A witty gay novelist confesses to writing a dozen fake letters published in Slate’s insufferably Woke “Dear Prudence” column. From Gawker:
HELP! I COULDN’T STOP WRITING FAKE DEAR PRUDENCE LETTERS THAT GOT PUBLISHED
It was a fulfilling creative outlet, until one got featured on Tucker Carlson.
BENNETT MADISON
9.13.2021Sometime at the tail end of 2018, shortly after abandoning yet another draft of what was supposed to be my fifth Young Adult novel, I took up a different form of fiction: I started writing fake letters to Dear Prudence, Slate’s long-running advice column. …
Writing fake letters to advice columns could not be considered a good career move; after all, it was unpaid and I wouldn’t even get a byline out of it. On the other hand, it was easy and creatively fulfilling. In my anonymous, fabricated letters to Prudence, I could follow the most demented threads of my imagination without having to anticipate the omnivalent flavors of opprobrium that might rain down on me from YA’s brigade of cultural revolutionaries. …
Over the next couple of years, I used burner email accounts to submit around 25 letters to Dear Prudence, at least 12 of which were answered on either the printed column or the podcast.
Though Dear Prudence has run in Slate since 1997, the role of Prudie was assumed in 2015 by Daniel Lavery — co-founder of the feminist website The Toast and author of a book about famous literary characters texting — who transformed the column into something of a tribunal, doling out po-faced judgment to guilty white cishets for crimes of allyship. Was it wrong for a letter-writer to call the cops when she saw a home invasion taking place on her street? (“You can’t go back in time and undo what you did, of course,” an unamused Prudie tsked.) Would it be morally acceptable for another to steal their parents’ phones and secretly delete objectionable content from their Facebook feeds? (“Go ahead and unsubscribe them with my blessing,” Prudie advised.)
… After a few false starts, I learned that a good letter is defined by two opposing values: it must be plausible, but it must also be ridiculous. This is a delicate equilibrium to manage, and one that I botched frequently. Help! My Friend Thinks I Am Stealing Vaccines From African-American Grandmothers To Attend Sex Resorts ran, but was a disappointment; it needed another flourish of insanity to justify its existence. My Family Used to Call Me Auntie Christmas. Now They Call Me the Christmas Karen! was a personal favorite that never got published, likely because it failed on plausibility — I had miscalculated the relative ages of the characters, and the whole thing fell apart upon examination. …
But sometimes my work was altered in ways that changed its substance. In My Daughter Is Pretending to Be Demonically Possessed… and I Can’t Take It Anymore!, I’d made a point of establishing that the advice-seeker fears dampening her daughter’s creative spirit by scolding her for crab-walking around the house and spitting on her family members. When the letter finally made an appearance on Prudie’s podcast, it had been stripped of its caveats to allow Prudie to deliver a sermon about nurturing childhood creativity. (“This child is perfect, and has a great big imagination.”) I don’t have a child, much less one who’s a vessel for a demon; nevertheless, I felt misunderstood.
Prudie’s advice often missed the point in favor of discursing on pet topics. In Help! My Sister Is Convinced She’s an Unrecognized Genius, and It’s Tearing My Family Apart!, a woman has turned into a monster after getting a perfect score on the type of Facebook quiz that asks users to identify sushi’s country of origin. “IQ. Fake and racist,” Prudie responded. True, but what did that have to do with anything?
Occasionally, though, Prudie praised me: My Mother Is Trying To Convince the Guests At My Gay Wedding To Come Dressed As Disney Characters was, in the columnist’s words, a “beautifully written” letter in which “every turn of phrase was a joy.” …
Though I assumed that thousands of people were reading my Dear Prudie letters, I received little in the way of feedback, other than from the small but prolific group of weirdos that populated the comments section of the site and a few close friends who mostly seemed confused about what I was doing with my life. It was the sound of one hand clapping.
It was ironic, then, that the letter that received the most attention was also my final one. The evening after Help! My Husband Won’t Remove His Mask, Even For Sex! ran, I was on my first margarita at a Mexican restaurant when a colleague texted me that it was getting traction on Twitter. I was on my second when another friend alerted me to the fact that the letter had been picked up by Tucker Carlson on Fox News. In a segment with Clay Travis — Rush Limbaugh’s replacement — Carlson read smirkingly from my work over a chyron that read TERRIFIED LIBERALS KEEP THEIR MASKS ON DURING SEX.
