If this author can accept her marginality as a marketing tool then, dammit, so can I. Confession: I am a straight, white male between the ages of 25 and 45, a father of two with no physical or mental disabilities apart from being of Scots Irish descent.

I won’t be shoved into a box, shelved on a section, categorised and pinned to a board like a dead moth. I will flit and fly and occasionally land on a flower or a carcass. I will disguise myself as a butterfly and then trick you by coming out at night to hang around your lamp and disturb you with my fluttering. I am a flowing river marking the divide between two states in this split society of ours, a tsunami crashing through your preconceptions and obliterating the gender/genre notices in the bookshop. OK, maybe that last one was a bit much, but you get the picture. I am a lesbian author but I am so much more. In the words of the main character of my novel: I am not a cardboard cutout. However …

[Takes deep breath] There comes a point in the career of every author, unless unconcerned with book sales, where you have to bite the bullet, throw in the towel, judge your book by its cover, and accept the most clichéd of all clichés: the newspaper headline. The soundbite catchphrase that draws the readers’ attention to the fuller article cannot possibly be as long as the paragraph above, which barely scratches the surface of my identity. Publicity material will focus on that which is most likely to generate interest. “Author Josie Henley-Einion is Waterstone’s Welsh book of the month for August” is not half as eye-catching as “Lesbian Author Josie Henley-Einion …” Throw the word “lesbian” into any pot and the bubbles begin to rise.

I suppose you could count the red hair and mottled pale skin as a kind of marginality—-it does prevent me from picking blueberries for more than two hours in a row without reapplying sunscreen… Geez. Come to think of it, I’m TOTALLY marginalized. I got to get on this. I need to form my own brand of music and make some kind of fashion statement instead of just singing Violent Femmes off-key and wearing jeans with an untucked collared shirt.