A man tried to shame an NC author’s tweet. She turned it into a bookselling success
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any woman in possession of a social media account must be in want of a random guy to comment on it.
Those opinions are not asked for, but boy, are they given. The replies can touch on anything: appearance, behavior, the way you share your thoughts or post photos of yourself. Some of us are better at telling them off than others. Monica Byrne is one of those people.
Byrne, a Durham resident and the author of a fairly-new book, has been outspoken and an advocate for herself since she was a child, and often does so virtually. So when a random Twitter user decided to reprimand her this month, she was immediately ready to fire back.
In mid-March, Byrne wrote a tweet she didn’t think much of: “ah that time of the month when you laugh slightly and now have to change your underwear.” Within 15 minutes, a Twitter user known as @BryceLandArt responded that this was “not a good way to promote a book.” Byrne immediately responded with an expletive, but told herself she could do better. She deleted it and crafted something that stuck:
This time, she repeated the expletive and added “choke on a spoon, Bryce. There, how’s that”
She screenshotted the exchange and tweeted it to her thousands of followers with the caption, “men try to advise me.” She says that in spite of her regular comebacks to men, this one seemed to resonate with the greater virtual community. People started liking and retweeting.
Then, they started buying books.
“It really resonated with people; ‘choke on a spoon’ resonated with people,” Byrne says. “And then people started saying, ‘I’m proving you wrong, Bryce. This is actually a great way to sell a book. Here’s my receipt.’ And then I kept getting dozens of replies like that.”
In the course of 36 hours, Byrne’s book The Actual Star rose to number one on Amazon’s LGBTQ+ science fiction and transgender fiction bestseller lists. It was number eight on the alternate history science fiction list as a book, and number two on the audiobook version of the same category (the number one spot was a Stephen King novel).
Coincidentally, The Actual Star focuses a lot on bodies and shame. It’s a science fiction novel set over three millennia, from the Maya in 1012 to Minnesota in 2012 to an imagined, hopeful 3012, where, among other freedom from constraint, having a body and enjoying sex does not come with a sense of shame. Byrne wrote the future millennia as a direct response to the 2016 election, and the long history of U.S. shortcomings.
“[It was] me reading those headlines and then going to my computer and thinking, ‘How would all of this be undone from the very roots?’ and writing that future,” Byrne says. “And it means everything coming apart.”
The Actual Star’s main character, Leah, exists in 2012 with an immunity to shame surrounding sex and bodies. In the future, she is considered a saint: the Rule of Saint Leah, a set of guidelines for a futuristic religion, provides the framework for the nomadic, anarchist culture. When writing Leah, Byrne says she tried to envision living in her body, and feeling that freedom.
“I needed to reimagine that possibility for myself, and for other young women,” she says. “And just imagining a body that doesn’t feel guilt; that was really important to me.”
Now, Byrne is compiling research for her next novel, a science-fiction love story set in a version of her hometown where time is nonlinear. As for The Actual Star, Bryce’s comment was the perfect way to find her target readership.
“Many people’s first impulse is to silence any talk of bodies, which is what this guy’s impulse was,” she says. “‘Do not talk about women’s bodies publicly.’” But, she says: “It is incredibly important and I will keep doing it.”
This story was originally published March 24, 2022 at 2:29 PM with the headline "A man tried to shame an NC author’s tweet. She turned it into a bookselling success."
