Don't Hate My Opinions
(It's nothing personal)
I’ve been on a mystery readers and reviewers listserv for a long time and often post reviews of crime-related books and films. I’ve found it a great place to learn about books, series, and movies I might have missed or simply passed over without a second look. That’s important to me as a crime fiction writer and someone who reviewed mysteries and thrillers for a decade at The Detroit Free Press. It’s always been hard to keep track of everything that’s out there, given that there’s anywhere between half a million and a million books published yearly by legacy publishers alone.
Years ago, I posted some comments on that listserv about a Patricia Cornwell thriller that I thought was weaker than her previous books. Of course people had different opinions, but I was surprised by the ad hominem attacks. One poster said “You must be jealous.”
Well, I wasn’t. Cornwell was way out of my league and I was fine with that. I never imagined being on the NYT best seller list and Cornwell wasn’t a model for me as a writer anyway. I was writing comic academic mysteries and my idols were mystery authors like Robert Barnard, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Charlie Huston, Marisa Piesman. And literary writers like David Lodge and Kingsley Amis.
I’ve seen the kind of hostile response about Cornwell appear across the Internet in the years since. It crops up whenever someone expresses anything negative about a movie, a book, a writer’s latest story or essay, a concert or anything and anyone at all in the world of the arts. For instance, if there’s a less than adulatory post on X/Twitter about a movie, you can bet that scads of the Twitterati will dub you “a hater” and/or feel the need to comment along these lines: “What movie have you directed lately?” or “Come back after you’re as good a director as so-and-so” or something equally juvenile.
It gets more venomous if you dare to even seem to critique a pop idol like Taylor Swift, as Anne Lamott recently discovered. After remarking on X/Twitter that she hoped to see less coverage of Swift in 2024, she was savaged, deleted her tweet, and issued an obsequious apology: “Very sorry for snarky Taylor Swift comment. I probably got more angry response to this than for anything I’ve tweeted in the ten years I’ve been here,” and added “Note to self: try to do better.” Shades of Communist China’s struggle sessions.
The hostile and even defamatory comments vary in form but the underlying affect seems to be contempt. It’s as if the only valid opinion you’re allowed to have online is a rave no matter what the opinion is about. And the replies are as dismissive or angry as if those people are being personally attacked. One cultural critic I know said that for too many people, what they like becomes a reflection of themselves, so if you disagree, your perspective is perceived as a threat to their identity.
Of course there’s also been plenty of commentary about this kind of attack and it’s widely attributed to anonymity: “When people feel anonymous online. . .they tend to be more likely to do things they wouldn't normally do if they could easily be identified.”
Some avenging mavens are so sure that they’re right and you’re not only wrong but misguided, dumb, or malicious that they have no trouble posting under their real names, as on Facebook. I was recently slagged there when I posted some brief thoughts about a hit movie and a link to a mixed review by a film reviewer I respect. You might have thought this person attacking me had written, directed, produced and starred in the movie himself.
But I guess all you can say to someone that irascible is “Bless your heart.”
Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in many genres and has seen his work appear in fifteen languages including Chinese and Romanian. He escaped the crumbling Ivory Tower many years ago to write and review full time.
Image by Sammy-Sander from Pixabay
When I was a reviewer, my practice was not to review anything I disliked, because I didn’t see any good reason to pan a work that someone might have spent years creating. But now I disagree with my younger self and that practice.
I was at a popular and respected writers conference last year when one speaker encouraged the writing of reviews as a valuable part of being in the literary community. I've written my fair share of reviews over the years, but it was only on the Internet that I was ever attacked for my opinion. It's a real disincentive to reviewing.