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How to Deal with a Bad Review
For writers and artists, negative coverage comes with the territory. But when attacked unfairly, you’re not helpless.
Without exception, a negative review is a source of suffering. All the more when a critic misrepresents your work.
To any writer or artist who has experienced unjust coverage, count on this: a small but no less real fraction of readers see through mendacity or purposefully injurious critiques.
I know because I’ve been among those readers and cannot imagine my experience is exclusive.
At age 19 in summer 1986, I interned at The Nation magazine in New York City. Pay: $75 a week, supplemented by housesitting. Experience: formative.
As it happened, that summer a popular Nation columnist, now deceased, hammered another leftwing writer, week after week, over a forthcoming article at a competing publication that — word had it — was going to sound a critical note about the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.
Many readers followed his column like sports coverage, lapping up each week’s takedown.
When the reviled article appeared, however, I found it profoundly moving and human, with none of the reactionary polemicizing I’d been (mis)led to expect.
