R. Renee Branca

I’m in Woodstock, New York with JC and S, poking around an independent bookstore. Several celebrities have homes in this part of the Catskills, including Neil Gaiman, so when the shopkeeper says there’s a stack of books Gaiman signed “the last time he popped by,” my ears prick up. Few writers have influenced my life the way he has: Neverwhere and Good Omens helped me weather a Midwestern winter in an unheated apartment, and American Gods got me through the worst breakup of my life. The first gift I ever gave my niece was a copy of The Graveyard Book, and as I write this now, there’s a stack of Sandman tarot cards on my desk. Death of the Endless was a reliable Halloween costume God knows how many times, and there was a period there, in the 90s, when I could brandish an ankh at any given moment—hanging around my neck, or dangling from the cartilage in my ear, or emblazoned on a bookplate in whatever book I happened to be holding. The complete Sandman, with its compendiums, special collections, and side projects, has an entire shelf to itself in my library, bookended by gargoyles called “Gregory” and “Goldie.” Those graphic novels taught me more about narrative structure and literary teleology than anything I picked up in grad school. So yes, I’m definitely interested.

Before I can rifle through this treasure trove, S shoots me a look and says “You know about the women, don’t you?” I feel my heart crumple up like a paper bag.

I did not, in fact, know about the women. 

But S, in this (as in everything), is right. There are a lot of women.

The allegations of sexual misconduct span decades, and, if true, indicate a disturbing pattern of behavior. While he’s certainly not the first writer I’ve admired to face these kinds of accusations, this one is especially difficult for me, because of one particular woman’s story. Based on the dates she gives for the incident she describes and the age difference between them, she would have been about nineteen or twenty at the time–the same age I was when Gaiman’s work was an entrenched part of my life and I was trying so hard to learn how to be a good writer. I can so easily see myself in her circumstances—amazed at my great fortune to meet him at a book signing or Comicon—and if he had expressed any interest in my work, any at all, or even any interest in me as a person, how easy it would have been to find myself in the same situation—in a hotel room somewhere, not comfortable at all with what was happening but also feeling unable to say “no” because it’s Neil freaking Gaiman and holy shit is this really happening? And it wouldn’t have occurred to me, at nineteen or twenty, that a twenty-odd year age difference, or a multi-million-dollar disparity in wealth, or that level of fame and influence would shift the power dynamic so much.  But a middle-aged man, with that kind of money, who has been in the public eye that long, certainly should know better, whether or not she was an “adult” and everything was “consensual.”

I looked at the books, wanting so much to hold them, to turn the pages and see what he’d written. I wanted to ask, Is it really so hard not to abuse power?