"Crazy Old Money" Just Became Loaded: A Holiday Romance. Here's Why.
So I did a thing that I need folks to know about for a lot of practical and not-practical reasons: I changed the name of the fourth book in the Gilded Love series (the holiday Rom-Com I released in 2019) from Crazy Old Money to Loaded: A Holiday Romance. And I didn’t just do it because the latter is a better title. As I was busy doing a lookback edit of the book while I had it switched from third person to first person, my editor posed a question that I took seriously: is it insensitive—even inappropriate—to use the word “crazy” as such a central part of my book?
I understood the argument. “Crazy” is a term that has been used as a weapon against all manner of people, primarily disparaging those deemed to be lower-functioning by various mental or cognitive standards of a given time. The othering of people based on mental function—and having terms like “crazy” and “insane”—wielded in a way designed to insult, gaslight, and oppress nonconforming people is problematic on many levels. I get it doubly as a woman (I’m thinking of the word “hysterical”) and triply as a neurodiverse person. And I agree—some historical uses of the word “crazy” have been problematic.
As a result of my conversation with my editor, and some research and thinking on my part, I decided to remove mention of the word “crazy” from this book. I’ll admit, I struggled with this one, not because I don’t believe in taking offensive words out of our lexicon. Because I’m deeply and genuinely worried about how binary thinking will impact our use (or canceling) of this and other words. Yes, “crazy” has been and is still used by some as a pejorative. It is also used as an extreme positive in a lot of our hyperbole (e.g., “crazy in love,” or “she drives me crazy,” in the sense it was used in the 90s era song by the Fine Young Cannibals). Much of our idiomatic usage has adopted crazy as a very good thing.
The title “Crazy Old Money” was a play on words I had intended to mimic “Crazy Rich Asians,” the movie version of which was popular around the time I released my book. My use of the word “crazy” was idiomatic, and wasn’t used in a way that described a person, or even assigned a negative value judgment to the thing it described. In my case, “crazy” modified “rich” and was used in a way that is largely viewed as positive and aspirational. It’s synonymous with the positive uses of the word “extreme.”
Much of the sound logic used to explain why we should avoid problematic words relates to avoiding negative usage. For example, the idiom “the blind leading the blind” is problematic because it implies that only visually abled people are competent to lead. It refers directly to a group of people and makes a value judgment on that group. Along the same lines, the phrase “blind optimism” is offensive if it implies that the quality it refers to is a bad quality in a person—this, because it uses the term “blind” as a negative.
The conversation we’re not ready to have (as a society) is a more nuanced conversation about how language is used in context. We’re at a moment in time in which we’re eager to cancel everyone and everything based on binaries that are easy to see (read: words) without dialoguing around the ideas they represent. As I’ve outlined above, the devil is in the details. And there are big questions about who gets to speak for what a community wants. I some cases, communities that have been hurt by a word reclaim and reframe it. In other cases, hurtful words remain taboo.
Ultimately, I my decision to remove the word “crazy” from the title came from my belief that its use would feel hurtful to someone, and out of my desire not to cause or amplify hurt. I didn’t remove it because I believe my usage in the title was irresponsible. I did find instances within the text of the book in which I had used theword crazy did refer to people, and in those cases, I removed them as a direct result of my learning and the belief that ensued (I had used them offensively and I was wrong). In my view, there are very few words in the English language that can be deemed “right” or “wrong” irrespective of context. Deconstructing that in any meaningful way means actually having hard conversations about these things. It really isn’t so easy as that.
With all that said, I really did learn something from having my use of the word brought to my attention and I’m thankful for that learning. Beyond what I did with Loaded, I’ve worked to eradicate its use in books that I’m writing now as well as other backlist titles I’ve recently edited. It might take time for me to update some of my other books.
I’m telling you this for two reasons:
If I’ve hurt you by using the word “crazy,” I apologize. From a desire to stop causing harm, I made the changes as soon as the issue was brought to my attention.
If you’ve ever bought or read Crazy Old Money, please don’t buy Loaded: A Holiday Romance. You will be buying something you already own.
This will become especially relevant coming into the holiday season. Every author is reminding readers of their holiday stories. In my case, I'm releasing Loaded: A Holiday Romance in a new format (audiobook) tomorrow. So, let's all be excited about that 💖