576. BookTok, Hockey Romance, and People as Products with Kayleigh Donaldson

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello and welcome to episode number 576 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell. My guest today is former book blogger and current pop culture critic Kayleigh Donaldson. We’re going to talk about BookTok and hockey romance and the Seattle Kraken and all of what just happened, and we’re locating this conversation inside a larger discussion about fandom and fanfiction, fanfiction about real people, and the ways that celebrity culture, fan culture, and romance are intersecting.

I do want to mention that we do briefly talk about Johnny Depp and his fandom and larger issues of misogyny and sexual harassment throughout this conversation.

This is something that I think a lot about: how fandom has changed, how romance has changed, how readership and the way that readers talk to each other has changed, and I hope you find this conversation as interesting as I did. I am very grateful to Kayleigh for not only explaining what was going on but also explaining how to locate it in a larger sense of the community online and off.

I will have links to all of the books that we mention, as well as several articles that Kayleigh has written and where you can find her online in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

I have a compliment this week, which makes me so happy! To Gwen P. – this is my 330th compliment if I have been counting correctly, which is not always the case with me but if so, that’s incredible! Thank you!

Gwen: Your friends and family think each moment with you is the greatest one. Until you get together again, and that time is the greatest time. You are nothing but fun.

If you have supported the show with a monthly pledge, thank you. You’re keeping me going, you’re making sure every episode has a transcript handcrafted by garlicknitter – hey, garlicknitter! – [hey, Sarah! – gk] – and you’re keeping me going each week. You’re also part of the community that I deeply appreciate, and if you would like to join, well, hello! Monthly pledges start at a dollar a month, you get bonus episodes, you get the greatest Discord in the history of the world, and you get to support this here production. Have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches to find out more.

Support for this episode comes from Love’s Sweet Arrow, Chicagoland’s first romance bookstore! Love’s Sweet Arrow curates a diverse selection of traditionally and independently published romance and offers bookish merch, candles, journals, stickers, all the things you love. To celebrate five years of Happily Ever After – yay! – Love’s Sweet Arrow is offering Smart Bitches listeners twenty percent off purchases in-store and online throughout the month of August with code SMARTBITCHES. In addition, all orders over one hundred dollars will receive a free gift with purchase! Enter code SMARTBITCHES at checkout online or mention it in store to receive your discount. Code applies only to in-stock products. Free gift will be selected by staff when fulfilling your order, and the discount is ready now, so go shopping at shop.lovessweetarrow.com. Thank you to Love’s Sweet Arrow for supporting the show, and thank you for supporting our advertisers!

Support for this episode comes from Wattpad. You might recognize the name Anna Todd from her number one bestselling After series. It was a massive global hit; it was made into a movie. Her appearances overseas cause lines to form around the block of readers eager to meet her and thank her in person. But did you know she’s written a new romance trilogy? The first two books in the Brightest Stars are out now, and if you are looking for summer reading, listen up: The Falling and The Burning are available now, just in time to heat up your TBR. Set against the backdrop of a military base, both books feature emotionally powerful stories about slowly falling in love with another person and with yourself. Colleen Hoover is a big fan of Anna Todd’s heart-stopping new trilogy; she raved about the first book The Falling, saying, “Anna Todd…is my go-to for a story I know I’ll love and characters who will live in the heart long after the last page is turned.” Look for The Falling and The Burning by Anna Todd and buy your copies wherever books are sold.

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All right, are you ready to talk about BookTok, hockey romance, and people as products? Let’s do this; on with the podcast!

[music]

Kayleigh Donaldson: My name’s Kayleigh Donaldson. I’m a pop culture writer and critic. My main stomping ground is Pajiba.com, and my main focus as a writer is on general pop culture, but specifically the intersections between celebrity gossip and celebrity culture and how we talk about famous people, essentially.

Sarah: Which is actually one of my absolute favorite topics, because the way we talk about celebrities reflects so much of whatever is simmering under the surface of culture?

Kayleigh: I think that’s what’s so interesting about a lot of celebrity drama as it pertains to their very ardent fans. It requires I, I would say, a certain level of infantilizing of your subject. I mean, in order to, frankly, worship a stranger who you’ve never met, I think you have to stop viewing them as human. You have to stop viewing them as being responsible for their actions, or even just part of a weird cycle, ‘cause being famous is bananas, and it’s such a fast-moving change in the way that we talk about these, like – there are a whole bunch of celebrities who are not equipped for the TikTok age. They’re still trying to deal with, you know, Twitter; they’re still trying to deal with the days when the, the magazines like People and Us Weekly ruled the roost rather than – DeuxMoi, I think, is probably the most infamous example.

So the, the disconnect that you see on those fronts is so interesting, and I think a lot of people don’t really know how to deal with it, so it festers and it gets much weirder, and then when you poke the bear you kind of unleash something really dark. And I think that’s another reason I end up talking about this so much, ‘cause it doesn’t get taken seriously –

Sarah: No.

Kayleigh: – and I think that you see the way this stuff gets reflected. I think the Johnny Depp thing is a perfect example: it became the microcosm of a really specific kind of misogyny, of victim-blaming, of the, the backlash to what we would call #MeToo…

Sarah: Yeah. The pendulum swinging back the other way –

Kayleigh: Yes.

Sarah: – from #MeToo. Yeah.

Kayleigh: And it’s, it’s a terrifying thing to get involved with, even just like as someone who writes hot takes on the internet. Like, we got the most pushback from stuff like this from people. Like, I, we’re, you know – but, because, I think, and we also realized there weren’t a lot of websites or publications that were actually standing up and saying, We believe Amber Heard, and Pajiba, I will very proudly say, was one of them –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Kayleigh: – and has been for a long time.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Kayleigh: But, you know, I think one of the benefits of being an independent writer on this front: I don’t really write for, like, the big people? They, they’ve never asked me, they’ve never paid me, so there is something to be said for being like, I actually have nothing to lose on this front. I really can dig into that, and I have the, the means to do so, so that’s how you get something as varied as, like, what we’re going to talk about with everything that happened with the Seattle Kraken. Like –

Sarah: Yes.

Kayleigh: Like, a lot of people just dismissed out of hand this like, This isn’t a story. And it’s like, Actually, there’s a lot going on here!

Sarah: Yeah. It’s just porn books about hockey!

Kayleigh: Yes!

Sarah: And the weird thing about fandom that I think celebrities and those who manufacture a celebrity narrative and a celebrity persona do not understand is that there is a portion of a fandom in just about every subgenre that is prepared to fall on their sword as if they are personally invested in this person, and I don’t get that.

Kayleigh: So that definitely is something that worries me, and you see this tied into a lot of the worst aspects of, like, fan and celebrity culture because the general, like, the status quo, default mode that we have of how we talk about celebrity is as these people aren’t people –

Sarah: No.

Kayleigh: – they are products to be consumed, and that is, we definitely have seen some evolution on that front, we’re definitely getting a more nuanced conversation, but if you look at just everyday piece of gossip, the way we talk about it, that is how it is. But I think people forget just how much money remains in this field. Like –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: – it’s so inescapable! [Laughs]

Sarah: It’s, it is! It’s like this gross, toxic stew, and you can’t get out of it.

So speaking of inescapable, you said a few minutes ago that these aren’t people; these are products to be consumed, which is brilliant, and I think that is the perfect way into what I wanted to speak with you about, which is the current BookTok hockey romance extravaganza of absolute weirdness. Every time I read about this it got weirder and weirder and weirder, and it was this weird, weird intersection between the people who I know who are into hockey romance, and then the people who I know are just into sports and follow hockey and have no idea about romance, and the people who are into internet culture and fandom. All of us came together and were like, What is happening here? And you wrote about it in a way that I thought really fully understood all of these different intersections, so could you walk me and the listeners through the BookTok hockey romance story as it stands now?

Kayleigh: Sure! Strap in for this. So –

Sarah: Hold on to your butts, people!

Kayleigh: – BookTok is basically the –

[Laughter]

Kayleigh: So BookTok is sort of the name given to the very disparate connection of communities of people who like talking about books on TikTok.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: It encompasses vast amounts of literature, as any book blog, you know, community would as well, but I think when people talk about BookTok in spec-, specifically and if you go to bookshops and you see signs that say BookTok Made Me Buy It, what they’re talking about is a very specific kind of book. Lot of Colleen Hoover, lot of Taylor Jenkins Reid, the real-world fanfiction written by Ali Hazelwood – basically kind of combinations of like contemporary romance, “women’s fiction,” and a sort of strain of like dark romance, I think is the title given to it. They’re very dark, kind of very boundary-pushing erotica. Sports romance, particularly ice hockey romance, is a really big part of this, and it’s seen a boom in popularity over the past few years; you see a lot of books coming in, many wonderful, punny titles like Pucked and Pucking Around and, you know, “Final Shot,” and, like, that’s the fun of it.

So several months ago a book called Pucking Around by Emily Rath came out. It is a Why Choose contemporary romance about a woman and the three men and the ice hockey team that she works for having a relationship. It became a surprising hit on BookTok and on Amazon. I say surprising ‘cause the book is over seven hundred pages long, but it got a very enthusiastic response, and if something goes viral on BookTok, it tends to make a real impact on their sales. Like, this is the reason Colleen Hoover is now one of the biggest selling authors of the 2020s is because of that drive on BookTok.

So you start to see a kind of community building of women in particular who, many of whom aren’t ice hockey fans and are coming to the sport through the books, and there are a number of writers and TikTokers and readers and such who are getting into this, and they start to latch onto a team called the Seattle Kraken, which is one of the newer NHL teams?

Sarah: Yes.

Kayleigh: Like, I think they’re only about three or four years old.

Sarah: Mm-hmmm.

Kayleigh: So there’s a, there’s a BookToker called Kierra Lewis who has over about 1.1 million followers on TikTok.

Sarah: Wow!

Kayleigh: She starts doing a lot of videos about basically the really hot guys in the Seattle Kraken, not exclusively but particularly a player called Alex Wennberg, who is a Swedish player who’s been with the Kraken for a couple of years and is indeed aesthetically a very attractive man. She starts making a lot of videos.

Sarah: He’s really handsome.

Kayleigh: He’s very – I mean, there’s just something in Sweden, man, like, I mean, they can’t all be Skarsgårds, but there’s got to be other ones; I respect it.

She is not the only one making these videos, it should be stated, but I think there’s been a focus on Lewis for a number of reasons, one of which is she was the self-appointed Queen of BookTok. She’s using that title, and she takes a lot of credit for the BookTok community, whatever it’s called and however it’s defined, latching onto the Seattle Kraken. She makes these now-infamous and now-deleted TikToks where she is squealing over Alex Wennberg and other players like Vince Dunn. The most infamous one where she talks about Alex Wennberg, she talks about having him fill all three of her holes? Very, like, graphic; very, like, slightly tongue-in-cheek; but just extremely, like, aggressive, horny-on-main videos. They get a lot of attention; her reviews of a lot of the popular HockeyTok books get a lot of attention. Icebreaker by Hannah Grace is another example that’s currently on the bestseller list; people really like that.

Eventually the Seattle Kraken social media team start playing around with this. They start –

Sarah: Oh!

Kayleigh: – making like essentially thirst-trap-y videos talking about how they make, they’re exclusively for BookTok now. They invite Kierra Lewis to a game, get her a BookTok Kraken jersey, and she has a sign that says “#krackmyback”, which she credits herself with creating as like the, the, you know, the step on me horny message towards the Kraken players.

Sarah: And these are, these are people at work.

Kayleigh: To break it down in the most mundane way, these are men at their place of work.

Sarah: Yeah!

Kayleigh: So there are videos of her like, if you’ve ever watched ice hockey players stretching before a game –

Sarah: Oh, I have!

Kayleigh: – it is very, the Ambiguously Gay Duo, like in terms of what they’re doing? Like, she is making, like, up some of these videos; it gets very viral; there’s a lot of hunger for a lot of these players, not just Wennberg, but I think he becomes the face just because he is very handsome?

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: And frankly fits a very specific ideal, I think, of what people have in their head of the hockey player romance novel protagonist. One, he’s white; two, he’s tall and has beaut- – blond, handsome, you know, like the whiteness of the hockey community is something I’m definitely going to get into.

This is all like, happened a few months ago, and then over the past couple of weeks, Alex Wennberg’s wife, whose name is Felicia Wennberg, puts up some Stories on Instagram basically saying, you know, I thought this stuff was kind of funny at first. It’s now become very uncomfortable. I don’t like it when people are in our comments saying stuff like this, pict-, and on pictures of our son. It’s uncomfortable to be at a game and hear people yelling this stuff. She shares a screenshot of someone leaving the “fill all 3 of my holes” comment, and you can see that it’s on a TikTok by Kierra Lewis. And then things kind of go to shit from here, because I remember I, I read the statement – it made it to my, my, my Twitter feed – and I thought, You know what? Yeah. That makes sense. That shouldn’t cause any controversy. It immediately did. Kierra Lewis in particular gets very angry, first to see the Kraken delete the TikToks they’ve made, which were basically these thirst traps.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: They then unfollow Lewis on Instagram, and she frankly seems more mad about that than anything else, which I think is telling. She then goes on this rant about how Felicia Wennberg is a bitch, how she’s a Karen, how she’s only doing this because her marriage is probably in trouble –

Sarah: Oh dear God, here we go!

Kayleigh: – and how –

Sarah: Oh, here we go.

Kayleigh: – yeah – she didn’t mind this when TikTok was giving her all this clout. She keeps focusing on the idea that she and BookTok are responsible for giving the Seattle Kraken clout. They’re an NHL team?

Sarah: They’re fine!

Kayleigh: Yeah, they’re fine! That’s a multimillion-dollar sport, and from what I understand, Seattle were waiting years for an ice hockey team. They sell out games constantly! They’re fine!

Sarah: Do you remember – I have a terrible concept of time, but do you remember, I’m going to say ten to fifteen years ago, there was actually a Klout score? Remember K-L-O-U-T? Klout score?

Kayleigh: God, yes!

Sarah: And you would put in your Instagram –

Kayleigh: Oh, that takes me back!

Sarah: – and you would put in your Twitter, and it would, like, measure engagement and give you a Klout score, and then you could, like, compare your Klout score to other people’s and what topics were the most applicable to your Klout, and you wanted to have Klout above eighty. And I, the minute I hear anyone on, on TikTok talking about clout I’m like, Oh, you mean like that score thing? Yeah, that’s bullshit. [Laughs]

Kayleigh: It does feel a little Black Mirror-y the way she talks about it –

Sarah: Yes!

Kayleigh: – and it’s clear that the Seattle Kraken did get a boost of followers from BookTok, because ultimately, like, their account doesn’t have anywhere near the same amount of followers as Kierra Lewis or a lot of these big BookTok accounts. The idea that they needed to fill out the stadium with BookTok fans to make the sales is very funny because I have friends who live in Seattle and it’s like, Look, we can’t get tickets for love nor money. I would love it if they tried to clout me into a, a ticket.

So she sort of doubles down quite heavily on this and says that she’s been smeared by Felicia Wennberg. People in her comments start saying, You should get a lawyer and go for defamation. Not how defamation works. Alex Wennberg himself has to release a statement, which, if you know anything about sports people, but particularly hockey players, it’s a very stoic sport. It’s a sport where you’re basically told, Shut up and don’t say anything, and he says in his statement, I’ve been media trained my whole career to stay silent, but people have been so horrendous towards my wife and my family, and I don’t like being treated like this. I simply asked for some empathy.

Felicia Wennberg releases another statement where she basically notes, I’m not singling out Kierra Lewis; this has nothing to do with her. I used this as an example because these are the comments that we see on a daily basis. If you want to say my husband is hot, that’s great; he is hot. What I don’t like is, I think the comment she makes is, I, I don’t like going to a game and wondering if someone coming up to me is a hockey fan or if they’re the people talking about how they masturbate wearing my husband’s jersey. And again, I think that’s very reasonable!

A lot of Lewis’s fans barraged her comments section, saying that she was targeting, unfairly targeting Kierra Lewis, that she was being a racist Karen, that she – this wasn’t really sexual harassment because, well, you seemed okay with it at first, and they, they, they didn’t under-, seem to understand that consent can be revoked at any time. It’s a very eloquent, very astute statement –

Sarah: Yeah!

Kayleigh: – that notes, like, a clear difference between, like, if you want to be horny on main for my husband, that’s one thing. What I don’t like is you coming to our personal space and my husband’s professional space –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: – and doing this. I mean, I’ve, it, it’s sort of glib to make comments like, Oh, you wouldn’t have done this for a woman, because people do do this with women, but I think you certainly notice the way that a lot of women thought that acting like a man was somehow like an empowering move on this front. I think that’s definitely like a very lazy, pseudo-feminist idea, the idea, Well, I, I, I can catcall a man –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: – and make him feel uncomfortable while he’s working because it’s happened to me. You saw one woman defending Kierra Lewis made this TikTok where she’s like, People leave me awful comments all the time! Do you see me complaining? And I was like, You should complain! That’s awful! You shouldn’t have to go through that! That’s not an, you shouldn’t have to see it as an occupational hazard!

And then this story ends up getting picked up by ESPN? It gets picked up by Rolling Stone?

Sarah: Yep!

Kayleigh: We were like, like, there are these pair of men on YouTube who just do hockey analysis, who are asked to commentate on it, and they look so lost!

Sarah: Oh!

Kayleigh: It’s like, Oh, you just want to talk about, like, you know, Larry King said, Oh, for high stakes, or, like, the game…don’t want to be talking about this! Come on!

Sarah: Yeah, you want to be talking about shots on goal. You don’t want to be talking –

Kayleigh: Yeah! [Laughs]

Sarah: – about somebody’s spank bank. That’s what, for me, as someone who’s been writing about romance for so long, that’s when I’m just like, Ah shit, everybody get in the bunker; it broke containment. Our, our world can be very weird! Our world can be really fucking weird, and if you’re not fully fluent in all of what’s happening you can look at this and be just absolutely appalled no matter where you’re entering in. And when you, when we break containment and it goes into, like, sports journalism or tech journalism, always like, Ah shit! Well, we’ve lost control of this car. [Laughs] Everyone get off!

Kayleigh: That’s one of the reasons I end up writing a lot about romance. One, because I’ve been, I used to be a book blogger, that’s how I got started, and I’ve been reading romance since, well over a decade now, because friends introduced it to me. I kind of started as a YA blogger, but, like, it is really notable when you read a report on this by someone who doesn’t know anything about romance beyond like, oh, well, there’s that Fifty Shades of Grey book, right, which I may have heard of. So I’m kind of very aware that, like, nonono, if I’m going to balance out the scales here, I’m going to do it properly.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: The, the Rolling Stone article is actually very funny, but, like, it’s very – and they’re talking about, Oh God, these women be horny! And it’s like, you’re not wrong, but maybe there’s another way to talk about this, and I definitely felt that way about the combination of fandom, of romance, of these issues of consent in celebrity kind of –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kayleigh: – converging in this way, because another thing about ice hockey is it’s super macho and super male. It’s also super white.

Sarah: So white!

Kayleigh: Like, I think one of the reasons people have jumped to hockey romance in particular is because it’s a sport of, like, first of all, it’s nowhere near as, like, celebrity-laden as, I would say, like, American football is, or like football is on my side of the ocean.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kayleigh: The players tend to be quite private; they tend to be quite stoic. It’s a sport of a very macho culture. There’s a lot of really interesting angles to write about: toxic masculinity; about community; about, you know, finding your voice in a sport where you’re often told to shut up. Like, I totally get, like I think there’s a line between, like, the Victorian rake and the, the hockey pro as a romance hero.

Sarah: Absolutely!

Kayleigh: But the side of that as well is,  it’s an extremely white sport, and I think, frankly, that’s why a lot of the romance community is drawn to it, because they want a sports romance, but they don’t want to read a sports romance where the sport is primarily dominated by very prominent Black men. You know, they don’t want, just, there are basketball romances, but there’s a reason it’s not bigger than HockeyTok. There’s a reason American football is not taking that on. You know, I think that’s actually very blatant, and that’s definitely – [laughs] – an issue that should be talked about. There are some exceptions, but they are exceptions, and especially BookTok is notorious for being predominantly obsessed with white books –

Sarah: Yes.

Kayleigh: – and white characters. Like –

Sarah: Yes.

Kayleigh: – I don’t think Colleen Hoover has ever written a character who isn’t white? The romance novels that tend to get sold on the booksh-, like the BookTok Made Me Do It books, all white. You know, every now and then maybe a YA book with a diverse protagonist will break through, but it’s so rare! If you want to find those books on BookTok, you’ve got to dig well beyond the algorithm. And frankly, it’s, it’s tough. It’s one of the reasons I primarily stick to Twitter, even though it’s – you know, I’m, I’m playing violin on the Titanic as that site goes down.

Sarah: [Laughs] You and me both!

Kayleigh: But, you know, I find it just a lot easier to curate in terms of, like, the books and the authors and the stories I want to see compared to BookTok, where I think, because it’s more personality driven and it’s so immediate –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kayleigh: – I think that’s why a lot of these attitudes bubble up. I think that’s why you see so many women getting furious at the idea that a man and his wife wouldn’t want you to yell “Fill my holes” in a public space at them! Like, that just seems very basic! Like, I don’t feel like I should have to say that!

Sarah: It’s very obvious, and it’s the same thing with Real People Fiction? There’ve been a number of books that are overtly or very discreetly ReyLo fanfic, but what they actually are is Adam Driver fic, and it makes me deeply –

Kayleigh: Mmm.

Sarah: – deeply uncomfortable, not only because that’s a real person, and that person has not consented to this, but that particular person has a problem with really invasive and scary fans.

Kayleigh: People are horrendous towards Joanne Tucker, who is Adam Driver’s wife.

Sarah: Oh, it’s heart breaking.

Kayleigh: As a man who is extremely private – like, this man has gone out of his way to stay out of the headlines and has a longstanding, collaborative relationship with his wife as an actor and a charity founder, as well as them being married – I believe they now have two children, who they kept out of the spotlight for years – and the way that people project just the scariest things onto him is very disturbing to me. And I get it? Like, I am, I just read the Loretta Chase book recently for the first time?

Sarah: Lord of Scoundrels?

Kayleigh: Yes! I just read Lord of Scoundrels for the first time recently, ticked off the romance bucket list, and holy crap! The way these –

Sarah: Ooh, you got to read it for the first time! Ahhh!

Kayleigh: Yes. Yeah.

Sarah: So excited for you!

Kayleigh: I had a, I had this paperback copy that was literally falling apart that I’d gotten off eBay, and I was like – I bought it during lockdown – it was like, Got to get to this at some point before the book totally falls apart.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kayleigh: It’s great, but also, this description of that man? That’s Adam Driver. So I get it! People are drawn to this man who looks like a Byronic hero, who plays essentially a Byronic hero, tragic antihero, in the Star Wars story. I get it! I don’t have it on me; I have Notepad, and it’s Johanna Lindsey cover art, but it’s ReyLo? I’m not a ReyLo shipper; I just like the Johanna Lindsey art. But it’s the one where, like, the woman’s on her knees –

Sarah: Yep!

Kayleigh: – and the guy’s totally naked. That is ReyLo like – I’m not doing myself any favors here, but I wrote a piece a few months ago for Paste about Adam Driver becoming this very big inspiration for romance characters, because there’s a book called The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood –

Sarah: Yep.

Kayleigh: – which I don’t, I think it started as ReyLo fic on Archive of Our Own –

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Kayleigh: – and has then been published. The cover is ReyLo art; it is so clearly supposed to be Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver. That book became wild bestseller, and now there is a whole stream of books being traditionally and self-published that’s ReyLo fic, but it’s not necessarily about the character of Kylo Ren. It is the projections you have of Adam Driver. Like, I received numerous press releases from pub-, from publicists over the past few months for books, like there’s a book coming out called My Roommate Is a Vampire. It’s ReyLo fic. It couldn’t, they’re not even hiding it on the cover. I’m not surprised that Star-Wars-adjacent fic and Adam Driver has become the move on this?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kayleigh: I am a little surprised at how blatant it is?

Sarah: I’m, I’m a little bit more surprised that there isn’t any sort of, Wait, does no one else have that squick line, where we’re talking about a person who is alive and is a person? Like, it, it’s not, it’s not a character. It is not a – and, and, and I understand when you’re talking about celebrity narratives? Celebrity narratives and the creation of a celebrity is about flattening someone into a narrative and flattening a person into an image, and then they have to uphold the elements of that image as, you know, as long as they are contracted to do so by being famous. That, I, I understand how it happens. But this is a person! Wennberg is a person! His wife is a person! That’s the part where I keep tripping and going, Wait! They can’t say this is okay!

Kayleigh: The expectation that they should be okay with it I think is, is really dangerous, and I think that’s one of the reasons it was so telling that Alex Wennberg spoke up.

Sarah: Oh, that was massive.

Kayleigh: Going back to the Adam Driver case, like, what surprises me is how open the publishers and the writers are about this having been fanfiction. Used to, you used to have to go out of your way to hide that! But also, specifically appealing to it on the basis of it being Adam Driver fanfiction. I don’t even know if acceptability is the right word! Like, because they, they’ve clearly decided that financially speaking this is okay; there’s a fan base to tap into; that’s how we’re going to do it. That’s why the Kraken official social media accounts kind of latched on in a big way! ‘Cause clearly it’s like, Well! Here’s an audience we frankly don’t usually have to appeal to, which is women, which is women of color, which is queer women who are, you know, coming to the sport in a new way and want to feel welcome. Why shouldn’t we latch onto that trend? Everyone else is doing it, and frankly a lot of other ice hockey teams like the, the Chicago RacistNames are, having been doing it. There’s a lot of accounts where it’s like, Oh, hey! We’re going to get our, like, we’re going to do a TikTok where we show one of the players reading one of these books!

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kayleigh: Actually, what was really interesting about that was when ESPN covered this.

Sarah: Oh God.

Kayleigh: They actually talked to Emily Rath, who wrote Pucking Around. She did like a, a ten-minute TikTok on this, which was actually very astute, and I highly recommend people watch it, but she talked about how, when her book first started going viral and you saw it being latched onto by a lot of the social media accounts of actual hockey teams, she was very concerned about it, and she mentioned, I believe she reached out to one of the teams – I can’t remember if it was the Kraken – and she said, you know, this might not be something you necessarily want to feed into –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: – and they didn’t listen to her.

Sarah: Yes, there be dragons, y’all.

Kayleigh: And she made a really interesting point – yes. And she made the really interesting point, it’s – let me find the quote. These, these NHL teams cannot abstract their players the way that fans do. They’re going to treat them like characters in books or treat them as if they’re fictional when they’re not. When your own company’s doing that to you, that’s where I draw the line.

Sarah: Yes.

Kayleigh: Yes, she reached out to the Kraken team, and apparently they just didn’t listen, and now, clearly, they’re, they’re learning from that mistake.

Sarah: Like, oop!

Kayleigh: ‘Cause, like, that, to me, is like, yeah, you see, like, that their teams do cheesecake calendars. They, they, you know, do interviews where they’re wearing, like, nice suits and holding a puppy to appeal to women, basically, so that’s nothing new, but I think there’s such a clear difference between, Oh, hey, isn’t our player kind of attractive? And isn’t he having fun with this? To, again, Krack My Back –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kayleigh: – to, You’re now an object that we can push out there. Because they’re already facing a lot of crap from the typical sports fan.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Kayleigh: Sports fans have absolutely no qualms about being aggressive and cruel to the players online. They have absolutely no issue with yelling, “You suck!” in the street, you know. That’s –

Sarah: Oh, I’m –

Kayleigh: – something they shouldn’t have to deal with, but that’s, like, so common! I don’t think they should have to add this on top of it, but this is the Pandora’s box that they accidentally unleashed, because I think they simply thought it was like doing a new meme.

Sarah: Oh, for sure.

Kayleigh: I think that’s how they viewed it. This is just, you know, this is like when planking was a thing or the ice bucket challenge.

Sarah: Yes! [Laughs]

Kayleigh: You know, this is us –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: – just doing a silly thing that will pass.

Sarah: We’re doing a meme!

How much responsibility do you think the Kraken hold for this situation? Because Allegra Rosenberg wrote about this in a newsletter called “Today in Tabs,” which is basically like, Here’s what’s happening on the internet, and Rosenberg said, “The best thing a brand can hope for is that somebody else makes their product go viral without the brand having to pay for it.” And that is true for BookTok, because this is all promotion that publishers don’t have to pay for.

Kayleigh: Oh, entirely! I mean, you’ve definitely seen the boost in sales like –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Kayleigh: – for people like Colleen Hoover. Taylor Jenkins Reid, who wrote Daisy Jones & the Six is a really good example. A lot of romance novelists. I think that the Seattle Kraken saw a thing was going viral and really didn’t think much about it beyond, My job is to get the name out there, and this seems like a, frankly, this probably seemed perfectly innocent to them at the time, because you’ve probably logged on Twitter and seen people being horny on main. I’ve been horny on main! You know, I have, like, a number of Scandinavian character actors I’m very interested in –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kayleigh: – in a totally healthy manner! So I don’t think they saw it necessarily as a big deal, and I don’t know how – like, this thing is, we don’t really know what their communication was like with the players, with the managers, all these people. Like, how much were they telling Alex Wennberg, This is for you to be leered over. Is this something you’re comfortable with? That’s probably something that’s going to happen now. I definitely understand why Kierra Lewis felt a little thrown out in that way, because she was the name. Also worth noting, she has substantially more followers than the Seattle Kraken, so the power imbalance here is really interesting.

Sarah: It is a weird power imbalance, isn’t it?

Kayleigh: Well, this was what was so interesting when she was like, Oh, Felicia’s going to send her people after me. It’s like, she has a, a, a fraction of the followers you do.

Sarah: What people?!

Kayleigh: I don’t think she’s even on TikTok! I was fascinated by people being like, Well, clearly she’s jealous of BookTok. I was like, She’s married to the guy you’re all obsessed with! Like, she’s won! She’s a beautiful, highly educated woman with a gorgeous husband who’s making bank and a very cute son, and they spend a lot of time going on holidays back to Sweden. She seems to be, she’s won it. She’s fine. You know, she has nothing to be jealous of! But I definitely wonder what the Kraken’s, like, social media will be like going forward. I think they’ve definitely now been given the message of stick to sports?

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: Which, you know, is your thing! Like, I think a lot of these teams are trying to capture that very gritty essence of Can we be a level of, like, genre-crossing chaos that creates a character, that creates a personality that goes beyond the sport? Before I became a full-time writer I, I worked in running social media accounts for people. It’s a hard job.

Sarah: Oh, it’s a very hard job.

Kayleigh: And this was before everyone was expected to have, like, a personality where it was like, Hey, are you suffering from the crippling depression of being a millennial? Buy my steak! I didn’t have to do that; my job was pretty bad, mercifully, but it’s a weird, very fast-moving industry to try and be a part of, and I think, frankly, the Kraken just got caught up in it. It’s a tough field, but I think that ultimately, like, the Seattle Kraken is going to be fine, regardless of how many Instagram or TikTok followers they – you know, they are a sports team!

Sarah: They’re –

Kayleigh: And they’re in a city –

Sarah: – fine.

Kayleigh: – with a very loyal fan base, and they seem to be doing quite well from what I, I’ve heard. I only just got into ice hockey this year, and ice hockey is, like, not a thing really in the UK. It’s extremely niche here? I happen to live in a city that has an ice hockey team –

Sarah: So cool.

Kayleigh: – but our, like, the average player – yeah, go Dundee Stars! – but the average, like, attendance, like, it’s the local ice, ice rink next to the cinema where I used to go skating with my parents –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kayleigh: – and it gets maybe like four, five hundred people a game. It’s nothing compared to what the Kraken are getting, or the Maple Leafs or the Flyers or all of these things. This, the culture’s very different; it’s way less macho? Like, I go to games; it’s, it’s like sixty percent women and children, and people just drinking their, you know, their beer and eating their chips and curry sauce and getting very, and enjoying themselves! Yeah, like, that, that, that’s my kind of sport! I want to be able to get a beer, a bowl of chips covered in cheese and curry sauce, and then I want to be able to, like, you know, chill. So – [laughs] – I will say, the funniest ever insult I ever heard was at an ice hockey game when, before they start games, the Stars have, like, someone saying, This is a family friendly sport! Please don’t swear! So people just start yelling, like, adjectives and nouns? But one woman yelled at a player, Your, your dad sells Avon, and your mother never liked you, and I have never met a better insult in my life.

Sarah: Ouch!

Kayleigh: Yeah. [Laughs] I’m saving it! One day I will write a book and put that in there; I’m fucking serious!

Sarah: Ouch! Oh my God!

Kayleigh: I was sitting like two seats down from this woman, and I fully just went, Och!

[Laughter]

Sarah: Oh! Crying out loud! Okay, first of all, I want to go to a, a Dundee Stars game because that sounds amazing.

Zooming out a little bit, what do you think contributes to so many people in this particular situation losing sight of another person’s humanity? Like, is this just the result of all of these other things?

Kayleigh: Please, I think it’s actually very easy to convince yourself that what you’re doing is totally fine. But the boundaries of what classifies as, like, fandom and, like, the specific kind of safety that that spot used to offer –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kayleigh: – those boundaries are far more liminal now. Like, I, when I was a teenager, which was not that, it was like fifteen years ago, but, like, when I was teenager, which feels several eras of fandom ago, we were taught, don’t touch the poop. Don’t break the fourth wall. Don’t poke the bear. Your community is your community. Like, when I was a teenager I was really obsessed with Whose Line Is It Anyway? so I, my fandom was like the people who wrote Whose Line Is It Anyway? thing – fandom and fanfiction, and the rules were always very clear: don’t go on Twitter and tell these people what you’re writing. Don’t –

Sarah: No.

Kayleigh: – spread around – this is our little LiveJournal locked page. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, basically. And we were always told very specifically, you don’t try and profit from your fanfiction because it’s eventually going to spoil everything for everyone else, because copyright take-down notices will be filed. That’s happened! Plenty of major writers did say – you know, for a very long time Anne Rice was super anti-fanfiction. She did change her tune as she got older, but there was a period of time where you just did, if you wrote, like, Interview with the Vampire fanfiction, you had that under lock and key, you know.

Sarah: Oh yes.

Kayleigh: But you know, I think Fifty Shades of Grey has a lot to answer for on this front. It became –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kayleigh: – not only acceptable – I mean, I remember after that book became huge the influx of TwiFic. Christina Lauren, the duo behind that, they started writing Twilight fanfiction. They’re now fairly big authors who write a lot of very good books! They spun that into something – more than E. L. James did, but that’s a whole other topic.

Sarah: [Snorts]

Kayleigh: But I think you definitely got the sense that people were waiting for the next thing they were allowed to do. Now, with Twilight, like, those are fictional characters, but then after that a book called After comes out with Anna Todd, which is a Wattpad fanfiction with a self-insert character and Harry Styles from One Direction. That becomes the most read thing on Wattpad, it gets a publishing deal, it sells a lot of copies –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Kayleigh: – it gets turned into, I believe, three films? It’s like a full trilogy of films that you can now watch on Amazon. They don’t hide the fact this is Harry Styles, and his, like, male friends are all the other guys in One Direction. They don’t try to conceal that. They don’t make it an active part of the marketing process, but everyone knows. People ask Anna Todd about it in interviews, and she talks about it. She’s not hiding it. And because no one sues and because no one, and Harry Styles’ team don’t speak up – Harry Styles has always been very, quite guarded in his private life. He doesn’t talk about these things, and I honestly do not blame him for that. I think whatever he said would just add fuel to a fire anyway. The best thing he can do is just go live his, like, adorable, tattooed life.

After that, I think you really see a sense of people trying to find the next fandom thing to latch onto. I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner, because I, I really was expecting ReyLo stuff to blow up much quicker than it did. I, I frankly expected more things to come out of stuff like Supernatural; I’m surprised that didn’t happen. Sherlock, actually; I’m surprised it didn’t happen because you could probably get away with that just by saying, Oh, it’s public domain, ‘cause Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, but, you know, that mercifully never happened. That fandom has enough to deal with. [Laughs]

And you definitely see a lot of this with TikTok. One of the reasons Alex Wennberg got really big on, like, the BookTok section of, with, with hockey romance was people were, essentially it’s fan casting him, but using him openly as inspiration for their characters. And there’s nothing un-, like, unexpected or unusual or new about that. Like –

Sarah: Mm-mm!

Kayleigh: – if you’ve ever read a Goodreads review, there are plenty of people who put in reviews, they’re like, here’s pictures of how I imagine these characters. People have done it on their blogs for years. Like –

Sarah: Yeah!

Kayleigh: – any writer has Pinterest where they do this; this is nothing new.

Sarah: Right.

Kayleigh: But I think the volume of it and the kind of, This person did it, therefore I can do it, and then this person did it, therefore I can do it, and it just sort of opens up this stream, and because there’s so much money in it –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Kayleigh: – no one is really stopping to think, Are we crossing a line here? Because I definitely think the ReyLo stuff, Adam Driver, I think is so crossing a line that it makes me very uncomfortable, and I’m, I think it’s, I’m not even necessarily against Real Person Fic. If you’re just like, Here I am in my little community doing my thing.

Sarah: Right.

Kayleigh: What I don’t like is when it becomes fuel for conspiracy.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: And I think that is, it’s often tough to extract those two things from one another.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: It’s really easy to feed an, a burning fire, and it’s really hard to quash it once it gets to a certain size.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kayleigh: And if you’re in – quite frankly, I think a lot of people who are in publishing who are picking it is they’re not seeing all of that. What they’re seeing is, here’s a, trying to make money on it; this is the exact same thing when, you know, Twilight was big and everyone wanted a vampire book. It’s the same thing when Fifty Shades was big and everyone wanted erotica. It’s the – I think that’s their beginning and end of it. So I don’t even know if they’re necessarily aware of what was happening on, on hockey side of BookTok. I think they, you know, because a lot of those books were self-published –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: – and a lot of those books are kind of fostered very much as an indie quality – like, I think Emily Rath is a self-published author – so I don’t think they were even seeing that –

Sarah: No.

Kayleigh: – but I also don’t think that they are necessarily going to confront any of this. Like, what it will take is, frankly, someone doing what Alex and Felicia Wennberg did and saying –

Sarah: No.

Kayleigh: – Enough is enough. And they didn’t even say it about the books. That’s fine; they were talking about the fan behavior at his place of work. No one –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: – has actually said, I don’t want you using my personal life, my personality, my family, and, like, details about my very being in this way.

Sarah: And now I have to sort of chase my own tail and question where my lines are, because I don’t have a problem with fan casting. I don’t have a problem with using a still of a celebrity or a still of an actor or a, or a sports person. You know, I don’t have a problem with any of that as fan casting in a review, talking about who you see as these characters. Like, that’s not how my brain works. But I don’t have a problem with that. So why do I have a problem with Real People Fiction in romance casting, casting people, not a role, not like Kylo Ren, not, you know, a, a, a role, a fictional character, but casting the actor. Like, why is that the line for me, but not the picture? So I really have to, like, chase my own tail –

Kayleigh: Well, yeah –

Sarah: – and question my own boundaries here.

Kayleigh: I think that’s another reason that stuff like this kind of goes unchecked is because, frankly, everyone has a different line, and it can be very difficult to define where your line in the sand is. Like I said, I read way too much Real Person fanfic as a teenager to really have a moral high ground on this.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kayleigh: So when it comes to things like, you know, the, the, the Adam Driver influx of, like, fiction in that way, that, to me, like, the, the profit of it I think is what gets me. The, the latching onto a man’s name to make money from him in a way that he has not consented and in a way that feels extremely objectifying –

Sarah: Yeah.

Kayleigh: – I think that’s another thing about this. It’s like they can talk all they want about, Oh, I like Adam Driver for more than just his looks, but that doesn’t really come across in your work! And if you were writing, like if you were on Archive of Our Own just writing this, you’d be fine! I, I’d go past, I wouldn’t click on it, but that’s your thing, you know. That, but I, I, I do struggle with this, and I think that was one of the reasons that they, they, the HockeyTok thing fascinated me so much was because to me that seemed like such a clear line in the sand –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Kayleigh: – and I was curious as to why it wasn’t for all of these people being so sexually aggressive towards them in real life and online and feeling offended when the guy’s wife says –

Sarah: Please stop.

Kayleigh: – I don’t want my son growing up where thinking this is okay. ‘Cause that’s a good lesson to learn! You know, she’s doing the right thing there!

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Kayleigh: And that’s so tragic to me! Like, she shouldn’t have to go through that. Where do they go after this? ‘Cause clearly a bunch of people, they’ve already said, I’m not going to support the Kraken anymore. They’re, they’ll be fine without you. So, you know, where do they move onto next?

I think this is another aspect of, like, toxic fandom and the way conspiracies play that is so telling is they jump ship frequently and take that rhetoric and take that poison to other places. The TwiMoms, the people who were obsessed with Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, they all jumped to Fifty Shades of Grey, then they all jumped to Outlander and replicated those same models.

Sarah: Holy cow.

Kayleigh: They’re the same people saying Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan are secretly in love and that her baby is really his and she –

Sarah: Oh!

Kayleigh: – didn’t really marry this other man –

Sarah: Those poor people!

Kayleigh: – and she had to, she just, and she was in an interview I think with Vanity Fair where she fully said, This is scary to be around. I feel unsafe for myself and my child. Didn’t stop these people from spreading this stuff; nothing will. But you know, Outlander is ending soon; where do they jump ship to next? Like, I’m, I’m actually trying to predict where I think they’ll jump ship; I’m curious. Like, I’m actually surprised more of them haven’t jumped ship to Bridgerton, but –

Sarah: There’s just too many people there.

Kayleigh: – I think that might have too many, like, non-, too many non-white people in it for their liking. So I think maybe they will jump ship to something a bit more based on real people, like, what’s the next sport? What is the next TV show? What is the next influencer? There’s always more content on the table. There will always be endless stream of it for you to vulturize. And that is a lot to deal with.

Sarah: It really is.

So I always ask, are there any books you want to tell people about? And where can people find you?

Kayleigh: Hmm! So I mentioned earlier that I read Lord of Scoundrels for the first time, so I’ve been trying to tick off a few, like, romance novel bucket list titles? I just read Vision in White by Nora Roberts for the first time recently –

Sarah: Oh!

Kayleigh: – which is a delight!

Sarah: I love that book!

Kayleigh: I’m a sucker for a beta hero. I’m a sucker for, like, a sweet, nerdy guy who’s unsure of himself, and I don’t see enough of that in the books I read, and Vision in White has the perfect one called Carter. I love him.

Sarah: I loved Carter so much.

Kayleigh: I’m also reading – oh! I want more of that. I’m trying to fill in more of my, like, Nora Roberts gaps, ‘cause I just, I’ve, I’ve read about four books of the J. D. Robb series now, just to, you know, I’m filling in some gaps.

I’m also reading Homicide and Halo-Halo by Mia P. Manansala. I, I hope I pronounced that correctly. It’s a cozy mystery about a Filipino-American woman who works in her family’s restaurant, and then murder happens, and it’s the second in the series, and what makes it different from that typical genre is the char-, the lead is dealing with the trauma of having watched someone die in her family restaurant –

Sarah: Yes.

Kayleigh: – and having to now carry that weight, and I think that book does that so incredibly well. I, I’m really very taken with it.

I’m constantly trying to find more crime novels to fill the gap in my heart left by Louise Penny, who writes the Armand Gamache books, ‘cause I’ve read almost all of them now. The only cop I will ever love; they are the perfect criminals. [Laughs]

Yeah, I try to, like, read, when I read a book I try and read something that’s the absolute opposite of it after I’ve done it, so, so I’ve got my cozy crime, and then I have my romance, and then I’m currently also reading about the history of the Marquis de Sade –

Sarah: As you do!

Kayleigh: – which is digging into his life, which – I also, I, I had a real craving for, like, early to mid-2000s urban fantasy. You know, the ones where it’s like a hot woman on the cover with a tramp stamp and a knife and a halter top, and it was like –

Sarah: And leather pants.

Kayleigh: – I need it. Yes! Leath- –

Sarah: Always having leather pants.

Kayleigh: Low-slung leather trousers, some sort of tribal tattoo –

Sarah: Yep.

Kayleigh: – a knife. You know, maybe she’s got a motorbike. So I read Minion by L. A. Banks, which I’m annoyed ends in a cliffhanger, but I really liked the worldbuilding of that, and it’s also a depressingly rare example of that era where the character, the protagonist is a woman of color, so I really liked the worldbuilding of that.

And another one I ticked off my, my literary bucket list is I started reading Discworld!

Sarah: Oh, how cool! Where did you start?

Kayleigh: So this was the thing was I’d always wanted to read Discworld, and then every time I’ve asked my friends who’ve loved those books, Where do you start? Every single one of them had a different one, so –

Sarah: Always.

Kayleigh: – overwhelming; not going to do this. I don’t know if you can see it from here; I have a shelf on my house that is entirely Phantom of the Opera books?

Sarah: Ooh, wow, look at that!

Kayleigh: And retellings of Phantom, so, and it’s got films and all these books, so I bought Maskerade, which is his Phantom of the Opera pastiche, and I had it sitting on the shelf for a while for the collection, and I thought, You know, I’m just going to read it, and, like, maybe this’ll be a good start. And it was like, oh, this is really funny and charming, and these witches are like the coolest women I’ve ever read! And the satire of this is incredibly hard-hitting, so I read that, and then I read the follow-up book, which is called Carpe Jugulum, which is about vampires, and I really like vampires, and that’s great, ‘cause that book is basically like Political Centrism Is Evil: The Novel?

Sarah: Yes!

Kayleigh: And it’s so scathing! I was like, How are you doing this? This man is brilliant! So I’m really excited to delve back into more of those, once I finish reading the – I have a little, like, moat of books around my bed –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Kayleigh: – that I haven’t read yet because I don’t have shelves –

Sarah: Moat!

Kayleigh: – to put them on? So I have to, like, carefully extract myself from bed in the morning, not to knock over the moat.

Sarah: [Laugh]

Kayleigh: And so it’s really like, it’s like a yoga move to get out of bed in the morning, so it’s, you know, I quit fizzy juice, so this is the only addiction I have now is – [laughs] – books.

Sarah: Well, there you go! Where can people find you if you wish to be found?

Kayleigh: Well, you can find me on the sinking hellship of Twitter @Ceilidhann; it’s C-E-I-L-I-D-H-A-N-N. I’m on a bunch of other places, but I’m, again, I’m, I’m moving the deck chairs around while the ship goes down, and Elon cannot get rid of me that easily.

I write a bunch of places everywhere. I’m most commonly found on Pajiba.com. I also have a newsletter called the “Gossip Reading Club” where, when I feel like it, I take a piece of celebrity reporting and I analyze it and dig into why it was important, what it was getting at, the legacy of it. My most recent piece is on the New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong that caused a weird amount of controversy by not taking him all that seriously as a Method actor and being like, This is kind of silly, and people were like, How dare you hurt my precious baby girl Kendall Roy, so that was very fun to dig into.

Sarah: Yes.

Kayleigh: So yeah. Come, you know, come follow me; come read my stuff. I write about basically everything. [Laughs]

Sarah: Thank you so much for doing this interview. This has been a flipping delight. If you ever want to come back and talk about book and gossip, would you please email me –

Kayleigh: Hell yeah!

Sarah: – ‘cause I would be delighted.

Kayleigh: Yes. Hell yeah.

Sarah: I would absolutely be fucking delighted.

Kayleigh: If there’s anything you want to talk about with me, I will do it. This was great fun.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you so much to Kayleigh Donaldson for walking us through the entire story and also locating it in a larger history of fandom, including some elements that I had not considered. I will have links to all of the articles that Kayleigh mentioned that she’s written, and I will also have links to all the books that she mentioned, plus where you can find her on Pajiba, on Twitter, and the “Gossip Reading Club,” which I highly recommend; it is a great newsletter.

As always, I end each episode with an absolutely dreadful joke. This joke comes from Bull – hi, Bull! – from our Patreon. Strap in. Are you ready?

What’s it called when a book is written by the entire Hivemind?

What’s it called when a book is written by the entire Hivemind?

An ant-ology.

[Laughs] Ant-ology. Ant-ology! Thank you, Bull! I love the bad jokes channel; it’s my favorite one!

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you back here next week! 

Smart Podcast, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at frolic.media/podcasts.

[end of cool music]