Making Something of It

Mental Health, Neil Gaiman, and...

When Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer announced their engagement in 2010, I started sobbing uncontrollably. The reason — inconceivable from this vantage point — is that I’d felt trapped in an unsatisfying five-year relationship and had been living vicariously through their courtship: the artistic collaborations, the wild parties with bohemian luminaries, the “open” sexual arrangements. Most urgently, though, and most enduringly, I thought, was a deep and multifaceted emotional connection and level of intimacy that added depth to their no-holds-barred sex life. They had everything I wanted, I was sure, and they had everything I’d never had. By the time that announcement was posted, the end of my then-relationship seemed, if not inevitable, possible, as evident by my ex’s immediate reaction to those sudden tears: “Which one of them do you wish you were?”

The answer, at that time, was “either.” As a writer and performer and bisexual fan of both, I could’ve taken NG’s large-scale writing career or AP’s large-ish scale performance career (which later also became a writing career, kind of?). But what I wanted — more than the money, more than the fame — was a partner who could fully collaborate with me on ideas if not concretely on art. I also craved a level of attraction I didn’t have toward the person I was with, which hurt to admit. I’d been conditioned to believe that if someone is kind to you — which this person had always been — you can’t end the relationship. But other than that kindness — which was real — I hardly had anything I wanted. After Ian and I got together, I told many people that I credited Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer for giving me the courage to seek fulfillment.

As Neil Gaiman faces horrific sexual abuse allegations that made me physically sick to read and therefore I will not link here (you can find it through New York Magazine/Vulture and it’s not behind a paywall as some have oddly proclaimed), Amanda Palmer is also named in a civil suit against both of them. Palmer allegedly engaged in human trafficking over a sustained period, procuring vulnerable young women (early 20’s) with documented mental health issues that Gaiman than brutally assaulted and who were never paid for the work (primarily childcare) that they had been hired to do. (All 28 pages of the slightly-less-graphic legal documents are also easy to find.)

There are a multitude of reasons why this case takes up more space in my consciousness than any of the other numerous allegations of sexual brutality by pop culture figures. It’s not just that I was once a fan of both Amanda and Neil in a way that I was never a fan of Diddy. It’s that the person I was in my 20’s took instruction from Amanda and Neil, was convinced that those two — more than most — really knew how to live. I fell for an act, and it was a carefully contrived act built by both of them over a period of years. The fact that I — along with countless others — was so convinced that I knew their life should’ve been a red flag on its own: in those days, they flirted publicly on twitter even when they were in the same house. I knew, in the back of my head, that that was questionable, but I couldn’t bring my misgivings to the fore because I enjoyed the performance. By that time, NG had a large percentage of the reading population convinced that he was an outwardly-buttoned-up propriety-obsessed British schoolboy-type who would never curse in public. His wife, proudly known as Amanda Fucking Palmer, peppered her perpetually-updated social media feeds with swear words, and I swooned when Neil Gaiman started doing his measure of the same. “She’s opening him up,” I thought to myself. “She’s bringing him out of his shell.”

We know now that if NG was ever in a shell then it was that of an evil hermit crab who kept vulnerable female prisoners in his lair. In his public non-apology, made over half a year after the allegations became public, he said he had “always been a private person,” a characterization that raised eyebrows based on his social media presence. In addition to a blog he posted to at least once a day back when blogs were a newfangled thing, he became as famous for answering questions on Tumblr and later for his constant activity on Twitter as he ever did for writing a book. When Twitter fell with Elon’s intentional crash and Bluesky crept into the social media sphere, many people jokingly complained that Neil Gaiman took up their entire feeds: Bluesky in the pre-Trump-II era was notoriously unpopular and very few people were on it. The point of all this is that one of Neil Gaiman’s most prized-by-fans qualities was his accessibility.

That accessibility hardly looks altruistic these days. What read to me and so many others as a willingness to dive into the lives of Normal People and not keep their social relationships in a rarefied realm now looks like a powerful man populating his orbit with women whose inferior social positions were one of their major attractions. Anecdotal evidence suggests that when Neil and Amanda got married, this power deferential underscored every extramarital sexual relationship that either or both of them entered. One Twitter afternoon all those years ago haunts me: Amanda and Neil playfully acknowledged that because their robust artistic careers took precedence over other aspects of existence, no housework was getting done. “We need a wife,” Amanda declared. “Taking applications now.”

I’m the least-wifely person anyone can endeavor to live with and I highly doubt I was envisioning a life where I suddenly get reliable about housework or markedly adept at cooking for their sake — (or was I? No telling, at this distance, how bad I had it, and I’ve learned in the intervening years that if I’m intoxicated enough by sexual attraction I can suddenly get hella traditional and want to cook/clean/devote my mental energies to midwifing the man’s career, etc. Whether that’s deep-down patriarchy-brainwashing or some weird set of primal yearnings is an eternal question). The point is: Amanda asked for wife applications which meant “photos so we can pick the hottest one” and I threw my hat in the ring thusly:

2010 photo taken on a shitty webcam after, appropriately, a Dresden Dolls show, Amanda Palmer’s “cabaret punk” duo with Brian Viglione

When Amanda tweeted — tagging her husband — “Look how hot our prospective wives are!” I burned with hope that she was talking in part about me. I didn’t assume so: selfie culture hadn’t taken over yet, but it was burgeoning, and no one glammed out with more fervor than Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer fans — but I still remember how badly I wanted confirmation, affirmation, that maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe. I asked all my friends if they thought the tweet meant I could’ve been considered one of the hot ones by their metric. If I sat down with that girl now, the one in the photo, I’d ask, “Why is it so important to you to be deemed hot by these two strangers?” I’m not sure what she would’ve said.

She — the girl in the photo — is the reason that this has been so difficult for me to process emotionally, the reason why the atrocities being discussed in this case feel so close. When the allegations against Neil Gaiman first surfaced in July 2024, I addressed them in a series of essays, one about the issues potentially inherent in goth culture, one about the wrinkles in consent when we’re young, and one about the ways in which my own experience with an institutionally-protected male predator dovetails with some of the broader issues at play in the Gaiman case.

In the summer of 2024, most people didn’t know about the sexual abuse allegations against Neil Gaiman, and that was why they felt so urgent for me to address. Since the New York Magazine article was published, Gaiman’s alleged brutalities have become common knowledge, and, after their former nanny filed a civil suit last month, suspicions about Amanda Palmer’s complicity, or at the very least, enabling, are also part of the ongoing discourse or — for some of us — the ongoing collective reckoning.

Palmer has, for over a decade now, advertised herself as “proudly Patreon-funded,” meaning that her salary as a musician is paid not by record companies but by fans, fans who pledge a certain amount of money every month in return for the kinds of “perks” that you have to be a fan to consider perks: everything from first dibs on Amanda Palmer band shirts and other merch to, if you’re really willing to shell out the dough, in-person dinners when she tours in your town. While I was, unsurprisingly, one of the fans who contributed to the infamous million-dollar Kickstarter for her second solo album, I didn’t think I was still connected to her Patreon even at the free tier. Turns out I am, though, and what she revealed only to those who’ve deemed themselves still fans has me thinking in a broader sense about the relationship between mental illness and capitalism. To an extent, AP has been open about struggling with mental health, but what I saw in that post was not the usual meditations on depression or intimacy issues or ego-centrism. This thought shows a level of disconnect from reality that, had she not been someone who raised over a million dollars and continued to sustain, in her own words, “a multimillion-dollar operation” as her music career, would have barred her from ever being taken seriously, even as an underground phenomenon.

Palmer knows we know that she’s being charged for human trafficking by a younger woman who used to work for her, a woman who, according to the documents, was victimized in a number of ways by both Palmer and Gaiman. She knows, too, because people have been explicit about this, that she’s lost hundreds of paying Patreon subscribers because they no longer trust her as the “everyone’s wild artistic feminist friend who puts empathy and feeeeeeelings first” that they once understood her to be. Still, to her still-there fans, she writes,

Excerpt from Amanda Palmer’s Patreon blog posted February 28, 2025

If Palmer actually thinks that her Patreon has taken an inexplicable hit, then she’s more severely diagnosable than I ever understood. I haven’t been charged with human trafficking on any account and I trust that none of you have either, but if you were, would you refer to it with a dismissive, “all the ***waves hands at everything***?” She could’ve made herself sound more stable by leaving out the “due to” phrase entirely.

This all reads to me as someone who — if not having been declared a danger or a predator, would have at least been dismissed due to mental illness had she not figured out how to make a lot of money. But she was raised in Lexington, MASS, and if I learned anything from my years in Massachusetts (including a couple weeks in Lexington staying with Ian’s cousin when we first arrived) it’s that Human Worth = Moneymaking Achievement. They don’t have time in their ambitiously busy schedules for anything else. Didn’t go to an Ivy League college? Fuck you, you’re not educated. Haven’t published in The New Yorker? You’re no writer and you never will be. (If I sound hard on Massachusetts, forgive me: it’s a difficult place for a New Orleanian with New Mexico-hippie roots. We were there for Ian’s graduate studies, and I’m ultimately grateful for the experience.)

My point here is that for all of her pansexual polyamorous bohemian trappings, Amanda Palmer’s got AMER-I-CAN SUCCESS carved into her very bones and if we know one thing about American Success it’s that it will normalize any mental health issue in service of someone who makes money. Look at Elon Musk! Everywhere, people who are very clearly not okay are lauded for their achievements, because even if they’ll (allegedly) shore up victims for their known-rapist husband or (indisputably) destroy a country for fun, what matters most is that they figured out how to get rich, or more accurately richer, because neither Elon nor Amanda came from negligible wealth, to say the least.

The girl in the photo is someone who admired Amanda. I admired her wild oversharing in blog posts, I admired her unhinged use of capslock (which she monetized into I BELIEVE IN CAPSLOCK hoodies), and I admired what I thought was fearlessness. I’m not sure what I was seeing in that last point, but whatever it was, it wasn’t fearlessness. The denial on display in that Patreon excerpt reeks of fear. I would be afraid too under these circumstances and, in addition to what she seems to have brought on herself, it’s heartbreaking to know she’s also afraid because Neil Gaiman’s publicity and legal teams, not to mention the Church of Scientology, which also has his back from lifelong association — are ruthless.

I also thought she was hot, and while I’m not proud to fall into that category of people who will overlook a whole lot for that ignoble reason, I’m not alone. The former nanny at the center of the lawsuit is a lesbian whose crush on Amanda — a crush Palmer courted en masse with lascivious discussions of her own queerness — was deliberately exploited.

Which two qualities are more aggressively valued in America than Hot and Rich? I can’t think of any. But we all know that little kindness awaits mentally ill people who are neither. (Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos prove that “hot” matters less if you’re a dude and if the Rich is REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY rich.)

I struggle with mental illness less than I used to because I’m on Wellbutrin and my therapist is fantastic (the best part of living in Georgia, really, since that’s the only place she’s licensed to practice) and, more than anything, because I’ve started to see the reasons why it’s worth combating Depression Brain to live life as fully as possible. Depression Brain says “curl up on the floor and cry,” and Rational Brain says, “NO! GO TO THE GYM!” Yesterday’s workout felt all the more gratifying as a result of winning that inner-argument.

Still, I think about the ways that clinical depression held me back before I was treated, and, as much as it would be nice to have more money than I do, I’m morbidly glad that shit blew up unignorably and that no checked American Success boxes could delude me into thinking I was thoroughly okay when I wasn’t. I’m not sure if I felt that way before I read Amanda’s possibly-delusional pronouncements. I know a lot of people who’ve chronically struggled emotionally but who’ve managed to publish dozens of books, record deeply moving albums, and produce fantastic visual art that sells by virtue of its singular mesmerizing qualities. I thought I had failed because of what I hadn’t been able to do in spite of untreated clinical depression.

But it took me a long time to realize how messed up that thinking is: a failure is a person who can’t push through untreated clinical depression hard enough to Achieve? What’s achievement for? I’ve read enough celebrity memoirs to know that achievement is no anti-depressant. But I think there are a lot of artists — and I posit that Amanda Palmer is one of them — who think, in my case, though, it will be.

I don’t like watching people unravel, because I’ve done it myself and wasted subsequent months wallowing in self-loathing. But people I know who were once close to Palmer tell me that she’s averse to getting help, and what anyone watching appears to be seeing is someone whose mental health issues are about to become even harder to ignore. Ian once read something whose source escapes me but whose general thesis I never forgot: most of us are teetering on the edge of, to varying degrees, insanity. Our thresholds are unique and unpredictable, but we’ve got specific threads we work hard to keep taut and if those threads fray or snap—

Well, I think Palmer’s threads have been her fan base (including the girl in the photo) who were always there to shower her with praise and thanks and hugs in the face of any criticism she ever received. She once blogged about a woman who greeted her on the street, and who she didn’t remember. She said something like, “I’m sorry, where do I know you from?” assuming this was a Dresden Dolls fan, and the woman indignantly responded, “Amanda Palmer! I worked with you every day at the theater for three years.”

To a long and drawn-out post talking about all the people she’s met on tour since her days working at the theater in Boston, fans expressed their sympathy and empathy and one person even voiced their concerned hope that she doesn’t have “early-onset dementia.” The uncharitable way to read that encounter is that it takes a pretty determined narcissist to forget a coworker of three years. (Palmer has never professed to be faceblind). Some people assess everyone in their lives in terms of what use they can be, and discard them if the answer is none.

Whether this case ends with criminal charges, further journalistic investigations, or simply two once-venerated artistic careers blowing up, what it’s revealed about mental illness as well as trauma is relevant to all of us. The New York Magazine article says that Palmer often tried to get her then-husband to talk about what his upbringing in the Church of Scientology was like, and in response he would curl up into a fetal position and cry. The declaration that unresolved trauma makes monsters of all of us does not excuse monstrous behavior, but this level of severity should compel any reluctant therapy-goers to make an appointment toute suite.

The Church of Scientology of course considers therapists to be the ultimate Suppressive Person, which explains why the wellness practitioner that Gaiman did see had no measurable credentials. I suppose that’s the best advertisement for therapy we’ve culturally got: a massive cult known for its aggressive manipulation and sanctioned abuse thinks therapy is bad, ergo it’s good (at least, caveat, good if your therapist is the right one).

My hope is that whatever any of us need treated, whether that’s actual mental illness or some ineffable soul-bruise, we’ll get treated before becoming someone we don’t want to be. Or, more realistically: before that person we don’t want to be takes us so completely over that we forget we could ever be anything else and become hopeless.

It’s easy to feel hopeless right now for reasons far, far bigger than one abusive author or one possibly abusive musician or one abusive married couple. The girl in the photo was raised to believe that on December 21st, 2012, the world as we know it would rapturously end and we would all become telepathic beings, our frequencies having been raised to that of unshakable connection and boundless love. There would be no more political elections, not because of a hostile dictatorial takeover by a reality TV show host and his genocidal white South African crony, but because we would’ve transcended all division.

It’s a wild thing to have believed that for twenty-something years. To be alive right now when even rich protected people are finding it harder to pretend that nothing’s falling apart. If I say, “I hope we learn something from these large-scale implosions,” it sounds trite, but by learn I don’t mean retool our inspirational slogans. I mean change. I hope we’re headed for good change, even though we’re clearly taking a long way there, and the resistance to it is violent. I think macro-change really does begin with unfucking our own individual brains, and I won’t lie: that process hurts. Any time I’m in the thick of serious mental-reorientation I think, “Wow, I see why people don’t do this.” I see why I’ve avoided it for so long.

“You can’t avoid this anymore” looks like the prevailing message of 2025. A year that began with a terrorist attack in my hometown of New Orleans and historical wildfires in California and the ushering in of Trump’s taking-Project-2025-Very-Seriously-Actually destruction in all its myriad forms — I have no idea what to do or what I can do about any of it but I do know that if I spiral, nothing will get done.

Every day, then, is fighting the spiral, which means reassessing what the girl in the photo once found sacred and vital. Most of that is done on my own time, but some of it necessitates brandishing the sword by taking your readership and attention with me. I have a memoir draft and a novel draft that have been fighting for my time and attention, so it figures that I would say “Fuck you both” and write an extensive essay instead.

What can I say? Writing is an act of solitude and I don’t much feel like being alone right now, at least not more alone than necessary in hyperChristian rural Georgia. I’d rather you were here. I’d rather you could’ve shared this pour-over coffee Ian made that I finished off some time ago, having gone on a little longer than planned. I’m pretty sure 2025 laughs at plans.