Repellent: Philip Roth, #MeToo, and Me

In the era of cancel culture, get a behind the scenes look at the journey to the critically acclaimed Philip Roth: The Biography and its canceled subject and author.

In 2012, the acclaimed biographer Blake Bailey persuaded Philip Roth-commonly known as our greatest living novelist, and famous for his staunchly guarded privacy-to give him complete and exclusive access to Roth’s friends, family, papers, and person. Their peculiar rapport evolved over the next six years, warm and contentious in turn, until Roth’s death in 2018.

Philip Roth: The Biography was published on April 6, 2021, and hailed as a masterwork by Cynthia Ozick on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. The 900-page book debuted at #12 on the Times Nonfiction Bestseller list.

But ominous forces were afoot: because of revelations in Bailey’s biography, many were calling for Philip Roth and his work to be canceled, while others seemed to think Bailey had been overly sympathetic and even complicitous with his subject’s worst failings. Soon rumors exploded on the internet about Bailey’s own private life, and within days he himself was roundly canceled.

In Repellent, Bailey looks back at his fraught collaboration with Philip Roth, whose reputation as a misogynist, philanderer, and self-hating Jew-not to say one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era-left him obsessively preoccupied with his only authorized biography. Bailey also frankly describes his own wayward behavior, and reflects on the extent to which writers’ personal lives should affect the perception of their work.

Repellent is a provocative account of the private Philip Roth and his biographer, as well as a clear-eyed examination of the perils courted by any writer or artist-fallible human beings, after all-in the era of cancel culture.