I’ve been one, so I’m allowed to say it.
Here is Antonia Quirke in the New Statesman, reviewing Cleaning Up. There are shades of the snitty Guardian review here, albeit in a different way. I have to ask myself whether these writers (and they are both published authors) were working from the same book as the one I actually wrote.
It may be that writing about drugs makes some writers feel very competitive. Perhaps this competitiveness is worse among women. There is urge to sneer if you haven’t done them, and the urge to impose your own experience if you have. God knows.
Or perhaps I am just feeling scared and cross because I have just written a long article about my stroke for a newspaper, and going over it all is reminding me how vulnerable I’m feeling – and then some foolish person (I wrote something stronger there before) comes along and misrepresents what I wrote in my book. And then a bloke who lives in my building has just come round and merrily told me that he signed for a parcel of mine, totally without my permission or knowledge, and that has pissed me off more than any of the above.
Aw hell, have another kitten.
Right, I’m going for a walk.
notabenebooks
February 29, 2008
Tanya, here’s a little tonic from Chekhov that may take the edge off:
Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their ploughing of the soil. The muscles of the horse are as taut as fiddle-strings, and suddenly a horse-fly alights on its croup, buzzing and stinging. The horse’s skin quivers, it waves its tail. What is the fly buzzing about? It probably doesn’t know itself. It simply has a restless nature and wants to make itself felt – “I’m alive, too, you know!” it seems to say. “Look, I know how to buzz, there’s nothing I can’t buzz about!” I’ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can’t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.
Hope the day has improved
Nigel.
notabenebooks
February 29, 2008
btw although notabenebooks is my website…the link goes to the wrong place…how frustrating…and there’s no reviewer/critic I can blame it on… NB
taniaglyde
March 3, 2008
Thank you for the Chekhov thought – lovely.