Life’s a balancing act. One can balance on rocks, as in this picture at Lake Hope in the Remarkables Mountains. One can balance messages in publicity, trying to carefully tread the line between interesting and controversial.

This week I was really disappointed to be told by a bookseller that they couldn’t stock my novel Broken is Beautiful because it has vaccination as one of its topics. Vaccination is not the core of my book. The theme is repairing broken people, friendships and how to bridge divides. However, the bookseller said their staff had been abused in connection with books on vaccination so they would not stock books, either pro- or anti-vaccination, or anything in between.

Disappointed isn’t a strong enough word to describe how I felt. Dismay doesn’t cut it either. Despondent? Other words that come to mind are ‘censorship’, ‘pandering’, ‘fear’. I hate the thought that I am living in a society where we cannot stock books that refer to a contentious topic, because we are scared of people’s reactions.

I’m not saying I think bookshop employees should be subject to abuse. No one should be deliberately exposed to abuse in their workplace. However, I am distraught to be living in a society where abuse is so common and accepted that it affects which books can be stocked. I wonder what the other people in the bookstore were doing when the staff were verbally abused? Intervening, or turning away to not get involved? Is our problem more about how we deal with differing ideas and conflict, than vaccination per se?

Where will people go for information if they can’t get books? The internet is a likely venue and one that people frequently use instead of bookstores. The internet, that place where people can’t tell the difference between valid information and misinformation. The internet, a place we consider to be one of the drivers of the vax/antivax divide, amongst other societal rifts.

One could consider that vaccination is currently a sensitive subject, so we should steer away from it for the time being, but not forever. Let the heat subside out of the argument. How long might we need to keep books about vaccination out of sight? A few months? A few years? Will a divide just quietly disappear if no one talks about it? Should we remove books referring to Māori co-governance off the shelves? That’s a current hot topic. How about 1080, which raises huge amounts of ire in many places. Should US stores avoid books that refer to any aspect of gun control?

I hypothesise that major problems ignored rarely dissipate magically. When I think of our society having to avoid books on specific topics because they result in abuse, I think of moth larvae chewing at a woollen jersey stored over summer in a glory chest. When you need that jersey to mitigate the winter chills, you pull it out to find the fabric has disintegrated beyond repair.