My High-School Haters

One spring morning, high-school students started tweeting at me.

“@4fishgreenberg, when is the last time you have eaten Bluefin Tuna?”

Another wanted to know about the “most unique places you have been on your studies/fishing trips.” A science teacher had assigned my book Four Fish and found me on social media. She’d had the clever idea that it might be fun for her students to “engage” with a real author online. Because a whole classful of book purchases makes my publisher happy, I dutifully tweeted back.

But then the bad tweets came.

“@4fishgreenberg who the fuck wants to read about fish lol”

In another tweet, he used a homophobic slur. I wrote that I would be telling the teacher about this one.

“I have the free speech right to say whatever I want about your book and my opinion on it,” he replied.

The tweets from the high-school class abruptly ceased. An email came in from the teacher. She was mortified. She apologized profusely. She assured me that the student’s Twitter account had been suspended and that disciplinary action had been taken.

A little later, a tweet came in from someone going by 4fishisgay.

“Hey @4fishgreenberg I had a little fan mail for you”: a picture of my book’s cover with a Post-it note reading, “suck my dick.” This person went on to tweet, “Everyone follow me I don’t suck fish dick.”

I posted online about all this a while back and let the incident slip from my mind. But this spring, with Twitter seeming to become even more of an adolescent stew, I found myself reflecting again about what happens to a book when it travels to the strange land of social media. Sure, there were probably trolls at the back of the class at the School of Athens scribbling papyrus wedgie threats to Plato. High school has always had its bullies. And hate mail is nothing new. But as a high-school kid, I never would have dreamed of writing to one of the authors whose work we’d been assigned to read. Writers had something of a lofty, untouchable glow. Insulting one publicly was unthinkable, unless you were another writer, like, say, Norman Mailer, in which case you’d just punch the other writer in the face.

But now public discourse is, um, different, and as a writer, you are just as likely to be asked to perform an act of fellatio as you are to list your literary influences. And even weirder is the way a book can tumble through the electronic ether, following a fate the author never could have imagined.

Take another of my fish book’s adventures. A well-endowed private school had booked me to read a passage or two and do my usual spiel about the ecological threats our oceans face and the obligation we all have to eat sustainably from the sea. But when I stepped down from the stage, a student approached me to tell me that the passage was familiar. He’d read it before … on a standardized test.

“I know this is kind of weird,” he said, “but I think your book was on the English AP.”

No, no, I assured him. No one from the testing companies had been in touch; there were a million STEM books out there. But then I gave a second lecture at another wealthy school, read the same passage, and had the same reaction from a different student: “Definitely on the test.”

I checked that sad little corner of Amazon called “Author Central,” where authors waste valuable writing time tracking sales. There, in tight synchronization with the springtime test, was a sharp spike. Not only had the College Board used a passage from my book without my permission, but evidently, someone somewhere had spilled the beans that some of my paragraphs were on the test. This indiscretion seems to have prompted thousands of others to buy my book to try to ace the test. Eventually, the College Board paid me a small fee, and everything ended amicably. I’ve always wanted to see a copy of the test. “What did the author intend with this passage?” I imagine one of the questions asking. Answer: The author intended, at least in part, to get paid.

At a certain point, I wanted to graduate. Enough with high school. I’d written my book for adult readers, for Chrissake. Couldn’t I get some university gigs? As luck would have it, my publisher had just created its own speakers bureau with the express goal of sending its authors to college. So off I went. To colleges hither and yon, in cold, flat, frozen places I’d never heard of. Just like recording artists who now make far more bank off concerts than off the actual music they write and record, we authors find ourselves working the crowds, keeping our books in print and our bank accounts in the black.

How much longer could I pound the pavement? I was wondering this as an undergrad sped me and three of his fellow ecology students at 80 miles an hour up an Illinois highway toward the airplane that would whisk me away from this particular flat, cold place. I liked this young man. He reminded me of myself at that age. He liked to fish and hunt and roam the woods. He had volunteered to drive me because my book, he said, had touched him, made him feel a little less alone in his love of nature. He felt the pain of the loss of the natural world as much as I did, and he told me during the drive that my book had made him want to do something that would save the ocean.

Just then, the doors on the truck in front of us swung open, and a dozen two-by-fours tumbled out onto the highway. The student swerved and dodged. A lesser driver would have side-winded us into oncoming traffic. But this clever kid managed to keep the car straight. With two shredded tires and a gash to the grill, he deftly piloted us over to the median. In a little while, a state trooper retrieved us and left us at a diner. We shook our heads and marveled at the miracle of our survival. The waitress came, and I opened the menu.

“What can I bring for you folks this evening?” she asked.

“Bring us,” I said—“bring us … something unsustainable.”