Opinion Allegations against Neil Gaiman: Fact, fiction and the writer
When harsh truths about a beloved writer are uncovered, the betrayal goes deep
Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual assault by eight women. (AP File) 
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I arrived at Neil Gaiman later than most people and with a book that was not The Sandman. The Ocean at the End of the Lane was a curious first book to read. Imagine a fairy tale, if you will, the German kind with its deep dark woods, unsettling creatures, and evil sorcery and a lost little seven-year-old trying to make sense of life. Now, supplant him in a Neil Gaiman universe in Sussex where the unsettling creatures assume everyday shapes — adults implacable like impossible gods; darkness that moulds itself into nameless horrors, magic that wears the cloak of benign familiarity, and fear, so much fear that leaches the colour out of the boy’s life. It is only his friendship with a young girl next door, and her family of magical women, his neighbours, that offer him sanctuary. Towards the end of the book, the boy, now a man of 47, has a moment of lucidity: “I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.” The experience of reading the novel was visceral and slightly disorienting but the hypnotic allure of Gaiman’s world was difficult to escape.
Reading The Vulture report by Lila Shapiro, detailing the British writer’s assault on several women — only the latest in a series of allegations that surfaced in July 2024 with a podcast — is a nauseous experience. From a former babysitter to a fan he had hooked up with after a convention, the details of assault and sexual misconduct are graphic and grubby. “Most of the women were in their 20s when they met Gaiman. The youngest was 18. Two of them worked for him. Five were his fans,” reports the story. Gaiman was over 40 at the time, at the peak of his celebrityhood, his books selling in millions and spawning television series that were successful franchises by themselves. The report reminds me strangely of the terror of the protagonist of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, of his defencelessness when he is let down by those meant to stand by him. In the damning pages of the report, the imbalance of power speaks for itself, impossible to explain away even in a Gaiman fantasy, impossible even to brush away casually by denials that speak of “false memories” and claims of the relationships being consensual.
What happens when a literary hero turns out to be a man with feet of clay? When all that he has spoken for — women and underdogs, the power of art to heal, of stories that offer hope and redemption — have been built on an edifice of lies? Gaiman is hardly the first writer with a character flaw. From Pulitzer Prize-winning Junot Diaz and Thirteen Reasons Why author Jay Asher, accused of sexual harassment, to the problematic politics of Ezra Pound, T S Eliot or V S Naipaul, or most recently, Alice Munro’s silence over her daughter’s abuse by her second husband, history is replete with writers with intractable blemishes. It is the fact of the power that they command, that can reduce or silence others into submission, that makes the difference. It also makes a man like Gaiman, with his vociferous support for women’s rights, the perfect perpetrator. When the first allegations came up, a barrage of friends spoke up for Gaiman as if his talent could explain away his occasional, perhaps consensual, profligacies.
Not too long ago, the revelation by Nobel laureate Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner of her mother’s support for her second husband Gerald Fremlin even after learning of his abuse of Skinner tore apart the image of empathy that Munro’s literary universe had built up. The women she created were rebels in their own quiet ways, subversive, difficult to hem in, very unlike the writer who obdurately refused to entertain the idea of her husband’s paedophilia, who would not see what Andrea and her other children were telling her, who drew strength from an abuser. The Nobel committee’s citation that held her up for coming close “to solving the greatest mystery of them all: the human heart and its caprices”, for being “interested in the silent and the silenced, the passive, those who choose not to choose” appeared only ironic in hindsight.
It also makes the rebellion of Skinner and the women who have come out with their stories of abuse against Gaiman so brave. In Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change The World (2018), Gaiman wrote, “It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that society is huge and the individual is less than nothing. But the truth is individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.” Because Skinner and these women believed their truth was a part of the stories these writers had to tell, because they fulfilled their obligation to imagine a better future, their stories and their truths make a difference.
Gaiman’s story, or Munro’s, makes for uncomfortable truths, especially because of the integrity they bring to their work, the hope they infuse in it that holds so many of their readers steady, like a friend. But perhaps, that is the purpose of fiction — to offer a neat causality to explain away chaos. In life, people contain multitudes — outrageously talented and ridiculously vain, good and petty; generous yet mean. Life rarely conforms to patterns. Perhaps, that’s why fiction tends to.
paromita.chakrabarti@expressindia.com
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