After all, Goodreads itself doesn’t offer many avenues for either side to vent its spleen, while Twitter provides an outrage-friendly platform to let it all hang out. The drama and defensiveness that now seem the dominant mode on literary Twitter was, in fact, born on Goodreads. I don’t know what Hough’s online life was like before her own contretemps with Goodreads, but it’s gone nowhere good since.
) But besides earning their undying enmity, authors who get into it with Goodreads reviewers tend to turn into the worst versions of themselves, reshaped in the reviewers’ combative, defensive mold, trailing outrage and deleted tweets saying god-knows-what in their wake. (Check out the Goodreads reviews for the book Hale wrote five years after her expedition to confront her reviewer, Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker. Goodreads reviewers seem to never forget or forgive the authors who challenge them.
There Are Bad Teams, and Then There Is This Year’s Worst in the NFL It Marks the End of a Great American Tradition. One of Our Best, Dumbest Action Franchises Is Dying. Hitchcock’s Adaptation of One of Roald Dahl’s Most Famous Stories Edited Out the Racism. How the Host of One of the Most Popular Podcasts Made America’s Favorite Hairstylist Cry Over Trans Rights In grand Goodreads tradition, people who’d never read Hough’s book but objected to her treatment of the reviewers began to leave one-star reviews on the Goodreads page for Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, dragging down the (otherwise well-received) book’s average rating to three stars. Hough’s complaints about Goodreads reviews came across as a high-profile author bullying a handful of ordinary readers in a public forum, and the dispute escalated from there, making Hough the main character in one sector of Twitter for the better part of a week-a prelude to this larger dust-up, and one that was totally avoidable.
It’s almost never a good idea for authors to respond to any reviews of their books, but when the reviewers consider themselves to be small fry just trying to share their thoughts with their online friends, the result can be even more volatile than a testy letter to the Times. Ostensibly, Goodreads, owned by Amazon, is a place where authors can interact with their readers, but from its earliest days, those interactions have proven fraught and inflammatory. ( Here’s a brief Twitter thread about The Men by Slate contributor Isaac Butler, who has read it.) Hough-who wrote in her Substack that Newman had supported and counseled her as she sought to publish Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, her first book-maintains that she took to Twitter to tell Newman’s critics “to read the book before condemning it.” Lambda Literary says that unspecified tweets from Hough “exhibited what we believed to be a troubling hostility toward transgender critics and trans-allies.” The exact content of these tweets is unclear as, according to the New York Times, some of them may have been deleted.Ī word of advice to all authors: Stay away from Goodreads. Hough’s friend, writer Sandra Newman, was embroiled in a social media pile-on when she tweeted an announcement about her forthcoming novel, The Men, briefly describing it as a dystopian yarn set in a world in which “everyone with a Y chromosome suddenly, mysteriously disappears.” This scenario prompted complaints that the novel was transphobic, although very few of the complainants appear to have read the book.
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