WRITING ADVICE #16: THE CRITICS.
Send your writing-related questions to: itsottessab@gmail.com. Each week I'll pick a question at random and answer it here.
Hi everyone,
Mild warning…This one got a bit intense. I hope there’s something helpful here!
Love, Ottessa
Dear Ottessa,
I’m curious. Do you ever read reviews of your work? And if so, does the criticism ever get to you?
With warm regards,
Punky Brewster
Dear Punky,
I try not to read reviews.
But a family member sent me a link to this review of my last novel, LAPVONA, with the question, “Dear Tessi, why do you look sad in this photo?”
So I read the review. Here is what I think about it. (My comments are in italics.)
Ottessa Moshfegh and the tedium of depravity
11 June, 2022, The New Statesmen
The American author’s new novel of medieval brutality aims for the Marquis de Sade but ends up closer to Shrek.
Photo by John Francis Peters. (It’s true, I look terrible.)
FYI Johanna Thomas-Corr wrote this for The New Statesmen, a British political and cultural news magazine. Now she is the “chief literary critic” for The Times and Sunday Times. This is her, what a beauty and a vixen. Not a shade of Shrek in that face.
I will spare you the entirety of her review, but you can read it here.
Thomas-Corr starts off describing each of my previous books in the most reductive and bitchy way possible. For example…
There is the young narrator of Booker-nominated Eileen (2015) who likes to stare into a mirror, examining her “soft, rumbling acne scars” and scratch her vagina at work.
Note that she points out the “soft, rumbling acne scars.” She thinks you will align with her and say, “Rumbling?! Acne scars don’t make a rumbling noise.” I thought they did! I’m so stupid for using a word you can’t poetically tolerate. I should go back to school!
Here is the full sentence in EILEEN, for reference:
The terrain of my face was heavy with soft, rumbling acne scars blurring whatever delight or madness lay beneath that cold and deadly New England exterior.
Is Thomas-Corr is trying to impress us with her edginess? “Scratch her vagina at work” are her words, not mine…
There is the depressed narcissist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), who resigns from her job at an art gallery by defecating on the floor.
This is so interesting to me because a few years earlier, she reviewed Death in Her Hands for The Guardian, a nothing review, but she did put some effort into handling my work. This is how she described my first two novels: