Two Pieces of Hate Mail

On "politics" and book reviews.

Hi friends.

I got two pieces of hate mail this week about things I had written a long time ago. I don’t get them as often as I used to, but I have certainly gotten plenty in my life. It goes with the territory. As the great Torrey Peters wrote during #1000wordsofsummer this past June, “You came here to be insulted.”

As with most pieces of hate mail I receive, they arrived via Facebook, the place where middle-aged cranks go to die. Any other day I might have ignored them but they came in back-to-back so it caught my eye. I did not reply to either of these letters, although I suppose by writing this I am in a way replying to them. That’s fine!

(Although I doubt either of these people are following my newsletter if they’re sending me letters to my professional Facebook account I open once a month. If you’re here now though, welcome.)

One letter was about a novel I had written being too “political.” The woman who wrote me said they had thought the book would be a nice family novel, but at the end they thought it had switched into some kind of commentary and it had ruined the entire book for them.

Of course, there was no real switcheroo here. I had been telling the same story the entire time. I had just allowed a character to elicit a point of view on the matter.

This is a common kind of letter to get. People who have a certain idea about how books should work, and are angry when they instead work another way. I would not know what to say to this person if I ever met them. “I am sorry that my book was…a book.”