“You Will Never Be Forgotten”
by Mary South
from the January 27, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
“You Will Never Be Forgotten” is the title story to what I believe is Mary South’s debut, a collection of short stories that comes out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March. I’m assuming, then, that this will be an introduction to South for most all of us. I’m interested to see where her story goes after this provocative, though rather general (probably because this story is sadly becoming more and more familiar), opening paragraph.
The rapist is such an inspiration that he started a newsletter to share his story. He chronicles his transformation from a nerdy duckling into the muscular entrepreneur swan he is today. The newsletter began as a motivational tool for his annual charity triathlon, but it has become much, much more. It’s a meditation on health, tech, spirituality, culture, and, of course, pushing through limitations and not understanding the meaning of the word “no.” The woman has been following the rapist on social media since the rape, though her accounts don’t officially “follow” the rapist. When the woman accidentally liked a post, she achieved a new personal best in self-hatred, just as the rapist was achieving a new personal best in his triathlon. She imagined the rapist receiving a notification of the like and considering it proof that the rape had been consensual. The rapist works for the most prestigious seed fund in Silicon Valley, which is a fact the woman finds funny in retrospect. The woman works as a content moderator at the world’s most popular search engine, in a room with no windows or ventilation system, shoulder to shoulder with unfortunate souls.
Please let us know your thoughts on the story below. I’ll be going on holiday later this week, and this is definitely something I plan to read while waiting for transportation (if I haven’t gotten to it sooner).
Mary South’s “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” exhibits some brilliant irony and a lot of unfortunate side-effects of up to the minute on-line web technology. As one character says, “The web is forever” but so is plastic. That social media seems to mold everyone into nothingness could be the theme of this story; how technology detaches everyone from everything. Noone really cares about anyone except their selfish selves although continuously making hallow gestures of caring that can be seen by others but are otherwise to be ignored. There doesn’t seem to be much of a plot. Rather the story functions as an existential satirical essay on our deteriorating mores concerning sexual and online misconduct. The protagonist victim is incredibly intelligent and one wonders how she didn’t distrust something about the rapist unless the writer’s point is that every nice male is a potential rapist who could get away with it unless he was a powerful celebrity who got his monetary livelihood taken away and was made into a social pariah. One also wonders why the protagonist didn’t file a police report or file a lawsuit even though any action by anyone about anything appears totally useless. It is difficult to read this kind of story because it is data rich with actual real events for fictionally rendering the degrading tendencies of the social media web technology industry. Add to this how everyone and particularly nice, high achieving males can pretend to be holy and do the most horrible things on the side and never be held accountable. It’s a hellish horrific vision where one day there will no more people, just degraded algorithms trying to analyze nothing in the dead empty shell of a supposedly once thriving digisphere that imploded into oblivion with no life just futile leftover sparks of sterile electronic energy. I’m interested to see other thoughts on this story.
I think Larry Bone’s exegesis is on target, and much more sympathetic than I feel towards the story. Because as he points out it is missing any action other than a kind of weird revenge in the narrator’s experience, It has more of the tone of a polemic about contemporary dangers than a realistic narrative record. Anyhow, yuck.
Here’s a story that hardly seems fiction although I don’t want to suggest Ms. South is describing her own experiences BUT she’s clearly enjoying the forum of the story to rant. But…I am 100% with her rant. I despise what’s happened to San Francisco and the tech industry’s hypocrisy is sickening. Her hate and bile are in line with mine. But…is that fiction?
That was exactly my problem with it, Ken. I didn’t plan on commenting on this one just because, frankly, it didn’t feel sufficiently transformed into art. It was an artless rant.
And a predictable one that doesn’t take any risks, publishing in a venue where the readership is largely already pre-aligned with South’s POV politically — it’s the sanctioned PC form of hate and bile, and if you’re truly a progressive and an old-school liberal, shouldn’t you be abhorring hate and bile, period? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Turn your disgust into something positive and productive.
This is more like a series of self-righteous tweets and vitriol and vituperation and anomie than actual literature, which is what I expect from a venue as prestigious as The New Yorker. I understand the idea of “the invective” as a form, but it still needs to be grounded in character, story, and language. Getting by almost entirely on “Voice” can work for a one-person show, maybe, but as written literature? Unimpressive. South disappoints on this effort.
I enjoyed all your comments and I also appreciated this story which I found funny, powerful, and shocking.This is a story of trauma: the narrator is traumatized. The “plot” of the story is her accepting her powerlessness, accepting that there’s no magic healing of trauma, that no expose of the perp will undo what has already happened, “the universe” won’t succor her, and that, irrevocably changed, she “has to figure out her life” from this moment onward.
I was surprised and disappointed to read the comments on here about this story, as I normally find them insightful. I suppose that itself is revealing, as the survivors of sexual assault are rarely platformed, much less empathised with, in mainstream film or fiction (and male-gaze revenge films or torture porn explorations of the topic – common in both pedestrian and auteur film – do not count; they only do more damage).
The plot here, as Carole points out, is this woman’s journey through her own grief, helplessness, anger and trauma. Anyone who has endured, or taken time to try to understand those who have endured, something similar to the protagonist will immediately understand that, regardless of whether or not they value the piece of writing. The fact that this journey is described as a “rant”, “polemic” or “satirical essay” is more indicative of the reader’s personal (in)experience and (lack of) knowledge of trauma rather than the quality of the story itself.
These comments instead accurately reflect the reality of sexual assault survivors in the world more generally – our stories are merely uninteresting rants or diatribes that we refuse to “get over” or “stop talking about”. We are victim-blamed, just as Larry’s comments above accomplish – we are held responsible for “[not] distrust[ing] something about the rapist” (why is it my responsibility to police men’s behaviour, rather than men’s to police their own, and society’s to police men?) and our experience of being sexually assaulted is portrayed as an indication of our intelligence. I cannot even begin to articulate how damaging this perception is. I might instead ask you: why weren’t you smart enough to avoid that car smashing into your house? and what were you wearing? and were you drunk at the time? and how many people have you slept with, and don’t you think these factors have something to do with the car accident? Do these questions seem like non-sequiturs? Welcome to our world.
Please step back for a moment to reflect on the culture these comments create for the hundreds of millions of women who have experienced sexual assault. And then you wonder “why the protagonist didn’t file a police report or file a lawsuit”.
Sexual assault is endemic, and that will not change until people such as yourselves do the work to educate yourselves. If you don’t think it affects you, or the women around you, then you are not building the types of relationships where people trust you enough to share their experiences of it (and it’s clear this is the case from many of your comments – you are not safe spaces for survivors of sexual violence).
In a recent UK study:
– 99.7% of the sample had been repeatedly subjected to violence including assaults, harassment and rape.
– On average, women living in the UK were subjected to at least 37 acts of violence each over the course of their lifetime.
– “In the vast majority of cases reported here, women were subjected to multiple crimes and the perpetrators were overwhelmingly male.”
– Only 2-4 percent of women reported their assailants were convicted.
Study: http://www.endthefear.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Key-Facts-Document-VAWG-VictimFocus-2021a.pdf
I do not post this comment because I care about your reactions – I really don’t, as you’ve already made your way lack of awareness very clear – but because I want the next woman who looks up this story and reads your ignorance to know that I see her, I understand her, and that she is not alone in this journey.
I apologize. I understand how Anonymous feels I was blaming the fictional victim for what happened to her if I wonder why she didn’t suspect evil intentions in the supposed nice guy or why she didn’t file a police report. Perpetrators are smooth manipulators and a police report makes the victim relive the crime. My comment means nothing. What the New Yorker short story editor thought about the story is all that really matters because she published Mary South’s story.