Y
OU 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, ampli-
fying 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 con-
sequences 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 con-
firming Supreme Court judges who have abused women.
My e-mail to Kristina initiated a long exchange be-
tween 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 re-
sponding to—and deepening—the conversation? We
need a book, she said. When she asked me to be the edi-
tor, I could not have been more thrilled.
Books invite concentrated focus and offer an immer-
sive experience. Kristina and I both believed that giving
physical form to a revolution that lived predominantly on
the Internet would be a meaningful act.
At that time, the end of 2017, the stories of beautiful
actresses, most of whom were white and straight, domi-
nated the forming narrative (even though a Black woman,
Tara na Bu rke, fou nded t he #MeToo movement in 20 06).
It felt essential to me—as a queer woman, as a writer who
immigrated to this country at age twenty-five, and also as aSHELLY ORIA is the author
of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2014) and the collaborative
digital novella CLEAN,
commissioned by WeTransfer
and McSweeney’s, which
received two Lovie Awards
from the International
Academy of Digital Arts
and Sciences. Her fiction
has appeared in the Paris
Review and elsewhere. She is
the editor of Indelible in the
Hippocampus (McSweeney’s,
2019), an anthology of
#MeToo fiction, nonfiction,
and poetry. Her website is
http://www.shellyoria.com.WRITINGS FROM THE #METOO MOVEMENTIndelible in the
Hippocampus
Life
THE LITERARY39 POETS & WRITERS^t^ k
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