All We Ever Wanted Was A Blog

The literary blogosphere is all a-twitter right now about how the author Alice Hoffman posted more than two-dozen angry “tweets” responding to a review of her book that ran in the Boston Globe. She called the reviewer, Roberta Silman, a “moron” and “idiot” and proceeded to post her phone number and email address online, suggesting that her fans “tell her off.”

A bad idea, especially now that Hoffman’s twitter feud has been reproduced all over the Internet — Hoffman has come off looking sour grapes, unnecessarily bitter. Of course, she’s not the first author to go public with her pique. Mary Elizabeth Williams had a great piece in Salon yesterday that documented a long series of these kinds of feuds, from Dave Eggers’s spat with the New York Times to the time when Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead for a bad review.

As an author, though, I can empathize with Hoffman’s impulse. When you’ve spent (as I did) four years of your life working on a book, it starts feeling like your baby; and when a journalist then casually — or, worse, cruelly — dismisses your efforts in a piece they churned out in just a few hours, it’s pretty hard to take this lying down. And unfortunately, the low-attention-span theater that is the internet has rewarded us with an era of critics (film, book, TV, you name it) who use snark as their primary writing tool. After all, it’s so much easier to be cruelly funny than it is to be measured, and apparently readers love the juicy thrill of those kinds of hit pieces. It’s criticism as shark tank, with your book as the bait.

In my journalism days, I was guilty of this kind of criticism too, and I wrote a fair number of reviews that, looking back, seem unnecessarily catty or snarky or mean. These days, I cringe at the thought of even writing a review at all, knowing all too well what the author on the other end might be feeling. (I can’t even tag a book on GoodReads with less than five stars without feeling bad about inflicting pain.) Not that I think every book deserves a good review, but I wish more critics would take all this into consideration before they tear a work apart with vicious glee.

So yeah, I can relate to Alice Hoffman, even if she did overreact. But I hope she turns her Twitter account off for a while, in her own best interest.