Hello dear readers!
If you have a paperback version of Plus One, will you cross out an extra line for me?
It's on page 113:
The baby struggled a bit against his bindings. I opened my eyes, waited for them to focus, and then studied him. The lights of Lake Shore Drive strobed across his body. He was waking up, and his whole face was scrunched like a dried apple, as if he were in excruciating pain or dying, when it was probably just a hunger pang. There was no way I could have known that the little person in that hospital bassinet was a boy, I consoled myself. He looked so much like a boy to me now, I wondered why I hadn't seen it before. The pain passed as quickly as it had come, and his face reverted to angelic relaxation.
Obviously the underlined sentence contradicts the sentence just before it, and should be scratched out.
How did this happen? Well, that line had nagged at me after publication of the hardcover—what exactly did Sol mean by it? Newborns don't look like boys or girls, except in the viewer's imagination. So I asked my Square Fish editor whether she'd allow me to change the line to clarify that passage. She kindly said yes, and the sentence before the underlined one is the new, corrected one. Unfortunately, somehow the paperback went to print without the old sentence being removed.
What else did I change in the paperback? I removed four instances of the word "rape," which two characters had used cavalierly, on pages 244 and 281. Those passages had upset some of my readers. And although I thought I had chosen the word for good reasons, after careful reflection I decided that my use of it was not helpful to our cultural discussion about sexual violence.
Yours,
Elizabeth
If you have a paperback version of Plus One, will you cross out an extra line for me?
It's on page 113:
The baby struggled a bit against his bindings. I opened my eyes, waited for them to focus, and then studied him. The lights of Lake Shore Drive strobed across his body. He was waking up, and his whole face was scrunched like a dried apple, as if he were in excruciating pain or dying, when it was probably just a hunger pang. There was no way I could have known that the little person in that hospital bassinet was a boy, I consoled myself. He looked so much like a boy to me now, I wondered why I hadn't seen it before. The pain passed as quickly as it had come, and his face reverted to angelic relaxation.
Obviously the underlined sentence contradicts the sentence just before it, and should be scratched out.
How did this happen? Well, that line had nagged at me after publication of the hardcover—what exactly did Sol mean by it? Newborns don't look like boys or girls, except in the viewer's imagination. So I asked my Square Fish editor whether she'd allow me to change the line to clarify that passage. She kindly said yes, and the sentence before the underlined one is the new, corrected one. Unfortunately, somehow the paperback went to print without the old sentence being removed.
What else did I change in the paperback? I removed four instances of the word "rape," which two characters had used cavalierly, on pages 244 and 281. Those passages had upset some of my readers. And although I thought I had chosen the word for good reasons, after careful reflection I decided that my use of it was not helpful to our cultural discussion about sexual violence.
Yours,
Elizabeth
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