The Helicoptering Author

MY HUSBAND AND I ARE FIGHTING AGAIN. We are fighting even though I think we are on the same side, saying the same thing. He dis­likes the name I’ve given to the phenomenon. “No,” he says, “It’s not helicoptering.” Lest it begins to sound like something that belongs to erotica, I should explain. Having encoun­tered the phrase—and the phenomenon— ‘helicopter parenting’ about 15 years ago, I let it go past me. I had no use for it—I wasn’t a parent, and I was too lazy to categorise people on the basis of their parenting styles. But there must have been some glue in the expression that made it stick to my consciousness. For when Jennifer Banks, my editor at Yale University Press, asked me—casually, affectionately and quasi-rhetorically—what advice I had for her as her first book Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth was about to meet the world, I was sur­prised by my response. “I have found that it is best to not be a helicopter parent to your book,” I said, among other sillier things.

Where had this phrase come from? When had I started thinking of the writer as a helicop­ter parent?

As we fought in the car—I am laughing as I write this, such is the comic quotient of these scenes—and I heard him accuse me of being an ‘ungrateful author’, I tried to remember how we had arrived on the subject. I might have been complaining about a pet subject: dishonesty in our literary and political culture. “I can spot the helicoptering author from the social media posts or review essays engineered by them,” I might have said. My husband was irritated, it was in his voice: “To care for some­thing that has taken one year to conceive, nur­ture and produce is a virtue,” he emphasised. Maybe he was right. Why else did I think of the plants and trees to which I had given so much of myself, about whom I worried, particularly when I was away? If that did not make me feel guilty, why should becoming a helicoptering author make me feel dishonest? It is possible that it owes to my temperament of hesitation. I haven’t asked anyone to ever write a review or social media post or any form of advertisement about my writing, I told him, not with pride as much as making an effort to hide the fact of lacking the skills to ask anyone for such a favour. (That I had managed to get myself to request six people—so far—to write letters of recommendation for me was enough, wasn’t it?)

It is easy to categorise people on the basis of how they wake up—I don’t mean insomniacs and those who sleep well. I mean those who can wake up and attack the day as if it were toothpaste waiting to get into their mouths and those who wake up still under the spell of sleep, neither sleepy nor awake but in a daze, as if they would need to learn how to walk and talk and eat and laugh and sleep all over again. I am aware—in a hard way, beyond my control—that I belong to the second category. I bring this seemingly hilarious information to serve as analogy: like sleep controls some of us even when we are not asleep, so with the book one has written. The writer struggles to let go of it—like a par­ent, they try to get their child into a good school, the school in this case being a magazine or journal or literary festival; like a parent who wants their child to have friends, they try to introduce their book to new reading circles … Such behaviour is quite self-explanatory and, of course, self-evident.

All of these could be seen as affectionate tics, except that it has produced a cor­rupt ecosystem in—I now hesitate to use the phrase—literary culture. Writers get in touch with reviewers themselves, asking to send copies of their books, often requesting for a possible review. The forums for the publication of the review range from print media and online magazines to Goodreads and Amazon ratings. Writ­ers have been left with no choice, I suppose—in the absence of a robust vocabulary and efficient platforms on which they could announce the arrival and presence of their books, they are now dependent on this means of visibility, even as they are aware of the corrupt nature of this enterprise. When a writer sends a reviewer their book, there is very little chance of the reviewer writing a bad review—we will find it hard to criticise the cooking skills of a person who has invited us for a meal, after all. It is not the writer I mean to criticise (though I would certainly have liked to criticise the poet who emailed asking me to send him the review of a book that he had edited, before I sent it to the editor—I later learnt from other reviewers that it’s a habit of his) but the system that forces writers to become their publicists. Aren’t we doing enough on social media already, forcing details about book events and reviews on our poor ‘friends’ and ‘followers’?

I use the word ‘helicopter’ to not only borrow the sense of the suffix ‘parent’ but also to hold in it the sense of the constant presence of the author having to lead and direct the book’s public life, even its public persona. The author is the equivalent of the book cover—the author must be visible for the book to be noticed. So, the author chaperones the book wherever they can, to book launches and book festivals, to television studios and lecture halls, hoping for their little one—I mean the book—to be praised. The helicopter writer collects these adjectives and stores and circulates them like the parent collects their child’s report cards, grade sheets and school and extra-curricular certificates. They will need to be aired from time to time—social media or interviews for the writer, a family get-together for the parent.

The book does not ever end, the child never grows up. The helicopter author has to help the book cross the street from time to time. Who knows when their help might be necessary? And so the helicopter writer waits, even lurks around, waiting to be called, like a child calls out to a parent in the dark or when they have locked themselves in the bathroom or when they have fallen down. The author must always be available on call—for an interview, for yet another podcast, to write an essay to plug their book, a social media post to refresh public memory, a photo of themselves with their book or a photo of a printed draft with sticky notes. These are all versions of changing the baby’s diapers, to keep it from crying.

Being miserable at being this helicopter author—as you’d have guessed already—I have begun to feel that this is harder and more miserable than the process of writing the book. One has—I’d like to imagine—greater control, one is far more inner-directed during its writing. The post-publication life, when the helicoptering begins, is, quite obviously, other-directed: the book must be dusted, its pages opened from time to time, stories of its origin circulated. I mean all of these metaphorically, of course. Serving as publicist and sales as­sistant and becoming an employee of one’s book when what one really wants to do is to write down the sentences that have been coagulating inside one’s head is exhausting—one always has the sense of being on double duty, and, consequently, of not doing either of these jobs efficiently.

It is common to hear actors complain nervously in film promotion interviews about the exhaustion caused by the unending rounds of promotions—“It’s in the contract,” a few explain. “I like to talk about the film, about myself not so much,” says Cillian Murphy, articulating the tiredness of returning to the same small archive about oneself: “If there was a way of making films and then just go home, then that would be heavenly. But that’s not the way it works. You’re making a film, so then you do talk shows, premieres. … You have to promote your work so that the public will go see it … but I’m not designed to talk about myself.” The helicop­tering author fortunately—at least not yet—doesn’t have to play silly games like “Never Have I Ever” on talk shows like actors must now. It’s a baffling logic that has become inbuilt into the system—that the book will reach only where the author manages to (Imagine the sun visiting every spot to ferry its sunlight). It is as much a critique of the distribution system as it is of the personality cult that sells books. I see it as a continuation of the ecosystem created by pedigree—the personality cult and the web of connections that might lure and catch possible prey. Also, it’s an inequitable system—not everyone has the same access to childcare, not every writer has the same resources for helicoptering.

I DO NOT SAY ‘HELICOPTER AUTHOR’ WITHOUT REASON. THE analogy between the parent and the author begins quite early: like the baby shower, which formalises the presence of the arrival of the new one into the world, writers now share photographs of drafts and proof of the manuscript, the equivalent of an ultrasonography scan. In book launches and at literary festivals—the equivalent of reality television— the helicopter writers ask their books to reveal their prodigious talent like parents ask their children to show their talent when guests visit them at home. The extension of the message seems clear: Love me, love my children; love me, love my book. Writers make phone calls to journalist friends and possible reviewers telling them about the newborn, asking, directly or indirectly, for help to care for it, to give it at­tention. But, no matter how much these people do, it always seems too little to the writer—just as no matter how much the world loves their child, the love seems too little for the parent. This is because no one can give it the kind of care and attention that the author has. It disturbs them, it frustrates them, it makes them sad, it turns into a persecution complex.

Feeling bereft of support and abandoned by a system that they cannot con­trol, the helicopter author is forced to try desperate means: kissing the page of their book as autograph, carrying copies of their book to events, asking friends and acquaintances to share photos of themselves with a copy of the book, share endless photos of their newborn book like parents do of their children, boast about good reviews like parents share their child’s good grades or getting into a good school … Most of these efforts are embarrassing—they make their intended audience cringe; they rare­ly generate curiosity or desire—and must be humiliating for most writers. Since the parent cannot be a helicopter all the time, they come to rely on domestic and professional help. So with the poor writer. Strangers begin offering help, often for a fee—they want to be the book’s nanny. Every other day, in the ‘other’ inbox on Instagram, Indian writers get messages from bookstagrammers who offer to post “5 reviews of the book for `2000”. This idea of helicopter­ing one’s book turns review culture into a cor­rupt system where reviewing space and good reviews are produced through a network, leaving those who do not have access to such connections homeless. Privilege is no longer a good degree or family inheritance; the truly privileged are those writers who do not have to be helicoptering authors. They have become the ripe fruit that will attract flies.

Is there an alternative? So conditioned are we to this idea of the helicoptering author— much of what I say here will lead to recognition of our own lives and its mini-trials, possibly even anagnorisis—that anything said against it begins to feel personal, as if it were us and not the system that is being critiqued. Just as it is hard for us to imagine a time before—and after—capitalism, we are struggling to re­member or create a system where the author does not have to also be their unpaid publicist and sales representative. I’ve been thinking of EM Forster’s ‘Anonymity: An Inquiry’, an essay where, in trying to understand the difference between ‘literature’ and ‘information’, he turns to the subject of ‘signature’ and the consequent personality cult. Though he does not spell it out directly, I think he, after saying that the style is the signature itself, implies what it might feel to have unsigned books, books without au­thor names on their spine. This utopian idea reminds me of Plato’s half-hearted suggestion to give away newborn human children to the State so that they are all raised in an egalitarian environment.

I have another. What if we helicoptered other people’s books instead of ours, not of our friends and acquaintances but of strangers? What if we ‘adopted’ these books as our own?

About The Author

Sumana Roy

Sumana Roy is the author of a work of non-fiction, a novel and two poetry collections

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