I feel sorry for Anne Rice

[msagara]

I don't know how many of you have seen the response she posted at amazon.com to reviews about her latest novel, Blood Canticle, but I'm assuming by this time many of you have -- because things like that tend to get around.

I read it with a kind of horrified fascination -- because, of course, it's the type of thing you think when you're very unhappy about a particularly nasty or incomprehensible review, which affects you say, when you're in the throes of PMS, etc.; the type of thing you might, in fact, grind out against a friend's shoulder in bitter frustration. Never the type of thing you post in public.

Otoh, she's always been a fairly public person, and she's not known for her lack of opinion about her work. How do I know this? Because I also visited her web site after I'd read her commentary. She's pretty clear about what she wants, and about how she views her own writing. And it's damn clear, reading her words there, that that lovely patina of detachment that writers are supposed to develop in public about their work and the comments or reactions it engenders? She hasn't. Ever.

Proof, of a sort, that you don't necessarily have to develop these calluses in order to be a million copy+ bestseller. Yes, that was a digression.

Do I agree with what she said? No. I don't think that people who didn't like it are clearly stupid or of lesser intellectual capacity. I think speculating on why the book didn't work -- that she was tramautized by the death of her husband and it affected her work, or that he must have been writing the other books because now he's dead and this one 'sucks' -- gives me some information about how seriously I should take the reviewer, and I understand why she might feel a sense of outrage at the implication that the words weren't hers. I think talking about the genius of one's own work is always teetering on the edge of wise (the wrong edge), but frankly, I've heard so many damn authors say the same things about their own work, either publicly or in chat rooms with a large number of people, that I guess it slides off the hard skin; it doesn't surprise me. It doesn't offend me.

What I find somewhat bewildering is the hostility that the counter engendered. She is clearly emotionally invested in her work to such a degree that she can't detach once the book has gone out of her hands; she's done something inadvisable and even publicly embarrassing (to herself), but I understand the source of the reaction because she's demonstrably not capable of not taking it personally; the work is what she has.

Do I advise anyone else to do this? Not on your damn life. And I would be eternally grateful to anyone who stopped me from doing something equally ill-advised; that's what spouses are for, poor sods.

The anger and scorn and derision and general cruelty that arose in response to her comments? I understand that less well. I don't understand that it comes from the same place; there's obviously no one with that same visceral attachment, that same inability to let go, because it's not their work. Yes, it's published. Yes, it's now open to public commentary, and yes people on Amazon have every right to post their opinions; I'm not arguing against that.

It's the reviews, if you will, of her response to the reviews that I find almost creepy. Or mob-like. Or something. It's like, "Okay, she's down and she's exposed a very stupid vulnerability, so let's all get together and kick her and giggle." I understand bonding exercises, and things that draw a group together in fun -- but this kind of fun is not my kind of fun. There's not a lot of malice in her words, that I can see; a lot of rage and obvious pain, but not a lot of malice; she's right there, in her words. She's completely exposed. There's a sh*tload of malice coming from other people, and it doesn't seem to come from a place of pain.

A better way to put this: She's not knowingly lying. She didn't knowingly turn out a bad book. She's not misinforming others to their detriment. Will the book make money for her? Yes, but not in a scam-artist way. I can understand a group assembling around any of these other things, because it seems to me to serve a purpose. Not entirely getting the purpose served here. (And Graydon, if you're reading this and you attempt to tell me this is some value of poor insecurity management, we'll have words <wry g>.)

My reaction to Rice's post is, as I said, a certain horrified fascination; it's like watching something implode. Or worse. But I'm wincing at it. If she came into my store tomorrow and screamed her head off, using more or less the same words? I'd grind my teeth and say nothing, and feel sorry for her because of the obvious cracks in the façade; but I'd be thinking, while I did it, there but for the grace of something-or-other go I. You build a lot of walls in this business, and it's like watching a car accident when they come down in this particular fashion.

I'm not immune to disaster scenes. I'm probably a lesser person because of this. I have to go and look. Why? Because obviously I'm stupid. And I have an edge. Just not that much of one.

Comments

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

I actually went to look at Anne's commentary, and I was just mindboggled. I think she basically broke every rule of writer etiquette I've ever tried to imagine.
Basically? She comes off like some 15 year old fangirl who's just had her first ONE PERFECT STORY critiqued, and she's ready to declare war on any who don't like it as much as she does. No, seriously. Put her words in the mouth of some online writer, and see if it doesn't sound exactly the same.

I can respect a lot of things from a lot of authors, especially convictions. But Anne's temper tantrum has just exposed something about her I never wanted to see. I'm amazed. Truly. THIS is a bigtime author with the big money and the many fans and the movies made of her books? THIS is one of the Writing Elite? She's allowed to contradict the critics; where I'm left shaking my head is when she points out how perfect certain scenes are, how special, how wonderful, how it's art and just so very right.

Let's not even get into the "I don't need an editor. I'll never let an editor touch my work. I'm too big for an editor." I think that if someone ever hits that point, they need an editor all the more.

In the end, I'm just amazed in a bad way that any author could get to where she is, and still be capable of blowing up in such a spectacularly pathetic fashion.

[(Anonymous)]

I suspect we all must have felt like doing this at some point. Ann Rice actually did it. There is a terrible warning here.

[shermel.livejournal.com]

I feel a bit sorry for her actually.

Then again, I've always believed that if the readers don't 'get it' then the writer hasn't done her job properly. It's my cardinal rule when receiving critique. So I don't have that much sympathy.

[schulman.livejournal.com]

I agree that the mob response is ugly, and getting uglier (and I hadn't seen the reviews that speculated about her late husband, which is certainly uncalled-for). But Rice's response is so self-congratulatory and over-the-top that it's hard for me to muster sympathy for her, particularly since she has a history of rhapsodizing about how editors are not allowed to come between her and her deathless prose.

I'm not a writer, and I've written a few unnecessarily cruel reviews in my day, so I'm on the other side of that divide. I'm also a reader, and whatever the sins of the Amazon reviewers who pushed Rice over that ledge, they paid $17+ for the privilege.

[domynoe.livejournal.com]

That so seriously blew me away. It's like she expects every reader to love her work and, sorry, that one just isn;t going to happen. You can not please every reader, it's impossible. So, knowing that some will love it some will hate it, and some won;t bother, you just gotta let things go. Heck, I've just done short stories and learned that one in the first couple of dozen rejections. She's been around A LOT longer than I have, has got to have received worse than I've ever gotten, so she's got to know all this.

But, then, she's been very public about how she feels about how people treat her work. Well, sorta. The whole Tom Cruise thing must have taught her something because she didn't say a word about Queen of the Damned and that movie adaptation definitely destroyed the book.

But this is still mind boggling.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Haven't read the review of Blood Canticle (yet--I'm not immune to rubbernecking either) but I did read some letter on her site that she posted a few years back, where she stated that she didn't think she needed to be editted or words along those lines. Seeing that reiterated here makes me feel a little squeamish.

(I also wonder how people know that it's The Real Anne Rice. I suppose I do tend to take things like that mostly on trust--just like I trust that Michelle is the Real Michelle--but I have to wonder when somebody does something so bizarrely public like this. It's not unheard of for people on the interweb to spoof other people they are obsessed with, for good or for ill.)

I wish she would allow herself an editor. I know the foundation of her work seems to appeal to the purple-prose loving crowd, but I think it's always good to have somebody to rein in your excesses. (Or to prompt them--since my last beta reader told me that my narrator was a bit too narrative and clinical and we never saw any emotions. I suspect Anne is at the opposite end of the spectrum, though.)

[elialshadowpine]

Like Pixelfish, I'm kind of wondering if it's actually Anne Rice or someone using her name, which is entirely possible on the internet.

On the other hand, I knew a multi-published midlist fantasy author who banned a long-time regular member from her writer's boards for supposedly writing a negative review of said author's books on Amazon.com and then lying about it. (Said now-ex members claims she never read the book, but the author held she was lying even after receiving an email apology from the real author of the review.)

Considering that the "bad review" basically consisted of the reader saying that the book wasn't deserving of the awe and worship that it got by previous reviewers, who were nearly all members of this same site, I really didn't think the review was that harsh. (Kinda agreed with it myself, actually. The book sucked, imo.)

So ... I honestly don't know. If Anne Rice really did write this, than it's immature in the extreme and, as someone else said, breaks all rules of writer etiquette. (Might make a couple new on its own, too. LOL.)

If you're going to publish something, it seems to me that you have to deal with the possible eventuality that people might not like it. People have different tastes, but if the majority of people are bitching about the way you've written a book, maybe that ought be a sign to you? "Hey, people don't like this. Maybe there's something valid here? *toddles off to take closer look*"

At least, that's the reaction I would have. But maybe I'm just odd. *shrugs*

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

IIRC there's a Real Name badge on her response, which pretty much means the name on the review corresponds to the name on the credit card. That's enough proof for me that it's actually Anne Rice.

But also what convinced me is that I'd read through some of her messages to readers on her website before -- I think the one where she talks about not letting her work be edited is "Message from the beach 2" or something like that -- and a lot of the ideas, the phrasing and even the emotional tone were all the same. She was obviously less upset in the message to her readers, but there was the same insistence on her work as genius, perfectly realized, &c.

Amazingly, this is apparently someone who's become a Big Name Author without the ability to take a pasting -- I won't say "criticism," because I don't think the Amazon.com reviews approach that. But sometimes writers just get unfair or uncomprehending reviews. Amazon.com has given a megaphone to a lot of fans who write stuff like "I didn't read this book but the other book I read by this author is terrible" or "This is the best book written ever," so writers are coming up smack against it in a way that really wasn't possible before Amazon.com. If you got a really bad review in a little literary quarterly, say, usually you wouldn't hear about it unless you had a completist clipping service (or agent) or they sent you a copy. But now it's like everyone is their own quarterly review, and you don't have to search it out -- it's all there right beneath the PW Review and whatever else amazon.com chooses to put up.

I feel a little sympathy for her because I also tend to get out-of-control when responding to sheer nastiness tossed in my direction, but I'm tempted to print out her Amazon.com post and hang it on my wall next to my computer as a reminder to never, ever try to get in the last word wrt a bad review, whether written by an Amazon.com nameless nabob or Edmund Wilson.

It's interesting how many people are comparing her to a fanfic writer who can't take criticism -- because what she's responding to isn't the kind of measured criticism fanfic can get. I wonder how much of that is due to her status as a "genre" author -- a bestselling one, to be sure, but still someone without "literary" prestige.

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

Damn, hit Post Comment instead of Preview again -- the message from AR which seemed similar to the Amazon.com posting is here. (http://www.annerice.com/sh_MessagesBeach2.htm)

After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. So all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian.

As always, I continued to work with immense focus, critically editing and polishing the words, only proceeding in the work until I felt that the most had been exacted from each element, editing and re-editing the words with enormous scrutiny and exactitude. Naturally, when I had switched from typewriter to computer around 1983 or so, I took to the computer very well, and this aided me in moving back and forth through the chapters, perfecting them, bringing them closer and closer to my ideal of what they could be, and sharpening and honing them into what I wanted.

But never were drafts of anything produced. My methods would never allowed for anything so sloppy to have been done. I'm too compulsive for that method. I understand why it might work for another person, but I must control the manuscript much more tightly. By the time I reach the last paragraph of a book, everything else is in line behind it, and giving birth to that last paragraph. I go back and back over that last paragraph countless times, getting up out of bed in the middle of the night to go in and redo that last paragraph, but all the rest is polished and edited right down to the last. And then the completed version goes off to the publisher.

That is my method.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the book, the review, or her post, but I know I've whined on my LJ about reviews, and even about the Amazon review that says "This is the worst book I've ever read."

So yes, I too sympathise with the impulse, even while seeing hos foolish it is.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Oooooo. Oooooo. I'm wincing from your description, so hard I don't think I can even bear to read it.

I was lucky: I got a talk from one of my writing mentors very early in my career (Tim Powers) who felt it important to tell all us budding hopeful writers at Clarion that we had to remember to pay attention not only to our writing, but how we conducted ourselves as decent, considerate human beings who didn't allow ourselves to get too puffed-up with ourselves. I've always been so grateful for that wisdom, because it has kept me from being tempted to act badly in ways I've since seen other writers act. And yeah, I can get really, really hurt when the critics get savage, but good heavens, I know enough not to pitch a fit publicly!

[fairmer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I read the stuff that was up there (on Amazon) as of noon yesterday. I find it somewhat amazing that she's been an author lo these many years and hasn't learned to let go of this stuff. It's easy, in our insular worlds, to get caught up in thinking we're cool, that what we say is important to everyone. You learn on what fronts to guard against criticism (or at least, to curb your reaction to criticism)--appearance, salary, the one person at work who always thinks you're an idiot, whatever. An attack comes on an undefended flank and it floors you, and all the urbane detachment you've developed about the other things is of no use.

I guess I'm just totally shocked that a writer hasn't learned that writing is one of those fronts.

But maybe that's what her husband actually did for her--I tend not to think that he wrote her works, because that's just convoluted and insulting on a whole different level--but maybe he shored up those defenses for her, and now she's reeling from something that, by rights, she should have experienced long ago.

Just a guess. I do feel sorry for her, but not in a good way.

[thinkum]

I have a Thing about Vampires. It's not rational, logical, or enlightened of me, but there it is: the whole subject gives me nightmares, despite the best efforts of the intellectual side of my brain.

This is by way of saying that (a) I've never read Anne Rice, (b) I don't ever intend to read Anne Rice, and therefore (c) I have absolutely no firsthand knowledge of the quality of her writing.

If her rampage on Amazon is any example, the quality of her writing is fairly substandard. Of course, that's a totally unfair example, as she's obviously coming from an emotional place, unedited, rather than crafting a structured argument. As you say, she's right there, totally exposed. But sometimes I find that's the most telling measure of a person, when their words are unedited, coming fresh from an emotional core.

We can't all be Dorothy Parker (thank god *g*). But even in anger, someone who truly crafts words as carefully and deliberately as Ms Rice claims to, should have made a better job of it.

Ultimately, her comments serve as the perfect example of why one should never post anything until the motivating emotion has cooled off. I think that warning should be emblazoned across the internet, at the top of every newsreader, web browser, IRC, IM, and email window: Never Post In Anger.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I read some of Rice's commentary. She crossed the line so many times that she erased it. Sharks smelled blood and circled. Ugliness on both sides.

That said, I also understand her impulse to defend herself. I have received and read Amazon reviews that seem to have no relation to the book in question, or which reveal the reviewer as someone with an axe to grind. Some people seem to view Amazon as a valid outlet for their 'kick the cat' impulses. Others don't understand the difference between a book that doesn't work for them and a bad book. But to respond to it as Rice did is bad form. The work needs to stand up for itself, and as others have said previously, if you need to go back and explain things, you didn't do your job properly in the first place.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I dunno. It's such a awful thing to have done - to post this kind of reply to a negative review - that it's almost impossible for me not to feel some sympathy.

Even though she's such a dreadful writer, and this "review of reviews" epitomises why she is such a dreadful writer. (Came over here via ide_cyan, btw - hope you don't mind.) She didn't use to be dreadful: but it's been years since I greeted the arrival of a new Anne Rice with pleasure, and indeed years since I started to wonder how she could possibly still be a bestseller. That she chose out of arrogance to become a less good writer than she's capable of being (that is, she used her bestseller status to avoid being edited) is a sin that I find hard to forgive: it's a waste of talent by pride. And the end result, is, indeed, that she's simply not capable even of accepting that some people who read what she writes won't like it.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I didn't post one of those responses to the review, because it's been said, but I identify with them -- my private response was much the same.

I didn't see the vulnerability and pain you describe coming from Anne -- I saw narcissistic drama queen. She refuses to let anyone touch her sacred words and then turns around and flames people for pointing out grammar errors. How dare we hold her responsible for...exactly what she just grandiosely claimed complete responsibility for? Um, no.

I can't speak for anyone else, but my malice comes, not from pain, but from righteous indignation. Oh no, honey, you can't be thinking to put this over on me, to make it my fault that I am too stupid to understand your masterpiece. I don't think so. (Of course, I've got my own history with narcissism and having things be made the other person's fault. So maybe this is a place of pain after all.)

It's also a context thing. If this were the first time she'd pulled something like this, she'd get the "wow, must've been a lot of straw on that camel already" benefit of the doubt.

But Anne Rice makes a habit of psychodrama of precisely this sort -- flouncing off, seeing betrayal and personal insult in any critique, leaving long rants on her answering machine and web site that, in the course of defending herself, manage to insult a large number of other people and sound laughable in the process.

Several friends of mine were deeply into Anne Rice fandom for years, and were finally disillusioned by her behavior as much as by the decline in her books once she refused editing. So as far as I'm concerned she used up the benefit of the doubt a long time ago.

In a nonfamous person I have no tolerance for repeated temper tantrums. Someone who pulled this in my real life would be long gone from it. In a famous person... I still have no tolerance for it. Less, in fact, because if people are shelling out for your novel and reading it all the way through, that puts an additional burden on you to act like a grownup in return.

I'm not sure getting angry needs to serve a purpose. I just get angry when confronted with something that strikes me as inappropriate, and then the purpose served is expressing my anger. In addition, I'd argue, it serves as an object lesson to other pros that falling in love with yourself to this extent is going to alienate readers, and to fans who behave in a similar fashion in our own small puddle to see how unattractive it is when viewed from the outside.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Hummmm....

Haven't read this, not sure I should.

May I suggest that the comment about "losing her husband lost her the buffer she must have had" sounds possible? I do know that a fun mystery/humor writer I adored as good popcorn prose started to fall apart after the death of her husband. Turns out that she was suffering from early Alzheimer's, and he was able to keep her focused and channeled enough that she could still write. Without him, her writing--and her life--fell apart.

She's not dead, but she might as well be. Very sad.

I wonder if something Anne would have yelled at the walls for hours about and had her husband soothe her over had no place to go but the Internet?

Does she even have any real friends to vent to when needed, with her tendency to blow and flounce?

[lexcorp-hope.livejournal.com]

While I feel sorry for the loss of her husband, and the utter disappointment and hurt that comes with writing a poorly-reviewed book in memoria for him, I don't feel the least bit sorry for the fact that people are jumping on her head. (In fact, I posted the link to Metafilter, so I'm certainly responsible for helping spread it.) Nevertheless, I've read most of her books, I very much enjoy them, but I don't feel bad about the response to this because of this:

You are interrogating this text from the wrong perspective. Indeed, you aren't even reading it. You are projecting your own limitations on it.

Pretty simply put: if you don't like my book, you have a limited mind, and you're reading it wrong, and no, I'm sorry- that's not how it works. Some people are sloppy readers, so an author can ignore it if one person says "Y doesn't make sense, X doesn't work," but if fifteen, or fifty, or a hundred people have exactly the same issue- they're not reading it wrong. The author didn't write what she meant.

This happens all the time- you have the whole story in your head, and it makes sense because you know the details, but somehow, those details don't make it onto the page. That's still not the readers' faults. She sunk her own ship by pointing out multiple times that her work is perfect when she turns it in, and she doesn't need any editor but herself, consequently anybody who doesn't get it is dumb.

Again, I understand being hurt when people don't like your work (in my case, I'm a screenwriter, so I get to understand that at about six thousand points from turning in my final draft to watching it being filtered through an entire production crew and cast, *then* the critics and the audience, it's *murder*,) but I cannot and do not understand believing in a "perfect manuscript," nor do I understand the inability to admit that sometimes, as a writer, you just didn't succeed.

She dished out a heaping plate of smack to a lot of people in a public forum; she should pretty much expect to get her own dish at the dinner shortly thereafter. I would feel exactly the same way if she were a random Joe who shows up at a peace rally to howl about the nobility of war- sure, she gets to vent, but the people she's yelling get to yell back. She knew going in that she's not just some random Joe on the street, and she still made the choice to spit at the crowd.

The Internet is not real life- you have to type all of your words, and then you have to consciously decide to press submit. She had all kinds of time to reconsider whether she really wanted to expose herself like that, and she decided she did. I can't feel sorry for somebody who volunteers to be a whipping boy.

Thoughts on why the hostile response

[astolat]

I haven't read the fandom_wank response in particular, if that happens to be what mainly inspired this post, because in general I find f_w to be kind of disquietingly mob-like even when it's funny. But I have to say I'm on board with everything flummery said, and I do understand the general wave of hostile response.

Fandom is all about responding to our shared texts -- enthusing about them, yes, but also discussing them, critiquing them, writing fanfic about them, drawing art inspired by them, whatever. When an author comes out and tells people that they're Wrong about her work, she's denying the privilege of the reader/fan to get things out of a work that the author didn't intend, to build upon what's been provided. That's pretty much the basis of fandom, and so I can see why the intense response.

I mean, yes, clearly she's not able to step back from her work, and I was wincing on her behalf too, but I also think she was deliberately asserting an unreasonable level of authorial privilege. From her previously-posted comments in the essay, I think it's fair to say that she does in fact believe in that level of privilege, that this was not simply an explosion of frustration. And I think fandom, at least the highly engaged, interactive side of fandom, naturally rejects that notion with great force.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

The best I can say about Rice's response is that she didn't say she could kick anyone's ass. Other than that, she hit every point of the Letter From Disgruntled Author template, down to "the lurkers support me in email."

I can't find it in my heart to sympathize with anyone who claims that no editor may offer her critiques because every word she turns in is perfect, in a letter which neglects to provide paragraph breaks.

This baffles me

[chibipoe.livejournal.com]

I admit I derived amusement initially from the comments being made about her reactions over on Amazon, even went so far as to post a snippet of it in my own LJ.

But I don't get personal attacks against authors or such. I mean, if you want to dislike the author because you think she's a talentless hack or he is dragging his series on endlessly with no idea what he's doing, then fine. That's good. Do that.

But, attacking them and bringing up personal issues into the fray is just disgusting and frankly, I'm glad I stopped paying attention to the Anne Rice stuff on F_W(other than to note that, at one point, there was 666 comments, which is probably not as funny as I think it is.)

Anyway, yes, again. Dislike the author because you don't like their work, but you don't KNOW THEM and disliking them and bringing up personal matters that have no bearing whatsoever on the reasons you really don't like them is just plain wrong.

[pameladean]

Um, hi, I don't think we've met, but we share a lot of interlocutors.

I feel sorry for Anne Rice too. As was said just above, it's one thing for people to dislike one's writing. But I think it's really beyond the pale to speculate snidely about why the writing is bad, using the wrong sense of "why." To locate the source of the badness in the writer's personal life, rather than in the work, seems to me incredibly shabby and also lazy. First, to go on like this is shirking the work of actually criticizing the book in a fashion that is meaningful to anybody at all, and second, it's incredibly rude and stupid. Nobody who has speculated in such an intrusive, presumptuous fashion about my work has ever, ever, ever gotten even one single thing right. They have been making up a tissue of lies from beginning to end. It has nothing to do with the book or with reading. It's just nasty invented gossip, and yet they will defend it as if it were their religion. I wish there were a way to make this kind of nonsense unacceptable.

Pamela