Week Seven - Prompt Response

My work is corporate, and therefore has never really been affected by author controversies. However, on a personal note, in 2018 I found out that I had been accepted into IU's MLS program (I later paused my degree to accommodate work and switched over to IUPUI...but that's neither here nor there). I was so thrilled - I'd always loved libraries, and had been rudderless in my career for a while. To celebrate, some friends and family went to the Indianapolis Central Library that night for an event - a book reading and Q&A with an author, along with some passed appetizers and wine. A perfect way to start my future librarian life. The author was Junot Díaz. I thought his writing was amazing, and the experience of hearing him read in the absolutely breathtaking space that is the Central Library on that particularly meaningful day actually brought me to tears. I bought one of his books, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, and fell in love with it. I stood in line and shook his hand. It was one of the best days of my life. 

No more than a month later, the news broke about his #metoo moment, the allegations that he had sexually harassed and made aggressive and misogynistic comments to several women. I was devastated. It wasn't only that I'd enjoyed his work and now had to grapple with the never-ending question of how to enjoy the great art of terrible people (which is a common dilemma). It was that the beautiful moment I'd had was turned into ash. I can still look back on that day and remember that I was happy, but it no longer makes me happy to think about it. I felt physically sick reading the allegations. I felt like something important had been taken from me, and I was angry at Díaz himself for taking it. 

To take a Readers' Advisory lesson from this experience, I believe that librarians should be aware that readers often have emotional connections to books they've read, and that they might experience a lot of grief when they feel that they can no longer support or love certain works or authors who were once special to them in some way. Those can be tough conversations. I think, in that moment, if I had gone to a librarian for an RA interview I would have loved it if the librarian had worked with me to find other, less known authors that similarly explored Dominican heritage and toxic masculinity and all of the themes that made Oscar Wao such a powerful read. 

A quote from the Vox article in our assigned reading this week made me think of that sort of RA work as a form of healing. As horrible as it is when a beloved author, especially one who is seen as representative of a community, falls from grace, "'[...]it can also be a moment to open up our shelves to other writers from these communities'" (Underwood, 2018).