When you are cancelled, your life story is rewritten for you. Your past achievements are invalidated, your bonds of trust are broken, and the future you’d worked towards is taken away. It’s like being swept away in a tsunami and it’s vital, but very hard, to find something to cling to.
One of my most important spars, for years, was my belief that the person who initiated the split with Picador/Macmillan in December 2021 was me. In the many unmerciful hours of my despair, I’d remind myself that I’d written to my agent after the events of the Telegraph interview and the Prospect article to say I wanted my contracts to end and the copyright of all my books to be returned. Well done, Kate, I’d say to myself. That was brave. No one does that! I bet Macmillan were surprised!
Alas, in 2024 I was sent a cache of emails revealing that Macmillan hadn’t been surprised at all. They’d been planning to put my backlist out of print and immediately stop publishing the controversial memoir, Some Kids - exactly what I was suggesting myself. They were delighted I was such a pushover and thrilled to be liberated to fully condemn me. Within 24 hours of accepting my offer they were tweeting another series of apologies to the women who had called my writing ‘Nazi shit’ and ‘neon-lit white savioury fuckery’:
“Chimene Suleyman, Professor Sunny Singh and Monisha Rajesh (‘s ) readings of Kate Clanchy’s Some Kids and What They Taught Me were instructive and clear-sighted and we are devastated by the ongoing pain experienced by them.”
Frenzies of excitement, though, die down. Just days after this triumph, doubts seemed to seep in at Macmillan. They worried about losing control of me. First they asked me to say the split was ‘mutual’ and I agreed: that seemed true enough. Then they offered me a Non-Disclosure Agreement and I refused: being able to write about my experiences was the point of the deal for me. I was working on an essay about my sensitivity readers just then. I felt that it was keeping me alive.
‘Kate won’t sign an NDA and we can’t make her,’ worried the MD. But they could try. The PR team started work on a set of answers to ‘FAQs’ for after the split. They asked to me to agree to voice these answers and nothing else on the grounds it would be better for my mental health. The FAQs showed a world united in hostility to me: ‘Will the Orwell Prize be revoking the prize?’ they began. (We have to refer you to the Orwell Foundation for that, answered Imaginary Macmillan, magisterially). They went on to sly references to my brushes with suicide. ‘Did you take into account the fragile state of Kate’s mental health? Imaginary Macmillan responded caringly, but with exasperation’ What we can say is that Kate’s team at Picador provided round the clock support to her. ’
After almost no thought at all, I refused to agree to the FAQs.
After Christmas Macmillan dragged their feet in producing the legal papers. Boxes of my books arrived in my hall. Others were given to schools or pulped. Still, deadlines came and went. Macmillan gave a press release to the Bookseller for the morning of the 20th of January. In a classic bit of petty bullying, they finally produced the papers in the evening of the 19th. The papers had NDA clauses and I was still insisting they be excised late into the night.
Finally it was done and the story was out. Time for the Macmillan FAQs! But no one asked about the Orwell Prize. In fact, none of the Macmillan Qs were FA at all. All the papers wanted to know about my publishers’ weird decisions instead. Macmillan hadn’t prepped for that.
‘This (UnHerd) interview with Kate has gone live this evening, claiming all sorts of things which are libelous’. wrote the Head of Comms two days after the split. But when she looked at her records she couldn’t find the libel. I’d said that Macmillan had issued apologies without consulting me. The Head of Comms was personally responsible for that and her own emails confirmed it, plain as the nose on her face. She just hadn’t looked in a mirror for a while.
After UnHerd, The Times. This time: had Macmillan forced me to make statements? For 24 hours the PR team wrestled with their response. Brenda was convinced that showing them the tweets I’d posted on My Weird Wednesday would sort everything out. That day she’d coerced me, quite cruelly, into posting a statement a whole minute before Macmillan did. Pointing out this time difference now, Brenda believed, would show I was ‘driving’ everything. But The Times was strangely unimpressed by her time stamps. A simple thing was clear to them: Macmillan had the power, not me. In their witch hunting, Macmillan had forgotten that.
They’d forgotten other obvious things too, such as how shattering my contracts might worry their other contracted authors. Many of these started to write to them and come to the offices to complain. Someone was even rude to the CEO.
As they’d bullied me to drop my journalism, Macmillan had forgotten the editors witnessing their peculiar machinations. Now the Sunday Times editor who’d seen me threatened into dropping an article organised a powerful interview, and Sonia Sodha, who had edited my piece at Prospect, wrote a damning op-ed in the Observer about Macmillan’s ‘inhumanity.’
For a while, Macmillan were simply disbelieving. I think the (Sunday Times) curated the comments as there it literally only one comment that has anything negative about Kate wrote Brenda about the torrent of support after my interview. The Managing Director, penning yet another letter of apology to Rajesh, Suleyman and Singh, called it ‘Kate’s mirage’ and confidently predicted it would evaporate.
But in early February I was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s drivetime programme, PM. The Macmillan team got the chance to brief the BBC beforehand, and, because (despite promises) the BBC researcher hadn’t read the book and likely shared Macmillan’s progressive view of the story, the views of the Macmillan bubble seem to have travelled almost unmediated to the presenter.
Thus I found myself on air denying that that I was racist or had written a racist book, desperately iterating that my publishers had apologised over my head and without reading the book, that I had brought more than 50 diverse young people into print. The hyperbolic, cruel, silly accusations and my pained denials went straight to PM’s 2.5 million, middle-aged, middle-class listeners, a very good cross-section of the UK book buying public.
They were outraged. I heard personally from more than a thousand people. At the BBC, such a vast sympathetic postbag arrived that the presenter wrote to apologise to me for the experience he’d put me through– though he also astutely pointed out that I had probably done myself a lot of good. In Macmillan, the volume of calls shut the reception desk. The BBC asked for comment, but the PR team, astonished, bewildered, their FAQs in tatters, could find none to make.
A couple of weeks later, that essay on sensitivity readers which had been keeping me busy all this time was published in UnHerd.
‘I find this to be one of the worst things she’s done’ gasped the Head of Comms to Brenda after reading it, recognising a really solid piece of damage. ‘She thinks she’s george orwell, but really she’s Kanye harassing his ex-wife with text screen grabs on Instagram’ replied Brenda, enigmatically.
Ah, Brenda, you were never droll. Wit requires a sense of the ridiculous and therefore a sense of perspective and proportion. I kept mine, just, though I had to give up so much to do it. That’s why that essay is still being read, and why I’m still afloat, telling my sad and horrible tale.
The most extraordinary read. I hope you keep writing and find new avenues of expression. In the end, the endurance of your work is the ultimate victory.
Please name and shame “Brenda”. She deserves it.