A former fan shares his thoughts about Neil Gaiman, who has maintained his very uncharacteristically public silence for three months now:
Gaiman was careful to cultivate a very different public image. His deceptions go back a long way. His story about how he skipped university to carve out a career as a freelance journalist and author in London tends to miss out the bit where he was working as an auditor for the Church of Scientology. There’s no doubting his talent, but he turns out to have been a monumental self-promoting bullshitter all along. Only worse.
Neil Gaiman never had the talent he pretended to have. I think it’s quite likely that he never had the success that he is assumed to have had either. (See: L. Ron Hubbard). And he observably never had the human decency that he pretended to have. The only thing that was genuine, in the end, was his Imposter Syndrome, because he always was an imposter from the start.
The knock on the door… it finally arrived.