Thick Skin is an interview series featuring authors talking about negative reviews, from critics and (anonymous) readers alike

See all of the Thick Skin installments.

Episode XXII: “This does strike a nerve, because it was something I was worried about”

Published 9/2/21
In this installment, I speak with Emily Temple. Topics include when criticism stings, MFA feedback, Tartt comparisons, comps & more.

Today I'm talking to Emily Temple, whose debut novel The Lightness was published last summer by William Morrow. The New York Times Book Review called it "a beautiful meditation on meditation ... frequently hilarious, and thoughtful throughout." Entertainment Weekly said it was "cool, dark, and pretty as a clear night sky." But we're here to discuss your less-than-positive reviews, both those professional and on sites like Goodreads and Amazon.

I usually start by asking if you've read all of your reviews, but by this point I know the answer is, of course, yes. I came across two negative reviews in major publications—does that track with what you found? In general, how would you rate your ability to respond well to negative criticism?

Yes, I'm sure I know the two you mean; I'd say one is very bad and the other a little more mixed—she thought I was quite a good writer but hated the book's plot, which is at least better than the other way around. Interestingly (or not), both of these reviews begin by comparing The Lightness to The Secret History, which certainly goes to show...something.

I do think I'm pretty good at metabolizing criticism. As you may know, my day job is as an editor at Literary Hub; before that I was the books editor at another website. I've been writing publicly, and fielding—well, not reviews exactly, but their evil step-cousin, comments—for many years. (I actually never read the comments anymore, but I recently got a very angry email from someone who was offended by my mild dislike for The Catcher in the Rye. Sorry bud!)

So I'd say that at this point, negative criticism usually only stings if a) I agree with it and b) the work in question has already been published. If I agree and it hasn't been published, thank you for your wise editorial feedback. If I disagree, then whether it's been published or not...who cares? It's not like I would have changed that bit to please you anyway, and people get to have their own opinions about things. Even classic novels.

All that said, no matter how internet-hardened you may be, when you publish a book, you feel very tender about it at first. (Or at least I did.) By chance, The Lightness came out in the UK a few days before it came out in the US, and so unfortunately that Guardian review (the very bad one) was the very first professional review I read. Which definitely sucked! I remember feeling primarily embarrassed, and a little offended, and suddenly afraid that they were all going to be like that. To add insult to injury, the Guardian did not use one of my official author photos, but instead an old shot that they had clearly scraped off Google Images, which (I think) makes me look a little silly and girlish. But that's the British press for you. 

I want to go into the Guardian and The Washington Post reviews (and yes, the second is a mixed review, not strictly negative—as Literary Hub's Book Mark's feature correctly tags it as), but first: what you wrote made me curious about your experience earning your MFA. You said that negative criticism only stings if you agree with it and the work in question has already been published. So is that to say that none of the feedback you got in your MFA stung? Did you find yourself agreeing with a lot of the criticism you received (both from students and professors)?

Yes, I realize I'm a freak, but I always really enjoyed my MFA workshops, and I don't remember ever finding them painful. I did agree with plenty of the criticism I heard, but I found that exciting, not upsetting—it meant I had a road map for making my story better. I also got plenty of criticism I did not agree with, or even take seriously—I learned pretty quickly in my MFA who among my cohort (and who among my professors) was a good reader of my work and who wasn't, and it was easy to ignore comments from people who I knew were just not meeting me on the field where I was playing. Which was, to be fair, a somewhat unusual field, at least for UVA. Most of the stories I worked on during my MFA had surrealist or fabulist elements, and UVA doesn't exactly have a reputation for being experimental. One professor actually accused me of "tricking" him into letting me into the program because my submission story had been realistic. He explained that magic in fiction was boring, and that the only magic worth writing about was the magic that happens at 3 a.m. in a CVS on Bleecker Street. Which was obviously annoying to hear from my professor when I was trying to write weird little stories about talking, carnivorous hills and dinner parties full of personified past selves, but also so clearly untrue that it was easy to brush off. I was pretty confident that what I was doing had value, and so I focused on the feedback coming from people who saw where I was trying to go and wanted to help me get there.

I have a feeling the concept of meeting a writer on the field where she plays will come up later.

So to start diving into your reviews in the Guardian and the Post, can I ask you to clarify what you meant when you said, "both of these reviews begin by comparing The Lightness to [Donna Tartt's] The Secret History, which certainly goes to show...something."?

Ha, I knew I wasn't going to get away with that little quip. Look, I love The Secret History, but I don't think my novel has that much in common with it, beyond a few pretty loose elements. Sure, they both make use of a hothouse atmosphere and a naive outsider seeking purchase in an alluring clique, but so do a lot of stories. (My editor doesn't even like The Secret History! So I wonder if these reviews actually annoyed her more than they did me.) To be fair, one of my blurbs name-checks Donna Tartt, and I have written about The Secret History on the internet. But I was still surprised to see it repeatedly used as a lens. Without going back to check, my memory is that it has been mostly referenced like this in negative reviews, professional and otherwise, and I don't really know what that means. Maybe just that if you're expecting The Secret History, you're going to be disappointed. But professional reviewers should really know that already, blurb or nay.

One thing that perplexed me at first was something the Guardian reviewer wrote: she had spotted "a cheeky suggestion" in the The Lightness that it existed in the same universe as The Secret History. It took me a little while to figure out what she was talking about, but if it's what I think—a passing reference to a missing boy on a college campus—that's actually not a reference to The Secret History but to something that happened while I was an undergraduate at Middlebury. So maybe there's just something in the small Vermont college water. 

It is certainly a fallback, in every level of the publishing industry, to sell (and see) books using other (monumentally successful) books, but where this habit crumbles under itself is after a book is sold, published and read. No one loves a book because it's some version of another book! And more to the point: No real writer writes a book so that it will be very similar to another one. 

Let's talk about the second paragraph of the Guardian review, which starts with this issue and ends with something completely different: "Emily Temple’s first novel, The Lightness, is one of the more preposterous Secret History facsimiles: in place of hedonistic scholars, Temple gives us nihilistic Buddhists on a quest to master the dark and furtive art of levitation. It is a premise that requires a mighty belief in suspension in order to suspend disbelief."

I don't want to lead the witness in any way, so I'll just ask this: Any thoughts on that last sentence?

Ah, yes. You can tell she thinks that's a pretty clever sentence, but it feels like she really sacrificed the meaning for the music there.

And you're quite right about comps in the publishing industry. I've always thought that comps should be for internal publishing and marketing decisions and not presented to readers. I get why they are—it's a shorthand—but they set up these bizarre expectations, and they're never, ever accurate. Comps might sell books, but they do it at the risk of disappointing readers, which may or may not lead to more bad, and even resentful, reviews, especially on Goodreads, where you see people complaining all the time that a certain book isn't what they thought it was going to be, therefore one star. Obviously, this isn't a great way to read, but they've also fallen victim to something very close to clickbait. By the way, the only book I have ever read that got close to satisfying its comp promise was Mona Awad's Bunny ("Heathers meets The Vegetarian"). Even then, it's inaccurate, but at least it does the work it's supposed to do: if you like those two comps (and you should), you'll definitely like this book.

I thought it odd that she was noting the premise itself is supernatural. Isn't that, as you say, not meeting you on the field where you're playing? And it also seemed to me to rhyme with your experience at UVA.

I want to cut to the last two paragraphs of the review, which pull a trio of jabs: that the book i) could be a satire but isn't, ii) is twee, iii) lacks ambition. Which of these hit a nerve the most?

It is hard to shake the lurking sense – the hope – that The Lightness might reveal itself to be a sublimely subversive satire; a much-needed parody of our abiding literary fetishisation of girlhood, with all of its idolatrous hunger and coiled sensuality, or perhaps a scabrous caricature of pumpkin spice spirituality. Temple’s description of the mountaintop centre, with its grab bag of courses from iridology to tantric sex, has promising raw-toothed bite. “I’ve come to be suspicious of American practitioners of Eastern philosophies,” grown-up Olivia confides. “There’s something so rapacious about them ... All that performative kindness. All that practised calm.”

Which is why it is so dispiriting that her novel opts instead for a twee permutation of a story we have seen so many times before. The Lightness leads us to the precipice, but when it comes time to make a bold literary leap, it loses its nerve.

Right—the novel is deliberately not asking you to believe in levitation, or "suspension," only to believe that some teenagers might believe in it. This is not exactly a speculative novel, though it does leave room for ambiguity. (I'd say the book asks if there is magic in the world, but does not clearly answer.) She also uses the word "preposterous," which makes more sense in the context of this (willful?) misreading. So yes, this reviewer is definitely playing on a different field, though I don't really know how she got over there. 

But even if the book did ask the reader to believe in a world where levitation was definitely possible—why would that require so much suspension of disbelief? This is a novel, set like any novel in a fictional world, with its own rules and its own conventions. Surely not everything should be judged on how "realistic" it is. Would she write the same about Italo Calvino, or George Saunders, or Kelly Link, or Helen Oyeyemi? 

As for the jabs: you will probably not be surprised to hear that I'm not much moved by any complaint in the "I wish this book had been x but it wasn't" category. It's not a satire. I wasn't trying to write a satire. I do think the novel is explicitly critical of both the fetishization of girlhood (especially by girls themselves) and, as she calls it, "pumpkin spice spirituality," but that's neither here nor there. And at least the way I read this, the third jab is really the same as the first—she thinks it would have been more "nervy" if it were a satire. Oh well. 

That leaves us with "twee" as the most painful, and this does strike a nerve, because it was something I was worried about: that the plot, and the age and gender of the characters, would obscure or overwhelm the work I was trying to do with language and concept and quality of mind. This is also where it really rhymes with my experience at UVA. Calling things "twee" is a pretty standard way to devalue women's writing. Men who wrote primarily about towns where the factory just closed down and/or fishing in the UP loved to tell me in workshop that my stories were "cute." Someone once said that I could be a great writer if I gave up all that fabulism stuff and wrote about something serious, like my family. Again, I don't agree. But that doesn't mean none of it lingers. And I did worry, at various point during the writing and editing process, if this was just a dumb book about teenage girls—which honestly probably reflects my own internalized cultural misogyny more than anything. I decided it wasn't, but it still isn't pleasant to have someone tell me that it was. 

I wonder if reading (and now rereading, a year later) this interview, you have any luck at making sense of the writer's perspective. Do you think they are a bad reviewer? Do you think they had it out for you? Was this book just not right for this reviewer?

It's hard to say. I certainly don't think you'd have to be a bad reviewer or out to get me in order to dislike the book. I happen to disagree with a lot of what's said in this particular review, but let's not forget that I am quite biased. It may indeed have just been the wrong book for the reviewer, or it may have struck some unknown nerve or pet peeve, or they may be right about it all and I just can't see it. Who knows? I dislike lots of books that other people love, and vice versa, and I'm just as sure of my opinions and reasoning as they are, so I can't in good conscience pretend that this person's reaction isn't as valid as any other.

On to the Post, which, as you noted, was in fact mostly positive except for this nugget:

The plot she’s chosen remains melodramatic, however: Hormone-drunk adolescents fall for something part-spiritual, part-magical, and go too far — way, way too far. The four friends constantly touch and stroke and lounge on one another in what might be a realistic view of young female sexuality if it weren’t combined with all their scheming and manipulation to have Luke teach them the secrets of levitation, as well as a body-heating technique known as “tummo.”

Do you know what she means by "melodramatic"?

It sounds to me like she just means "teenage."

I saw the word a couple of times, too, on Goodreads. One of which cited "melodramatic prose that obfuscates rather than clarifies", and the other, "Four melodramatic teen girls spend the summer at a Buddhist retreat trying to learn how to levitate. They do some weird, melodramatic teen girl stuff."

Do you think the word is being wielded in the same way? I wonder if you think it's used in the same way "twee" is?

"Melodramatic" is a funny one, because it's such a matter of taste—one man's melodrama is another man's drama—but you can see even from these quotes how tied it is in our brains to stories about teenagers, especially teenage girls. I do wonder if I would hear that word if I had written the same book about boys, and in that way it's similar to "twee," I think. (You know who's really melodramatic? Holden Caulfield.) 

But in a sense I kind of agree about the melodrama. Look, the reason I wrote about teenage girls is that they're so intense; they're like these extravagant raw edges all the time. I was actively trying to capture some of that, and maybe that means a little melodrama is unavoidable. I mean, I remember being 14 and writing out the lyrics to a song from the musical Rent in my diary, and then crying onto the page, and then drawing a frowny face in the tears and smearing ink with my finger, and feeling like that finally could get close to expressing the sadness of my inner soul. That's what it's like!

As far as the prose—that's a matter of taste too. Some people prefer Nabokov and some people prefer Hemingway. Personally, I'm not often very interested in a novel unless it's doing something exciting on the line level, but I know plenty of people would rather have clarity.

Your response had me searching Goodreads for notes on your prose. There were some but actually even a lot of the negative ones were positive on your writing. So kudos. I did find this one:

"Unfortunately, this reads like a misguided, appropriative first-year MFA student project without any editing or direction. That is to say there are some bright moments of prose, but there’s far, far too much nonsensical, overwrought attempts at “literary fiction,” coupled with a bizarre White gaze.

Do you know what she's referring to?

Do you mean the "white gaze" bit? If so, I have to say not really. Maybe, considering the word "appropriative" in the first sentence, this person is saying that it's bizarre for me, as a white person, to write about Buddhism? 

Oh and this also made me think of something: I was once reading a novel and hit a line that was so overwrought, so self-consciously Literary, that I nearly put the book down and walked away. A little while later, I read a review of the book by James Wood himself, which pulled out that very same line as proof of how well-written the book was. Which only serves to remind that there really is no objective truth when it comes to evaluating art.

It seems there are some sentences that can only be either self-consciously Literary, or, given the Wood imprimatur, Literature incarnate.

When you read some reader review like, "Pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-literary drivel written by an elitist," are you ever tempted to go back to the book and see if your own view of your sentences has changed? Do you ever find that your opinion of your own writing has changed?

Nope. My opinion of my own writing is definitely subject to change (though I rarely look back at it, to be honest with you), but not so drastically that I fear I'll wake up one day and think "this book that I worked on for five years? I just realized it's drivel!" Or not so far, anyway. 

Besides, without having seen that particular review, usually all you have to do to make yourself feel better about a Goodreads review is click on the person's profile and take a look at what they gave five stars to.

That's fair. You've been very candid and patient and have made yourself an open book, so I'll just about let you off the hook now. But before we go, your last comment made me think about how different readers come to a given book. Not every book is for every reader, and in fact books sometimes seem to attract the very reader they are not for. Given all of what we talked about, how did you feel about how The Lightness was marketed? Do you think there's much subjectivity in how a publisher brings a book out into the world?

That's the secret silver lining of Goodreads—when you can see that this person who hated your book really only likes, say, realist historical fiction, it all makes much more sense (unless your book is realist historical fiction, in which case, just click away, friend). Or maybe they just love ten books you hate! And then you know you simply have different tastes. 

Anyway, you're right to ask this question about The Lightness, because there is a massive amount of subjectivity in how books are packaged, and I recognize that The Lightness was a tough one. It has both commercial aspects (the plot, the teenage girls, the mystery, etc.) and literary aspects (the prose, the structure, the refusal to answer certain questions, etc.). I don't know that my publisher could have marketed it any better than they did, considering the way it straddles the line, but it does seem like the people who really hated it were responding negatively to one or the other of those aspects—as though they had come to it hoping for a fast-paced teen girl mystery and instead got a pretentious literary novel, or had come hoping for a weird, highbrow novel of ideas and instead got a bunch of teenage girls trying to seduce the gardener. For me, obviously, it's both—and that was the point. I wanted to write about teenage girls in a literary, experimental way, because I love teenage girls, and I love messing around with language and form. But like anything else, it all depends on your point of view.