Neverland: The Pleasures and Perils of Fandom

Poet Kisuule (A Recipe for Sorcery) delivers a candid reflection on struggling to reconcile her love for Michael Jackson with the sexual abuse allegations against him. Discussing the outsize role Jackson’s music played in her childhood, Kisuule recounts practicing the moonwalk while listening to her aunt’s Jackson records and feeling disbelief after learning of his death in 2009. She offers a frank account of coming to grips with Jackson’s misdeeds, describing how she made excuses for him for years (“He was troubled, childlike, ambushed”) before watching a 2019 documentary on the allegations. Afterward, she was relieved that she no longer felt compelled to defend him. Kisuule’s full ambitions come into focus in the provocative final chapter, which draws parallels between her uncle and Jackson, noting that both were beaten as kids and went on to abuse others as adults. She finds in her aunt’s compassion for her abusive ex-husband a promising model for dealing with problematic men, arguing that in addition to holding abusers accountable, society should strive to rehabilitate them and mitigate the “factors that make abuse more likely.” Though the power of her aunt’s story is somewhat dampened by the disclosure that “some of the events described in this book didn’t happen” (which ones aren’t specified), Kisuule brings a novel perspective to the discourse on loving problematic artists. This is a worthy complement to Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson. (Dec.)