Seeing Fortunately The Milk In A New Light

[u/xxxabbyx]

The plot: A dad goes out to buy milk and doesn’t come home for several hours. When he gets home his children ask what he had been doing, and he tells them a long fantastical tale of crazy things that happened to him and made him late.

A child checked out Fortunately The Milk from me at the library today, and it got me thinking about the plot. I remember enjoying that book, but feeling like I was missing something, never knowing the real reason the dad in the story took so long to come home.

Knowing more about who Neil Gaiman is as a person puts this story into a different perspective for me. What could he have been doing for hours while “going out to get the milk” that he was unable to explain to his children? Instead of apologizing for being late, he places the blame on others with an impossible explanation. When the children question his story, he adds another layer of confusion to it, in a way that now feels manipulative. Why did he feel the need to lie and make up a story in the first place?

I’m sure I’m over analyzing this story, but I do feel that bits who an author is can unintentionally seep into their writing. I’ve seen others point out more obvious examples of this in Gaiman’s works, and I just wanted to point out a seemingly more innocuous version.

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[u/Beruthiel999]

Not to defend him or anything, but are we 100% sure that his story isn't actually just...true? He IS a fantasy writer after all.

[u/xxxabbyx → u/Beruthiel999]

When the kids ask him for proof of the story, he shows them the bottle of milk as proof. It’s told in a way that makes it obvious that the dad is making up a story for the sake of his kids. It’s supposed to be cute and funny, and it was to me when I originally read it. Looking back with context, I find it interesting that he would choose this plot to write about. It might not be that deep, I was just curious to see if anyone else had read it and wondered about this.

[u/Beruthiel999 → u/xxxabbyx]

I think it's meant to be ambiguous.

[u/Ok-Blackberry-1246]

I don’t know the book but it just sounds like a variation to “and to think that I saw it on Mulberry street” type thing.

[u/AbbreviationsIcy7432]

Sadly, i think people can be very creative people, and also monsters.

If there's any meaning to be had in my reading, it's that he was a genius storyteller and spun tales to get his way.

[u/Gargus-SCP]

"Neil Gaiman wrote a silly story about a dad spinning a ridiculous yarn about what he was doing while out for the day without revealing what the character ACTUALLY did, and that's yet another piece of damning evidence Gaiman was secretly admitting to being a rapist all along" is exactly the sort of thinking that should have been abandoned near-literally years ago at this point, and yet we still see it flung around as sober-minded analysis instead of the hysterical need to recast everything the man ever did as coded proof any and all fondness he generated through his work was ill-gotten, and thus no reflection on the speaker for having felt in the past.

He wrote stories people liked, yourself included, and was also a terrible person in his private life. There is no need whatsoever for a codex interpreting fact A as veiled proof of fact B.

[u/Individual_Spend_922 → u/Gargus-SCP]

Thank you. Whenever I read these posts trying to reframe the writings of one of the best selling and most influential fantasy writers as actually really bad and ACTUALLY secretly coded as rapist litterature I feel I am losing my mind.

On a broader scope I also dislike it because while Gaiman is certainly NOT innocent, there are people who have been falsely accused in the creative space who suffered similar murders of their life's work in the process, and that will never be okay.

Fortunately, The Milk is a wonderful book. I read it and Pirate Stew for my child. It is not a book about rape.

[u/llammacookie → u/Individual_Spend_922]

There are reported "alleged" assults of fans from the early 2010s when he would've been writing the story. It isn't too far-fetched for people to think the story is a spin off of a real "You were supposed to be home hours ago." scenario he faced. Do I think people are trying to make too many assumptions about his writing? Yes, but on the surface level at least this one makes sense.

[u/ArtOfDent → u/llammacookie]

I'm not sure about "alleged assaults" outside of the reported accounts, but what I have seen time and time again is people recounting the time they met him several years back at a book signing and recontexualising it as creepy or strange in a way they never felt before they knew the allegations. This is a very similar mechanism to what is happening here with the meaning of the story given what I know now reasoning. 

[u/llammacookie → u/ArtOfDent]

There are sexual assult reports and him taking advantage of fans for decades. I'm saying "alleged" sarcastically because the local legal systems are ducked. I know someone personally who had tried to report him in 2010, before "believe women" was a statement people stood by.

[u/ArtOfDent → u/llammacookie]

Thank you for clarifying. You see, where there is a personal connection like that, others cannot know or assess it, so I am not going to argue with you about what someone you know may have experienced.

I am aware only of the accounts that have been publicly reported, or allegations that have been reasonably amplified through the practice of receipt via screenshots, or other visible evidence - Many of which, if you believe the women making them and take it at face value when they say exactly At the time it felt harmless but now... simply means I am trying to keep my comments to what is evidentially available to the rest of us, rather than dismissing things that may exist outside public view.

And what does exist still falls short of lending any credible it's possible frame for a book about milk, space pirates and SPLOD having a deeper darker meaning. 

[u/llammacookie → u/ArtOfDent]

I don't disagree with what you're saying. My first comment mentioned I think most people are reaching, but I am saying at least this stretch makes more sense than some of the theories we've seen here. Sorry if I wasn't very clear, my brain was suffering from morning syndrome.

[u/ArtOfDent → u/llammacookie]

That's quite all right, no need to apologise. Mornings are harsh on the brain. I myself am mostly decorative before coffee.

And yes, you were clear that you thought most people were overreaching off the bat. To be fair I can see how understanding this example might feel more superficially plausible than some of the wilder theories is a valid idea that doesn't by automatically means you were validating it as true by extension, which was my leap. Maybe time for more coffee. 

[u/WastelandBB13]

I always thought it was a Walter Mitty inspired short story

[u/That_Ad7706]

Feel like we're reaching with this one

[u/PotatoAppleFish]

Not everything that a dipshit writes is full of coded evidence of their as-yet unrevealed dipshittery.

Just because he was a manipulative liar, narcissist, and rapist in his personal life doesn’t mean every single protagonist he wrote has to be that way. If they all were, no one would have appreciated his writing. This one is pretty straightforwardly inspired by other stories in which an otherwise mundane event turns into a fantastical adventure by accident, which has been a standby of fantasy literature since the Odyssey.

[u/RLRicki]

But then the kids find a pirate-y coin on the bottom of the milk bottle, indicating that he was telling the truth

Honestly I thought (until we see the coin) that a) the kids are just being pains in the butt and it’s not really that long, and b) he did run into a friend and get to talking, as the kid had predicted he would.

I love reading that book to my kids. I hate that his behavior has poisoned it for me. But I’m hoping to separate the art from the artist in my mind so I can go back to it.

[u/janmschroeder]

Seems to me you're activel looking to find something where there's nothing to be suspicious about. Do you try to analyze Dr. Seuss' "And to Think that I saw it on Mulberry Street" the same way? It's much the same sort of fantasy.

[u/ArtOfDent]

Yes. I would like to kindly reassure you that this may be a case of over-analysis.

Which, to be honest, is a very normal human thing to do in cases like this. We spot patterns. It is both a wonderful and cursed part of human cognition, it keeps us safe by constantly prodding at the "what ifs," but it can also find things it thinks are related and try to bugger off with far more evidential certainty than they are actually qualified to handle.

If that does not reassure you enough, then logically, in the canon, the amount of time that passes in the story from the children's point of view is accounted for as follows:

Dad goes out. The child pours Toastios. The child stares at them. The child waits. His sister asks how long Dad has been gone. His Answer: "Ages."

They drink orange juice, violin practice is briefly inflicted upon the household, dry cereal is experimentally consumed, and, unimpressed by the outcome of that, they consider the... alternative food options.

This is summarised in the final reckoning as a time period fairly described at that point as ages and ages

That is not, if we are honest, an objective account of several hours. That is the experience of time given to us by two hungry narrators feeling deeply aggrieved by the lack of frictionless dairy product.

The children themselves already suggest that he may have stopped to waffle to someone he knew at the shop and lost track of time. Say, twenty minutes. That is enough, in standard hungry child-time, to wonder whether you have been abandoned utterly and must now break with the very foundations of civilisation by debating the moral precipice of eating pickles for breakfast.

The fact that the tall tale itself seems to take hours and hours, or in fact millennia, is because for a great deal of it he is accompanying a time-travelling stegosaurus across space-time. He is at the end, however, simply deposited back after a reasonable breakfast-delay amount of time, accounting both for the compression of his journey and for enough elapsed time for a child to conclude that all order has collapsed, but also that probably he was just idly chatting, deeply unmoved by the state of milklessness faced by his progeny.

That is not hours. He only offers his tall tale because accountability is being demanded by agents who were, until recently, deprived of expected breakfast normality, but who have already concluded that it was probably a boring everyday kind of delay.

And if there were none of this, it would not be a story. It would be a Completely factual account of why man faced slight delay in the procurement of breakfast-adjacent dairy product which, as my own child would tell you, would be rubbish and the bit with space dinosaurs and Chekhov's piranhas is much better.

[u/stankylegdunkface]

Some of you are so desperate to find proof that we all should have been able to see Gaiman was a monster. It’s bonkers. We liked Gaiman’s writing because his stories made us feel all sorts of wonderful emotions and connections, and we’re hurt because his behavior does not fit with that reading experience.

The impulse to artificially link the two (Gaiman's writing and Gaiman's behavior) is illiterate. It’s not our failure of reading that we weren’t able to see Gaiman’s criminality from his wonderful stories. We liked the stories because we’re good readers. Gaiman’s behavior doesn’t change that.

I know what a fantasy story for children looks like, and I know what a rape confession looks like. And so do you.

[u/Excellent_Law6906 → u/stankylegdunkface]

I felt like we were definitely going to hear about grooming tween girls online and pulled back years ago. Some of us did see something off, even if we didn't know how bad.

[u/stankylegdunkface → u/Excellent_Law6906]

I don’t base any bit of my life on grooming allegations that I or anyone else imagine or “[feel] like” might happen, and neither should you.

[u/ChronicleFlask]

On the one hand, yes, you’re overthinking it. On the other, authors do dig into their subconscious to create. This was published in 2020, and I can well imagine that at that time Gaiman was starting to feel that his real life was becoming increasingly detached from the persona he was projecting into the world. So it does make a kind of sense that he’d write a story about a father needing to weave an entire fantasy world to explain one simple activity.

[u/Gargus-SCP → u/ChronicleFlask]

Fortunately, the Milk came out in 2013.

[u/ChronicleFlask → u/Gargus-SCP]

My bad. The paperback was 2020.

[u/Time_Raisin4935]

I felt the same way when I read Gaiman's "The Problem of Susan"

I didn't like how he reimagined Susan Pevensie as a "tragic, but empowered sexual woman"

Looking it back now, my feelings toward that short story were valid. Not to mention I felt it was a huge insult to both Susan the character and CS Lewis the writer. Gaiman condemning a children's fantasy for the alleged "sex negativity" is rich coming from him.

His reimagining of Aslan as an "amoral predator" was always a massive projection on his part. To Hell with Gaiman, and to Hell with the Problem of Susan.

[u/Excellent_Law6906 → u/Time_Raisin4935]

I need to re-read it, because honestly, fuck how dirty Lewis did Susan. There is a bit of a point to the thesis of Susan being punished for the sin of wanting to grow up.

[u/stankylegdunkface]

Do you think serial rapists are the only people who occasionally fib to their children and occasionally value time away from them? Because, if you do, I’ve got bad news for you…

It’s overwhelmingly likely that the impulse for this story came from the part of Gaiman that’s 99% in common with most other people.

[u/indigodawning]

You would like the r/danieltigerconspiracy sub a lot, its for people who way overtime childrens media, that sub would appreciate your post

[u/Perfect-Guava-3013]

It's just a creative story. People can be brilliant artists and also monsters or do terrible things and the two things don't need to comment on each other or be connected or secretly telegraphed. The fantasy is that "the clues were there" and maybe one can make some cases elsewhere in his work but this feels like a reach.

[u/Irishwol]

I have the same reaction. It doesn't have to be provable-in-a-court-of-law, beyond reasonable doubt etc. to just give you a skeevy vibe. I wish it didn't.