Ann Patchett is a popular and critically admired novelist— who until recently, was best known for her book, Bel Canto.
But now she has a new scarlet letter for celebrity: she's been Dixie Chick'ed by a Christian-tyrant-style failed gubernatorial candidate named Ken Wingate in South Carolina.
Wingate organized a massive protest against her memoir, Truth and Beauty, for being assigned in summer reading classes at Clemson University. He called the book too immoral for university students' examination, and referred to the author as "a sewer."
From Abigail Cutler at The Atlantic Monthly:
Patchett’s book, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, which had been assigned to the incoming Clemson University freshman class of 2006 as mandatory summer reading...
But soon after the text was assigned, a handful of parents began voicing concerns that the book was inappropriate reading material. Led by Wingate, they pointed out that the book included pornography, fetish, masturbation, multiple sex partners, and anti-religious sentiments—and claimed that all of this served one purpose, and one purpose only: “The explicit message this that sends to students is that they are encouraged to find themselves sexually.”
...In fact, Truth & Beauty is Patchett’s account of her friendship with her best friend and fellow writer, Lucy Grealy, who had died three years prior at the age of 39. Author of her own memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Grealy endured 30 years of pain and suffering as she underwent 38 reconstructive surgeries in an attempt to fix her jaw, which had been disfigured by childhood cancer.
Ann got the full "FOX" treatment:
In the face of provocative television news segments, an inflammatory full-page ad in The Greenville News, and an outpouring of letters from angry parents and alumni calling for the cancellation of the author’s scheduled appearance on Clemson’s campus, Patchett decided to speak to the Clemson class of ’06 anyway—even though that meant accepting protection from a bodyguard.
If stories about girls who are disfigured by cancer, humiliated by strangers, and turn to sex and drugs to escape from their enormous pain are too disgusting, too pornographic, then I have to tell you, friends, the Holocaust is off-limits. The Russian Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, the war in Vietnam, the Crusades, all represent such staggering acts of human depravity and perversion that I could see the virtue of never looking at them at all.
The Monthly interviews Patchen about what it was like going into the Lion's Den, getting confronted in the auditorium by a teenage student about her marital infidelity (!), and "What Would Lucy Do?"
It's an excellent interview and video: LINK.
Thanks to Martha Garvey for the tip! I also highly recommend Barbara Koppel's documentary on what happened to the Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, as to how self-appointed Puritan witchhunters choose a particular kind of woman to be their "condemned whore."
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