The Deep Weirdness of Being Seen
A novel meets a shifting literary terrain
Dear Reader
I used to think that publication day was the moment of arrival. The book steps into the world; reviews follow; the work becomes real because it is received.
This time, with Ocean, has been different.
My publisher, Eye Books, secured a lot of wonderful coverage, for which I’m very grateful. A beautiful feature in the Financial Times, an Observer travel piece, interviews on Times Radio and BBC Scotland. I’ve spoken about the book’s genesis, the sailing trip I undertook to research it, its themes of trauma, grief, survival, and the psychic hauntings of love. Readers have told me the book shook them and that it stayed with them. Ocean is the culmination of nearly six years of work, and, I believe, the pinnacle of my career so far. It brings together everything I’ve done across fiction and poetry in the past twenty-five years.
And yet, something hasn’t happened.
Something that has happened with every one of my previous books, including my poetry, which has been reviewed in broadsheets despite the tiny space poetry is normally afforded.
Though published almost a month ago, until this weekend, Ocean had received no mainstream literary criticism at all.
Not in the Guardian, not in the Times, the Telegraph, the Scotsman, the Herald, nor in any of the UK’s literary pages. Not in the TLS, nor by the literary bloggers who often pick up where shrinking books pages leave off. Not one. This absence was made all the more noticeable by the strength of support from smaller outlets, most notably the excellent Strong Words. Together with that broader media coverage, these would normally create momentum, not mark the end.
Of course I understand that review space has shrunk. Literary editors are under immense pressure. Celebrity memoirs dominate; tie-ins are prioritised; much good work goes unacknowledged. But even so, almost nothing at all? Not for this book, at this point in my career?
So when a review finally came, it landed like a life raft.
“This novel shines in its exploration of the deep weirdness of grief and trauma...”
These were opening words in a review in the Irish Times this weekend, and they felt like oxygen. (Full review here) The critic understood not just the story, but the psyche of the book: the hauntedness, the trauma bond, the ambiguity around James, the way Helen’s grief both clarifies and distorts. It was the review I’d hoped for: serious reading, deep engagement.
It wasn’t a London paper, nor a Scottish one, that broke the silence around Ocean. That a serious literary newspaper outside the UK’s metropolitan tangle was the first to engage with the novel felt telling.
It’s relevant to note that the writing of Ocean spans the entire period of ideological capture in publishing — from 2019 to 2025. Ocean began with a commission from a Big Five publisher, over lunch in 2019 (remember lunch with your publisher? Yes, it used to happen!). At the time, I could never have predicted what was coming: that gender activism would soon sweep into publishing, that women writers would become targets, and that the cultural ground would tilt beneath our feet. Over those six years, I went from a novelist with a contract and a track record to someone hounded from social media for the incomprehensible ‘crime’ of following J.K. Rowling. I adopted a pseudonym on X. I watched, in real time, the atmosphere in publishing shift into something chilling. I saw the internal pressures mount. Eventually, no longer trusting that Ocean could be published with integrity, I broke my contract and took it away.
Free from publisher constraint, I dropped my X pseudonym and stood firm. The backlash was unexpected, and monumental.
An invitation to speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival was given, then abruptly withdrawn. Through Subject Access Requests, I learned that colleagues and friends had tried to cancel me. I entered a world of whisper campaigns where only the Free Speech Union offered support and clarity. And I emerged, eventually, with a new publisher, a new community, and a slow but real turn back to sanity, marked by the Supreme Court’s judgement clarifying the primacy of sex in the definition of “woman.”
Many excellent nonfiction books have emerged from this ideological upheaval: by Helen Joyce, Victoria Smith, Kathleen Stock, Jenny Lindsay, Hannah Barnes, among others. Ocean is, I believe, the first major novel to come through it.
I am, for someone who has dared to pursue two literary genres to the same level in a country that doesn’t always welcome that kind of range, fairly well known. My poetry has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and has won several others. My novels Larchfield and Tiger received widespread attention and praise.
Which brings me back to the silence.
All authors long to be ‘inevitable,’ to be welcomed into the pages of the broadsheets. That’s a forgivable authorial dream, and one I’ve been writing for long enough to know is just that. Still, to receive so little serious review? Three novels. Four poetry collections. A significant reputation in two genres. A new book already highly praised. I don’t accept that this is just “how things are.”
During the Edinburgh Book Festival debacle, I was told that what was happening to me (suddenly being disinvited from an event I’d been invited to) was “normal” and to “let it go.” Believe me, I wanted to. The alternative, that I was being deliberately erased, and that people I once trusted were complicit, was too painful to contemplate. The author is a sole trader, a piece-worker, always reliant on shifting relationships and fragile goodwill. In this punishing climate, the woman author is the most vulnerable of all.
But the evidence was too strong that something was going on, and I persisted all the way to finding out what it was. I should say: being vindicated gave me no pleasure. It was one of the worst days of my life. The truth hurts. A lot.
Pursuing these things, or even simply noticing them, is not just for me. We are in the middle of a cultural power struggle: a slow-motion attempt to erase those who do not conform to the dominant ideology, regardless of merit, regardless of achievement.
Life isn’t fair, least of all literary life. But still, I’ve published more, won more, and worked harder than many of my male peers, yet I fight for each book as if it’s my first. And it gets harder. A woman growing older becomes, somehow, both more controversial and more invisible.
It’s hard not to wonder: if someone else had published the range and quality of work I have, would they be world-famous by now? The work is not the problem. I am. And not because of anything I’ve done — just for being… what? I think we all know.
Nevertheless, I still believe in meritocracy. It’s a founding principle of my world view. It’s what gets me up in the morning and keeps me writing. It’s just that the meritocracy, to borrow John Lennon’s words about his feminism, “may have died slightly.”
The recent major report by Sex Matters into ideological capture in publishing makes it harder to keep pretending nothing is happening. (Read ‘Everyday cancellation in Publishing’ or the ‘Summary Report’ here.) Page after page is shocking, here’s just one sobering statistic:
Munroe Bergdorf, a trans-identifying male and gender activist was given a six-figure advance for his book Transitional, which sold 2,915 physical copies in the UK. Helen Joyce’s advance for Trans was no more than a fifth of this, at £20,000, yet her book sold more than 23,000 physical copies in the UK.
The report lays out the ideological entanglement of publishers, booksellers, and media. Publishing decisions are increasingly driven not by merit or even by commerce, but by ideology. And the broadsheet review culture follows suit.
More shocking still was the response to the report’s publication from the editor of The Bookseller, Philip Jones, who, in an Editor’s Letter, acknowledged that publishing is ideologically driven, that it knowingly makes losses, and that this is, in his view, not a bad thing:
..the better-selling books in this area have largely been written from the gender-critical perspective, and yet generally eschewed by the big publishers. The corporates promise to publish for everyone but, in this regard, they do not, and have not. They know it too, because privately they admit it. They have followed internal consensus rather than commercial instinct, or to put it another way, care for the majority of staff and authors over the contrary views of others.
The arrogance of this view, and the lack of interest it demonstrates in the consequences to wider culture, are astonishing. I believe we are approaching the point where women writers will be able to bring discrimination cases against publishers who continue with this blind prejudice. With merit and commerce no longer driving decisions, careers are being promoted or ended for ideological reasons, and women are unfairly paying the price.
Back to Ocean and the wonderful moment The Irish Times review landed and broke the silence. Not only was it the deep engagement the book deserved, but the same weekend, Gareth Roberts, whose work I’ve long admired, recommended the book to his X followers. That felt like another breach in the wall. A hand reaching through.
So although the silence has been real, I have not had my faith in my work destroyed by it. I’ve simply been confirmed in my understanding of how things now operate. But the only way to resist erasure is to speak, and ask others to speak too.
My publishers have been energetic and exemplary. It isn’t their fault that every major English and Scottish outlet has so far looked away.
But you — my readers, my peers — can look directly.
I built this Substack around Ocean. I launched it to share the novel, and a growing readership has found it here. So I’ll ask plainly:
If you have a foothold in journalism, and Ocean speaks to something in you, pitch a review. It could be to a broadsheet, a literary journal, a podcast, or a blog. It could take the form of a survey of literary work emerging in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. Or it could simply be about the novel itself. There is plenty there to discuss.
We can send you a copy. We’ll support you in any way we can.
Ask the question.
Help this book have the life it deserves.
Thank you so much for reading.
Until next time,
Polly x
