Indelible in the Hippocampus

YOU know the beginning: In October 2017, a major newspaper broke a story about a famous producer—a serial predator, a man who wears his ugly on his skin—and our communal ether filled with women’s voices sharing private horrors, amplifying and echoing one another’s words, all stamped with a hashtag. I’d recently finished writing a short story about a woman who murders men, a tale about the potential consequences of sexual harassment, and I e-mailed Kristina Kearns, then executive director of McSweeney’s, asking if she’d like to publish it. I used the words quick and soon. I used the word timeliness. I thought, “How many news cycles do we have left?” I assumed that in a week the hashtag would stop trending and the world would resume its collective lack of interest in everything it revealed. I spent those early days of #MeToo feeling devastated in advance.

Sometimes I laugh at my 2017 self for her fear. Here we are two years later and that news cycle still hasn’t ended; it birthed a global movement. But most of the time I’m still scared—that we’ll stop trying to change the reality we exposed or that we’ll keep trying and ultimately fail. That our country will keep electing presidents and confirming Supreme Court judges who have abused women.

My e-mail to Kristina initiated a long exchange between us about the role art and literature should play in a crucial cultural moment. What is the point of being a publisher or editor, Kristina asked me, if one isn’t responding to—and deepening—the conversation? We need a book, she said. When she asked me to be the editor, I could not have been more thrilled.

Books invite concentrated focus and offer an immersive experience. Kristina and I both believed that giving physical form to a revolution