside the room, Buffy collides with something she can’t see. She investigates further, stepping into the band room, where we see a ceiling tile lifting up. Buffy calls out to whoever is there and promises she isn’t there to hurt them, she just wants to talk.

Outside the school, these two super cool characters are hanging out, trying to blend:

Giles: “A girl on campus with the ability to become invisible.”

Xander: “That is so cool!”

Willow: “Cool?”

Xander: “Well yeah, I would give anything to be able to turn invisible. I wouldn’t use my powers to beat people up. I’d use my powers to protect the girls’ locker room.”

Giles: “It must be a fairly heady experience. Having that ability.”

Buffy: “I think Cordelia’s going to be working on her May Queen dress tonight. Maybe there’ll be some action.”

Okay, in a previous scene we’ve already been told in a bit of incidental dialogue that Cordelia’s dress is finished. And also, that someone else was making it. And Cordelia is not the Molly Ringwald, make-my-own-dress-for-prom kind of quirky girl. So what does she have to work on?

The whole thing seems to be a convenient excuse for the next scene, in which Buffy looks wistfully through a window at Cordelia and her friends… well, I’m not sure what they’re doing.

And when he turns around, he sees:

Cordelia: “God! I am never sitting through another one of those alumni lectures again! Two hours of ‘My trek through Napal.’ Hello, there is nobody caring.”

Bathroom mirror Girl: “Did you guys see his toupee? I mean, it looked like a cabbage.”

Cordelia: “And those slides? ‘That’s a mountain. That’s a mountain, too. Now look at some mountains.'”

Harmony: “I swear, he had three slides and just used them over and over.”

Bathroom mirror girl: “I know, but did you see his toupee? I mean, it was like, the worst.”

Harmony: “We’re talking, okay?”

Cordelia: “Oh, and did you guys check out that extreme toupee? Yeah, that’s realistic. It looked like a cabbage.”

Why did Cordelia steal that joke? That joke wasn’t even funny. The dude is a mountain climber who went to Nepal and now does inspirational speaking. There is tons of material there. For example, right off the top of my head:

• Did he steal that toupee from the Yeti?
• What’s that toupee made out of, a Sherpa’s back hair?
• A toupee? Why? Did you have to amputate your comb-over when it got frostbite?
• Did you spend A Night on Bald Mountain? (And come on,  invisible girl is a band geek, why didn’t she immediately go for that one?

 The bathroom girl looks after the other girls adoringly as they leave, but finding herself alone again, her expression sours.

In the courtyard, in the present, Snyder is declaring Cordelia May Queen, and of course, she takes the whole thing super humbly:

Cordelia: “Being this popular is not just my right, but my responsibility.”

Xander and Willow make little, “Oh, Cordelia” faces as they pass through the courtyard to find Buffy, who’s watching the whole May Queen presentation go down. She believes Cordelia is the key to whatever is going on. Willow gives Buffy the list of dead and missing students, which is multiple pages. Because Sunnydale. #8

Definitive proof that the teen girl is an invasive species.

Willow: “Oh my god. ‘Have a nice summer.’ ‘Have a nice summer.’ This girl had no friends at all.” 

Giles: “Uh, once again I teeter at the precipice of the generation gap.”

Buffy: “‘Have a nice summer’ is what you write when you have nothing to say.”

Buffy asks Willow and Xander if they knew Marcie. They deny it, and Buffy points out that they both wrote “Have a nice summer” in Marcie’s yearbook. Okay, in Willow’s defense, she wrote “have a great summer,” but she’s still horrified to realize that they both had four classes with Marcie the year before and still have no recollection of her. Due to something Giles explains with quantum mechanics rather than mystical forces- okay, score one point against #13 on that one- that because Marcie was perceived as invisible, she became invisible.

Of course, Buffy has a throwaway line about living on a Hellmouth and mystical energy, and I’m like, come one, guys. Even the X-Files occasionally had an episode where it wasn’t aliens.

We see a flashback to Marcie in English class with the teacher she just tried to murder. Though she keeps putting her hand up, the teacher is calling on everyone except her. And then shit starts to get real:

Buffy: “This isn’t some great power that she can control. It’s something that was done to her. That we did to her.”

And as Buffy suspected, Marcie’s end goal is doing something horrible to Cordelia. This is something Cordelia has figured out, as well, and she runs into the library to beg for Buffy’s help in a way only Cordelia could:

Cordelia: “I knew you’d be here. Buffy… I, uh, I know we’ve had our differences, with you being so weird and all, and hanging out with these total losers… ooh. Well, anyway, despite all of that, I know that you share this feeling that we have for each other deep down.”

Willow: “Nausea?”

Cordelia: “Somebody is after me! They just tried to kill Mrs. Miller- she was helping me with my homework- and Mitch and Harmony… this is all about me! Me, me, me!”

Cordelia figured from the super strength, the weapons, and the fact that Buffy’s around whenever weird stuff happens, that Buffy is in a gang. She’s looking for protection, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Oh, and Giles points out that she’s never been in the library before. So, I guess Cordelia is street smart, instead of book smart. Buffy gives in and decides to help her. Despite the numerous times we’ve seen Cordelia in the same place as Marcie and interacting with her, when Buffy shows Cordelia a photo, she can’t remember Marcie.

In her hidey hole, Marcie is ranting to no one about how Cordelia and all her “slut friends” ruined Marcie’s life. She’s going to make them “learn,” and as she says this she reveals a rope and a doctor bag.

Cordelia: “Hey. You think I’m never lonely because I’m so cute and popular? I can be surrounded by people and be completely alone. It’s not like any of them really know me. I don’t even know if they like me half the time. People just want to be in a popular zone. Sometimes when I talk, everyone’s so busy agreeing with me, they don’t hear a word I say.”

Buffy: “Well if you feel so alone, then why do you work so hard at being popular?”

Cordelia: “Well it beats being alone all by yourself.”

So now we’re starting to get a sense of what Cordelia is really like. Being popular is only important to her because she’s afraid of being alone. No matter how little we care for Cordelia, we have to sympathize with her here. And as Marcie becomes more destructive, and Cordelia becomes more constructive (opening up to and trusting people who aren’t “in a popular zone”), now the audience should become less supportive of Marcie, and come over to Cordelia’s side a bit.

In the library, Xander, Giles, and Willow hear flute music, and they rush to the source, hoping to catch Marcie and, between the three of them, subdue her. But when they find the source of the music coming from a tape recorder in the school’s basement, they realize they’ve been trapped. They’re sealed in a locked room with a gas leak and the most boring flute recital recording ever.

At The Bronze, Buffy and Cordelia have woken up tied to the coronation thrones on the stage. Cordelia is panicking because she can’t feel her face. Oh, and this is also going on, so… that’s ominous:

Marcie: “You should be grateful. People who pass you on the street are gonna remember you for the rest of their lives. Children will dream about you. And every one of your friends who comes to the coronation tonight will take the sight of the May Queen to their graves.”

So, to the pain, then?

Oh, and the reason Cordy’s face is numb? It’s loaded up with local anesthetic so she can be awake for her entire disfigurement.

This is some Red Dragon shit.

While the Scoobies start to valiantly die together, Cordelia tries to talk Marcie out of Why-So-Serious-ing her:

Down in the basement, Giles has nearly succumbed to the gas, and he’s just kind of slapping at the door in futility when out of no where, Angel is there to rescue them. He arrived via basement to give Giles The Codex, and he smelled gas. Because Angel can’t breathe, he’s the perfect guy to fix the gas leak while Willow, Giles, and Xander stumble to safety, gas drunk.

Buffy decides that although she had sympathy for Marcie before, she doesn’t now because Marcie is “a thundering looney.”

You know what I want to add? #14: Mental illness is treated poorly. From everything we’ve seen in the story so far, we should hate Cordelia and love Marcie. After all, Marcie is just a vigilante, right? Getting revenge on the people who wronged her in an unfair system? Cordelia is responsible for Marcie’s invisibility, at least in part. And she’s proven to be a self-centered, cold person, despite a slightly small, kinda chewy loneliness center. But we care about her, because the last time we saw her, she was pouring her heart out as a victim of her own popularity. The last time we saw Marcie, she was raving and jabbering to herself. And nobody likes a crazy person, I think my fellow mentally ill people know that all too well. So, we wind up with our title character declaring that she can’t be sympathetic to someone who is mentally ill, and that’s a good reason to beat her up. No, Buffy. A good reason to beat her up is because she’s attempted to murder people. Not because she’s “crazy.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t the last time we’re going to see #14. It will figure in heavily in season 5, as well.

In order to fight Marcie, Buffy has a very special moment of zen that lasts five seconds, at least: