circles for review, the circumstances here are different: your attack on my book was sent not to impartial authorities but to concerned parties who also happen to be governmental officials, an unheard-of compromise of journalistic independence for writing dealing with social and political issues. A likely effect of such an act is to create pressure on the publishers to withhold publication.” Recruiting a powerful man was, like throwing published data into a conflict, another chess move to compensate for my own lack or sense of lack of credibility in the conflict. And I pointed out to my editor that in raging about my sins of interpretation—and only those sins—this reader had apparently found no factual errors worth mentioning.
Credibility is a basic survival tool. The book went through the usual editorial processes, and then in the fall of 1994 it was in print. Because it was in part about nuclear weapons and the campaigns against them, and because my younger brother was an antinuclear activist and a kind and supportive person, he helped organize a speaking tour across the American West, using his networks to set me up at colleges and radio stations and activist groups, and joined me on the 7,000-mile journey in my Chevrolet truck. We stayed with friends and acquaintances, mostly his, all the way; in Dallas, our host politely asked us what route we took there from San Francisco, and I was pleased to be able to reply to him, “Via Seattle.”
Sierra Club Books assigned an in-house publicist, a tall blond man who became more and more peculiar as I tried to work with him. It became impossible to reach him by phone or to get him to return calls, but he emailed me that he had booked me in bookstores across the West as part of that grand tour and gave me dates that fit the schedule. I’d been ignored when I’d complained to other people at the publishing house about him, and I’d gotten the impression, again, that they considered me overwrought and my concerns baseless. When we were already out on the road, I got suspicious and found a pay phone from which I called the first bookstore he was supposed to have booked me into. I found out he’d never contacted it. I made more calls.
He was a liar. None of the events he’d claimed to have scheduled me into existed. When I did radio interviews it turned out that the interviewers hadn’t received the copies I’d asked him to send, so they had no clue what we should talk about. He had, one way or another, decided to bury my book. The book remained far more invisible than it might have been otherwise, and our tour was full of gaps and dead spaces we could have filled ourselves if we’d known what he was doing. I thought Savage Dreams was an important book, or at least a book trying to look at important, urgent things in new ways. (Its title, which I regret, was after a charismatic monster named James Savage, who initiated genocidal wars in the Yosemite region in pursuit of gold-rush profit.)
If someone had listened to me when I began to distrust him out loud, his malice or incompetence might not have had such an impact. During those first few years in publishing I was writing history and being regarded, as young women often are, as not particularly capable of bearing witness even to everyday interactions. I was reading in public and being unable to make myself heard by my publishers. That evening with Tina after the movie, when I told her about Coplans and the rest, I realized for the first time how much it all felt like a genteel, disembodied version of the annihilatory rage I’d met on the streets a few years earlier. These incidents seemed intended to tell me that this was not my place and in it my voice would not be heard.
Now, I feel lucky to have gone through all that before even the internet, let alone social media, had come along. We know the malice there is distributed by gender and race, and that a lot of collective online labor is put into making people who aren’t white or male or straight or cisgender shut up and go away. If they aren’t silenced altogether, they pay this tax on having a voice, they do the extra work to