I heard about this yesterday but it wasn’t until this morning when I read the Mary Sue breakdown of Cait Corrain’s professional implosion that I truly understood. An author, on the cusp of success, kills their own career in a matter of hours. How did it happen? Why?
TL;DR: New author (they) review-bombs her competition, gets caught. Then they deny, can’t fake-news her way out of it. Now her professional brand crushes like a beer can. Yikes, yikes, and more yikes.
At this writing, Corrain has checked into rehab. I wish them well on her personal recovery journey even as I deplore her choices. This isn’t more dog-piling. The Mary Sue’s got that covered. What I am interested in is: why? Addiction is only one possible part of the answer. What drove them to despicable decisions, especially when the potential benefit was negligible at best? Why would you do that?
What Happened?
Let’s take a look around – see if we can’t find some answers. Let’s pretend we’re Matt Scudder from the Lawrence Block series for a second. Don’t investigate their career death – try to understand her life. Her blog is offline, so let’s start Google. When you do that, you see that Corrain was/is an unhappy person. As the saying goes: ‘hurt people will hurt people.’ It’s not an excuse, but it helps us understand.
How do I know that? Their Goodreads bio is a clue:
I’m a writer, artist, and relapsed goth from the East Coast, where it rains regularly. I’m currently trapped in the sunny desert of LA, with my service dog and two parrots who boss me around all day.
When not writing, I can be found doing academic research for fun, engaging in casual falconry, devouring audiobooks and podcasts, forgetting to reply to DMs, and staying up past my bedtime.
I have a BFA in Sequential Art from Savannah College of Art and Design, where I also minored in Art History. I spent time working in film/TV before jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire by becoming a programmer.
Please buy my books so I can stop doing that forever.
I’m not a mental health professional, but it looks as though Corrain has pivoted several times through their life with different career paths and interests. Their last line is a bit of a tell: “please buy my books so I can stop doing that forever.’ It doesn’t look like their job makes them happy – they’re looking to you, the reader, to help them escape.
Why This Didn’t Work
Why is that wrong? It’s a logical fallacy, a twisted version of :‘If your plan depends on you suddenly being ‘discovered’ by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.’ Yes, being poor sucks. Yes, nobody cares. But at the end of the day, you are responsible for your own experience. This is YOUR journey. This is YOUR personal Mount Everest. Corrain missed that point in the Creative People Survival Guide – now they’re paying the price.
Torching your personal creative career on an amped-up Mean Girls-style whisper campaign takes a special kind of cruelty. You aren’t born with it – you’re taught it. Hours and hours of effort to dim other candles so that their candle burned brighter. Someone taught them that trick. I wonder who the person in Corrain’s life was that taught them that A) it was okay to do this and B) it was effective. Somewhere in their history, this happened to them – they tried to do it to someone else, a core career meltdown ensued.
Corrain Will Be Fine – Eventually
Even though the story plays out like a cautionary tale – let’s remember something. Controversy sells books. Don’t believe me? Look at James Frey. Publicly dragged on Oprah before a national TV audience in 2003 for claiming that ‘A Million Little Pieces’ was non-fictional. Twenty years ago, we all thought ‘this guy’s done.’ Not so. In 2007, he signed a seven-figure deal with HarperCollins. He’s been busy writing, creating, and making money ever since.
I predict that, although Corrain wouldn’t be welcome in certain author circles, they will go onto a successful career otherwise. They’ll exit rehab, do an apology tour, make amends with the authors they tried to cancel, and then off to the next project. Two or three years from now, readers will be buying their books and they’ll be doing just fine. In my darker moments, I almost envy them.
Or perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps we don’t live in that universe anymore. Perhaps actions have consequences and even though we can be empathetic to Corrain, we’ll let them go back to the world of ‘programming’ and ‘listening to podcasts.’ But not writing. This industry doesn’t seem to agree with them, if they’re willing to push others down to make sure they rise to the top.
