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Negative reviews may not merely say that your book sucks, but that you, personally, suck as a human being; if you wrote a childhood memoir, they may add that you were clearly bad to the bone when you were seven years old.
(No, I haven't been checking my Amazon stats obsessively, I was there looking something else up. I can understand a child being self-centered, and utterly devoid of compassion or tolerance, but it's hard to understand these traits in an adult looking back on her life.)
On the other hand, if I were Hanne Blank and had written Virgin: The Untouched History, a brilliant, well-researched, incisive, and funny history of the concept of virginity in the western world, I would undoubtedly get creepy emails inquiring about my sex life. On the whole, I think I prefer "you suck."
(No, I haven't been checking my Amazon stats obsessively, I was there looking something else up. I can understand a child being self-centered, and utterly devoid of compassion or tolerance, but it's hard to understand these traits in an adult looking back on her life.)
On the other hand, if I were Hanne Blank and had written Virgin: The Untouched History, a brilliant, well-researched, incisive, and funny history of the concept of virginity in the western world, I would undoubtedly get creepy emails inquiring about my sex life. On the whole, I think I prefer "you suck."
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From:
no subject
Stupid Amazon reviewers! You should see some of the pile ups on Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. People are just out and out mean. I am so never ever ever writing a memoir! My skin is WAY too thin.
From:
no subject
Or something like that.
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no subject
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no subject
That doesn't sound very much like the book *I* read at all.
From:
no subject
The reviewer sounds supremely unable to read (or think) critically or objectively.
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no subject
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no subject
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in a word: douchebag
From:
Re: in a word: douchebag
I suspect that it's a Baba-lover, which means I might have met them for thirty seconds when I was ten, but probably not someone I know personally or someone in the book, as it's been out for long enough that everyone who's in it has already either written to me personally or else fulminated in public before.
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Re: in a word: douchebag
It's a terrific memoir, and you were very brave to write it.
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Re: in a word: douchebag
Heh, lots of non-Baba-lovers have that reaction.
From:
no subject
Yeah. Jeez. Your parents were only trying to have fun! How dare you.