Wouldn’t Have Happened If He’d Married a Black Girl…

Chris Rock used to have a section of his standup act about Black Men marrying white women that basically ended with: “Brother gets hit by a truck? Folks say: Wouldn’t have happened if he’d married a Black girl!”

My husband is Black. I am White (well, technically, I’m a Soviet-born Jew, but most people don’t care about the nuances). Whenever something doesn’t work out for me professionally, our joke is, “Wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t married a Black man.” (We laugh, and we joke, and then when the co-op we’re trying to sell in NYC comes in under the estimate when he shows it to the bank’s representative, and over the estimate when I show it, we remember that maybe we aren’t kidding all that much, after all.)

But my question for this post is, does an author’s personal life affect your enjoyment of their books? For me, reading some racist comments Roland Dahl made, forever colored my views of his work. (So, let’s see, Willie Wonka kidnapped these indigenous people and made them slave for him in his factory. And they’re oh, so happy about it? Sure…) Or knowing that Jonathan Kellerman is an Orthodox Jew, whenever a pro-Jewish comment pops up in the Alex Delaware novels, all I can think is, well, that’s gratuitous, it has nothing to do with the story, he only put that in there because of who he is. (It’s different with his wife’s books because her stories are about Jews, so it feels organic).

Does knowing about an author’s personal life help or hinder? Have you ever put down a book because of something you learned about the author? Have you ever picked one up? (I admit, I read “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” because Gary Shteyngart’s background is almost identical to my own; we immigrated from the USSR about a year apart at roughly the same ages, but it also made me more critical of his work as I read it, because everything in it was so familiar).