In 2022, the Booker Prize’s Instagram page posted a short video featuring the three judges for that year discussing the seemingly impossible task of reading 170 books over seven months as they chose the winner. Sarah Jessica Parker—that Sarah Jessica Parker, the Sarah Jessica Parker, of Sex and the City fame popped up in the comments to exclaim, “Oh let me try !!!! X” The Booker Prize responded with a query, “Shall we get our people to talk to your people?”
Two years later, Parker is part of the latest panel of judges to decide the 2025 winner. The origin story of how she got there reads like a well crafted public relations move (read: bullshit). It’s much more likely that this was an agreed upon stunt between Parker’s people and the Booker people, and it simply took them two years before they could coordinate schedules and confirm her inclusion on the panel. But it’s emblematic of the Booker’s attempt to seek a different kind of relevance in a world that seems more tied to celebrity than ever before. For some, Parker’s inclusion in the panel is a harbinger of doom, the end of publishing as we know it. But is that really the problem?
The news has inspired emotions bordering on rage in some parts of the book world, and a great deal of thinly-veiled contempt. In The Spectator, the paper’s literary editor Alexander Larman laments that “the prize’s dwindling relevance reflects the way in which serious writing is no longer taken seriously in society.”
What, exactly, is “serious writing” anyway? Among Larman and many other critics writing about the state of publishing, a common complaint is that too many people seem to prefer “Romantasy,” for instance (a blend of romance and fantasy fiction). But in many ways, Rebecca, whom some consider Daphne du Maurier’s finest work, is a form of Romantasy: it is about the dream cherished by generations of women, of meeting an elusive European gent with unlimited wealth. Read Jane Austen one way, and she is a romance novelist. Turn her work sideways and her novels are satirical exposés of the social order that she occupied as both an insider and an outsider. A historian friend, working on a presentation about Austen’s world, remarked to me, “It’s only when you read her out loud that you realise how sarcastic she is.” The best way to read Austen is as both romance and anti-romance, because her work is about all the contradictions inherent in the very idea of romantic love. It is no accident that romance, in any form, mostly written by women, should be considered outside “serious writing.”
Parker is not an outsider to publishing, as many have pointed out, and she has long been known as an avid reader. Lending credibility to her profile as a lover of books is the fact that she has her own imprint at Zando Projects, which bills itself as an independent publisher. On its website, it declares:
Zando offers a new model to connect inspiring authors to the audiences they deserve—and helps readers find new books to love. We work with a select group of beloved public figures, platforms and institutions, publishing a carefully chosen slate of books that reflect those partners’ authentic passions and interests.
The word “independent” can mean many things, and, in the context of publishing, is often read as synonymous with “small.” But, like “serious,” the word hides a multitude of, well, if not sins, occlusions. Zando, tellingly, does not call itself as a press but presents itself as a set of projects—it has at least twenty-five employees, about seventeen of whom work on matters related to rights, marketing, and publicity.
Most independent presses, much smaller in scale, have less than half that number (many have just one or two doing all the work). Zando’s emphasis on the fact that it works with “beloved public figures, platforms and institutions” who reflect their “authentic passions and interests” suggests that the publisher is looking for books that could also become serial shows and movies. A book, nowadays, cannot simply be a book: that kind of singularity is now seen as a quaint late twentieth-century holdover. A Los Angeles Times story refers to Zando as “making a business of celebrity book imprints” (that’s meant as a compliment). Gillian Flynn, of Gone Girl fame, and Lena Waithe are among the other celebrities attached to Zando via imprints.
Which is just fine. Zando has a right to exist, and not having read any of the books it has published, I can’t pass judgement on the writing; the fact that a few have achieved bestseller status is no indication of quality. (I do, however, hope that they don’t use their status as an “independent” entity to deny excellent advances to their authors.)
But it’s worth considering the nature of the SJP brand, and what that might do to the books she publishes and reviews. Parker is a formidable business woman, and owns or has owned a dizzying number of enterprises, selling everything from perfumes to shoes to wine. Not all of them survive, but it doesn’t take Parker long to move on to the next branded money-maker. Every business she starts is tied to her very particular form of celebrity, and her brand remains one of the few that can still command a degree of respect and, more importantly, investor interest. That includes Sex and the City, which has more recently morphed into its sequel And Just Like That. The second show is not good, at all: as I’ve written here, here, and here, it’s phenomenally bad and it mutates the old show’s virulent racism into a newer, flashier, DEI-influenced tokenism that is much worse. But it is hugely successful, and a sign, again, that Parker knows how to create work that sells really well: its quality—or awful politics—are beside the point. And Just Like That is perhaps the most hate-watched show in recent years.
Speaking to the New York Times about the Booker, Parker points to her lack of a college degree as a reason for some nervousness about how she might fare amongst a group of academics. In fact, if we are to award prizes for fiction, the panels ought to include a range of judges, including people without college degrees who are also passionate readers. Parker speaks of her mother who read voraciously, whenever she could:
My mother is the reason that me and my siblings are all readers. When I was little she would drive car pool, and she always had a book open on her lap underneath the steering wheel, and at the red light, she would look down and read and wait for the car behind her to honk to tell her to go again.
I will confess that the anecdote melts even my crusty, cynical, iron-bound heart. There are millions of people for whom reading is a precious gift, who love books without necessarily articulating why or how, who just take the time to read whenever they can. Whether they read romance or history, books about the occult or caterpillars is not the point. Whether they read book-books or via audiobooks or on e-readers is also not the point. A culture where people read, where people are given the opportunity to spend afternoons reading simply because they like to read, is a culture—and a world—worth fighting for.
There’s no cause to worry about Sarah Jessica Parker somehow bringing down the quality of the Booker because her status as a high-powered celebrity might taint this supposedly noble enterprise. That the Booker should seek to borrow her sheen and gloss is unsurprising because the prize itself has become boringly inevitable. Sometime in the late summer of 2023, I found myself listening to a group of book critics on a Very Prestigious Podcast gushing about Zadie Smith’s forthcoming The Fraud. Given that a new Smith novel is always an event, they were all understandably excited about it. The book had not yet arrived in stores, and the advance copies had yet to be sent out. And yet, one of them declared that she was sure it would be nominated for the Booker.
This was, yes, a ridiculous statement, but it says a lot about both the Booker and the state of contemporary publishing. Every month, countless unknown authors search for agents, work on proposals, wait anxiously to hear about contracts, and more often than not spend years hoping to get just one book published. The system whereby someone like Smith is anointed as a Booker nominee before critics even read her work is a system that is permanently closed to an entire class of writers who will never be platformed by a business entity that links “projects” to “platforms” occupied by “public figures.”
Sarah Jessica Parker is part of that problem, but she’s not making it worse: she is simply profiting off it, just as the Booker is profiting off her brand. As for all the talk about serious and unserious books (and readers): the problem is not that too many people are reading Romantasy, but that there are not enough presses and publishers willing to take a chance on daring, interesting works of fiction and nonfiction. Don’t blame readers for reading what they want. Instead, consider the vagaries of a publishing industry that throws millions of dollars at “viral” authors and fails to support writers in more equitable ways.
If you’re a writer who wins the Booker or any other prize, you should feel no guilt or shame: take the money and run. Pay off that mortgage. Sleep for three months. Eat all the sushi you want. Travel.
But everyone else in the publishing world should ask the hard question: how do we support writers so that they can continue to write and live well, without worrying about winning awards and becoming celebrities just to survive?
Yasmin Nair would like to sleep for three months.
See also:
A Bestiary in Silks: Fashion and Race in And Just Like That
The Style It Takes or, The Difference Between Style and Fashion
Sex and the City’s Soft White Supremacy
A Portion of the Mind: On Writing and Nobel Prizes
Lyrical Doughnuts or, the “I” in Writing
Is There a Place for the Small Novel?
Photo by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, via Wikipedia.
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