The response to my latest book, Seducing the Demon, has delighted me. The reviews have been mostly positive, my book tour has been a blast and will continue intermittently through the summer, and I still like my publisher-a first for me. But yesterday, The New York Times Book Review called my book "disheveled" and "trapped in time." That review was more widely read than, yet not as ghastly as, the one in the Chicago Sun-Times, which called me "delusional" and "a car wreck."
Ever since I published my first novel in 1973, some reviews of my books haven't just been bad; they've been apoplectic-as if I'd committed a crime that had nothing to do with words. Never mind the nice things that John Updike said about Fear of Flying in his New Yorker review; what still sticks, three decades later, is being called "giant pudenda" by Paul Theroux.
For most of my career, after getting bad reviews I would take to my bed, refuse all calls, drink wine straight from the bottle, eat chocolate and chocolate cake, think about never writing again and consider going into social work or medicine, and fantasize about doing bodily harm to critics, who were-of course-jealous, sex-starved, ugly, broke, mean, abusive, and sexist. I considered hiring hit men, but since I've always pretty much hung out with liberals and eggheads, I never had access to those phone numbers. So my revenge of choice would be public humiliation. Looking my best in an Yves Saint Laurent velvet "smoking," and four inches taller in my Louboutin black velvet boots with glittery heels, I would splash cold vodka in my critics' eyes at the PEN gala. Though blinded for the evening, they would see the errors in their ways, repent, fall to their knees, and kiss my beautifully pedicured feet. I got so carried away with nasty press that my third husband, Jon Fast, used to hide my reviews, but eventually someone would quote the worst phrase to me-often on TV.
Yet I never was able to inflict my fantasy. I am neither Gore Vidal nor Camille Paglia-the only two writers who make vitriol both illuminating and fun-nor can I throw a punch like Norman Mailer. I have stood face-to-face with my detractors and said nothing but "How are you?" while they shuffled from foot to foot, wondering when I would throw the punch or the vodka. Am I cowardly or wise? Probably both. I know that revenge springs back on the avenger. And now I'm a sixty-four-year-old grandmother. Husband number four is working out well after seventeen years, my daughter is off coke and has become a successful author in her own right, I've been able to set aside some money doing what I love, and the Wellbutrin has kicked in successfully, so I'm mellow enough, self-confident enough, and maybe deluded enough to attempt to look at nasty reviews in an entirely different light. I also realize I could easily come off as a shrill bitch with a sense of entitlement if I complained gratuitously about bad press.
So instead of writing a letter of complaint to The New York Times Book Review, I'm posting nasty reviews of Seducing the Demon on my website. My goal is to (a) learn from them, (b) get inside the heads of the reviewers, and (c) look at these readers generously: instead of seeing their comments as personal vendettas or sexist attacks, I'm going to assume they simply thought my book sucked. Hey-they hated my book, and me. Why not? There are one or two books and authors I hate.
Getting outside my own head is something I need to do anyway. Grandmotherhood has tempered my narcissism, and I've always wanted to improve and evolve as a writer. I'm now writing a novel about my doppelgänger, Isadora Wing, as a woman of a certain age, and I want to get outside her and into the minds and bodies of other characters, her objects of desire among them-one of them a buff book critic.
Let me know what you think.