Thread by @jzellis

So a story for you: when I was a kid I wrote for a magazine called Mondo 2000. It was a cyberpunk magazine, and someone once told me that "for six months it was the coolest thing in the entire world", which was true.

That someone was Neil Gaiman, when I interviewed him.

I met Neil when I was twenty, and very much exactly Mondo's target audience. Here are two photos that give you some idea. I wanted to be a William Gibson character so bad it hurt. Here's two pictures taken that year to give you some idea of how cool I thought I was.

I interviewed Neil the morning after a reading on the Queen Mary in Long Beach. I have photos of him and of me and him and my friend Bret perched on the big guns on the deck.

I'm sure I was annoying as hell. I desperately wanted him to think I was as cool as Mondo 2000.

But he was extremely polite and remains perhaps the most eloquent person I've ever encountered. Dude actually talks like that. I've tried ever since to approximate his ability to speak aloud in complete paragraphs without any "ums" or "ers". It was a great morning in my life.

A few years later, I'm living in Seattle and I go to a signing of his new book American Gods to say hi, assuming in my egotistical way that he'd remember me. And he did. "Have you read the book yet?" he asked me. "I think you'll find it interesting." Or words to that effect.

I didn't tell him that I was too broke to afford the hardcover of the new book. I wanted to read it but I figured I'd wait until it was in paperback.

And then my friends started calling and messaging me, asking if I'd read America Gods yet, because I was in it.

If you've read the novel, you might already know where this is going; the character is different in the TV series, for a different era.

But I got a copy and read it, and as I read it, I came across this.

Now, every fictional character is usually an amalgam of people the author has met and I'm sure this one is no different, but the physical description, speech patterns, and even specific references and phrases he uses, are me and things I said to Neil in conversation.

The Technical Boy may not be entirely me, but it's very hard for me not to believe I ended up in the book the guy was writing when he met me, at least in part. Enough that people started calling me after they read it.

I was a Neil Gaiman character. You can imagine my response.

It was not a flattering portrayal but I didn't care; I thought of it as a bit of cheeky satire on me and my subculture by a wise and perceptive author. But it also stung a bit, though of course I'd never have admitted it. I thought it was very cool and that I was very cool.

It was an extremely perceptive and incisive portrayal, and he wasn't wrong. And inside my head it took a pin to my inflated ego and sense of how cool I was. I didn't dwell on it, exactly, but it made an impression.

It took me years to really be able to get past my own arrogance and self regard and realize that, in fact, Neil Gaiman thought I was a cunt, and wrote me into a book as a cunt, along with all the other California cybersamurai wannabe cunts like me. And I was a cunt.

To be fair, I was also twenty years old. I think you're allowed to be a cunt at twenty, especially if you're a harmless cunt, which I was. Just a smart insecure kid who thought he was the future, yadda yadda wank splat urgh whatever. I think you can forgive me for that.

It's another thing to be a cunt when you're sixty and the furthest thing from harmless. To not be able to turn that razor perception on yourself and see yourself for what you really are. To buy your own bullshit for so long you think you are what people want you to be.

I may never be half the writer Neil is, but that, at least, is one gift I have that he doesn't seem to; one that, ironically, he in part gave me.

I have the ability to see the cunt in the mirror and know him for what he is, and to care enough to try and stop being that cunt.

I'm very sorry about all of this that's coming out - sorry for these women, sorry for millions of disillusioned people who saw Neil's work as a mirror in which they could see themselves when no one else seemed to see them.

What those people saw in Neil's mirror was far more kind and empathetic than what I saw, and I think that's why it hurts them so badly. Because they thought they could believe that someone saw them and loved them for who they were. And he let them believe it, and that sucks.

I'm not a good person. I've never done what Neil apparently did, but I have been emotionally abusive to women in my life, not out of malice or even not caring if I hurt them, but out of self-delusion and self-absorption.

I was never the villain in my own head. Who is?

But I changed. I became able to see through my own bullshit. It left me filled with guilt and self-hatred for a long time, and if I'm being honest I didn't really stop being a cunt overnight. It took me a long time. I'm still a cunt. But I can live with it now.

I'm still arrogant and dismissive and cruel, but nowadays I think I'm only cruel on purpose. For a cunt that's a big step to take. And I don't pretend not to be a cunt. I don't let people believe I'm a kindly wise gentle gnome saying all the right things on the Internet.

I have a lot of feelings about that article, just as I had a lot of feelings when similar (though frankly less egregious) allegations came out about another comics writer whom I knew a bit better than Gaiman a couple of years ago.

But who gives a shit what I think? I'm a cunt.

But I realized today that, in a funny way, the kind of cunt I am now is not the kind of cunt I probably would have been if Neil Gaiman hadn't held that mirror up to my face, whether he meant to or not. I'm a better class of cunt now, thanks to him.

I just wish he could have turned that razor perception on himself - for his own sake, the sake of these poor women, and for all the people who feel like a lifetime of being seen and celebrated for who they were, when very few people did that, has been betrayed by the truth.

I learned very young not to meet your heroes or confuse the art with the artist. I wish it were that easy for everyone.

But then again, I'm a cunt. Ask Neil Gaiman.

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