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 XX: “More or less exactly the review I was afraid the book would get”

Published 7/21/21
In this installment, I speak with Miranda Popkey. Topics of conversation (ha) include engagement being confused with endorsement, comparisons to Rachel Cusk, the social ramifications of reviews & more.

Today I’m with Miranda Popkey, whose debut novel Topics of Conversation (Knopf, 2020) has been praised as "masterly" (The New Yorker), "provocative" and "sure to spark conversation" (NPR), and "a shrewd record of the act of unflinchingly circling ... amorphous notions of pain, desire and control." (The New York Times Book Review) There have also, of course, been some less than enthusiastic things said about it, which we’ll talk about shortly. But first, I want to know what your relationship is with reviews in general. Can I assume you've read all of the reviews of Topics from major publications? Have you dived into the reviews on sites like Goodreads and Amazon? And just out of curiosity, do you think you're "good" at receiving feedback on your work (i.e. from friends, editors, etc.)?

I have a lot of anxiety around showing my work to others, but when I do, I want an honest reaction. I want to know what isn't working for a particular reader and why; then I can decide whether the problem they've identified is one I'm interested in fixing. I do think of myself as someone receptive to feedback, especially when it comes in a professional context. To give one example: the draft of Topics that went out on submission wasn't arranged chronologically; that change was made at my editor's suggestion.

I'm not nearly as good at handling feedback I can't interact with, i.e., reviews. I seek reviews out because I want to know, but Jack Nicholson was right: I can't always handle the truth. So yes, I've read the reviews in major publications, and yes, I've read at least a smattering of the reviews available on Goodreads and Amazon, both positive and negative. I have enough distance now that I can read a negative reader review with a fair amount of equanimity, but I spent some late nights on Goodreads right around pub really pressing on the bruise, so to speak.

Well then let's start with Goodreads. Topics currently has a 2.8 on Goodreads, which is relatively low. I personally pay no mind to the overall ratings on Goodreads; it makes me think of Yelp, and how the kind of establishment has everything to do with the overall rating. (Everyone loves cupcakes, but who knows what type of tourist might wander into an authentic Filipino restaurant and order balut.) This is all to say Topics is rather experimental relative to other books put out by major publishers.

A prototypical gripe was that it was "trying too hard to be artistic and intellectual - coming off whole heartedly pretentious." I saw the P word quite a few times. Was this the kind of reader review that hurt more than others? Are you someone who believes pretentiousness eats at artistic endeavor like a cancer, or do you think it's often flung at the real thing by readers who came across a work that wasn't meant for them?

My Goodreads rating was a source of pain early on, but now I wear my 2.8 as a badge of honor. It's difficult to find a contemporary literary novel with a similarly low rating—trust me, I've tried. Not that there's necessarily a correlation between rarity and quality, but if I'm not doing something right, at least I'm doing something different. 

Being labeled pretentious—truthfully, that's not a criticism that stings. My narrator uses her intellect alternately as a shield and a weapon; I wouldn't call her pretentious, but I understand why others would. I will say: I did not intend Topics to be "difficult." You use the word "experimental"—even that might be giving me too much credit. Say there's a Venn diagram: one circle describes what I wanted the novel to communicate; the other describes my abilities as a writer. Topics exists in the overlap between those two circles; I couldn't have written it in any other way.

Right, "experimental" is perhaps never the exact right word (like "weird", or "interesting").

If it wasn't being labeled pretentious that caused you to, as you say, spend some late nights pressing on the bruise, what kind of things did? I found reviews citing "none of the characters were likable", "I was truly bored to tears", "I consider myself to be a feminist and I would like to put it out into the world that this book is not feminist.", "It felt like an unedited stream of consciousness.", and "this book, at its core, conveyed such a strong theme of hate and resentment that it truly disturbed me. The women throughout these pages were not inspiringly erotic or bravely feminist; rather, they were hate-filled, conceited, and apathetic characters devoid of any sort of intriguing depth." Anything along those veins?

In part it's a question of volume. I want people to like me! Reading over and over (and over) that they don't was difficult. (Of course it's the book they don't like, not me as a person, but that distinction is more known than felt.) 

I did worry that Topics might be (mis)read as anti-feminist. My narrator's sense of self is deeply informed by the cultural products she is exposed to, cultural products made, by and large, by straight white men. Examining that self meant engaging with narrow, even offensive understandings of female personhood. Examination and engagement don't equal endorsement, but looking long and hard at something disturbing—if it's not done carefully, the reader may come to believe that the author is more interested in shock than in analysis. In any case: knowing that Topics was in fact read as anti-feminist, at least by some, does hurt. I could blame these reviewers for reading sloppily or in bad faith, but it's hard not to think that perhaps some fault lies with my attempts at representation. 

By that last line, do you mean to suggest that, given this feedback (and others'; more on that in a second), you would have written the book differently?

It does seem to be getting harder and harder to write about morally dubious people or situations without it being taken for granted you endorse them. Harder still when the issue in question—in this case, feminism—is profoundly dynamic.

But readers' ideas are one thing, reviewers' another. On the topic of feminism, I did find the above concerns mirrored in a couple of publications that covered the book.

From Public Books: "Popkey uses the idiosyncratic sexual inclinations of a few women, all of whom are from the same culture and class, to clumsily fashion a universal theory of female desire." There was also, "Women in this novel don’t emerge as individuals but as indistinguishable members of a chorus with a point to make ... This should not be mistaken for feminism."

Your reviewer at The New Republic seemed to nail down the difficulty in the mission you set out for yourself. She said your task became "complex on the level of individual narrative, where Popkey must simultaneously valorize the self-expression of her female characters, show how their feelings may have been conditioned by misogyny, and also maintain that this conditioning does not disqualify them as autonomous, free-thinking people."

Assuming you came across both of these reviews, what did you feel when you read them? Have your feelings towards them changed over time?

No, I wrote the book how I wrote the book. When I read a review that suggests I failed a particular reader, it's only ever a potential lesson for the future: did I in fact fail that reader, and how, and do I care.

The Public Books review was more or less exactly the review I was afraid the book would get. I found it unpleasant to read because I disagree with the analysis. I wasn't trying to fashion a universal theory of female desire. To my mind, the women of Topics are individual, as are their stories. They are, also, yes, collectively inflected (infected) by the largely noxious cultural soup in which they (we all) swim—that's one of the sources of tension in the novel. But because it was the review I'd feared, I was as well prepared for it as I could be, and grateful that the writer's views weren't shared by more critics.

In an ideal world, I'd take the New Republic reviewer out for drinks. The piece is far from a rave, but it's not a scathing takedown either; she's interested in figuring out what I'm up to and why and whether or not I was successful. She took the book seriously, and I'd be curious to hear more—and a more unvarnished version—of her thoughts. 

That makes me think there's a prototypical pan every writer has in their heads before a book comes out. I certainly have one.

Speaking of the Public Books review, she did mention something that caught my eye—that Topics is, "as Popkey has admitted, a rip-off of Rachel Cusk." This is something that was picked up on by a couple of other reviewers: your Bookforum reviewer at a glance ("the novel is heavily—too heavily—influenced by Cusk’s recent novel trilogy"; though that review was largely positive), and The Wall Street Journal, which was perhaps your worst review (tell me if you disagree).

From the WSJ: "The novel’s form is so transparently indebted to Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy—narrated by a woman in crisis who seems to rebuild her identity by drawing from the stories people tell her—that one looks for ways that Ms. Popkey has distinguished her work from its model. One way, unfortunately, is in style. Where Ms. Cusk’s prose is stern, mandarin and sharply aphoristic, Ms. Popkey’s is slow and tongue-tied, circling the same few ideas and further belabored by pointless stage directions that read like the nervous tics of a writer who distrusts the worth of what she’s saying." It also mentioned that, "set against Ms. Cusk’s pitiless transcriptions, feels maudlin and needy, as though it sought absolution for the narrator’s behavior instead of simply presenting it."

Did you, as Public Books said, admit to having "ripped-off" Rachel Cusk (phrasing seems harsh)? And more to the point, do you feel that this criticism is fair, and had you anticipated it?

I think I did use the phrase “rip-off” in an interview—my passion for self-deprecation coming back around to bite me in the ass. What I intended to communicate with the phrase “rip-off” was self-knowledge; I didn’t want a reviewer or critic to think I thought I was getting away with something. The Cusk inspiration is clear and I felt compelled to acknowledge it; I was and remain in her debt.

I won’t enumerate the ways in which Topics distinguishes itself from the Outline trilogy, because I think there’s a larger point to be made here: Cusk’s innovation is thrilling in part because she suggests a new way to structure narrative, an alternate scaffolding. If other writers aren’t allowed to play with the forms she’s modeled, the innovation dies—it’s irrelevant outside the pages of her trilogy. That seems bad for literary culture more broadly. Imagine everyone after Virginia Woolf shying away from stream of consciousness narration for fear of being accused of copying! Again, I think the relationship between my novel and Cusk’s novels is overstated in these reviews; but the particulars of my situation aside, I find the argument being implicitly advanced in the WSJ review silly.

All that said: I found the review excruciating when I first encountered it. (As an aside: I’m grateful to the WSJ’s strict paywall for inadvertently shielding me from this attempted assassination. I only read it in full this past December.) Not because I think the reviewer is right, but because we’re only a degree or two removed from one another socially; I know people the reviewer knows. What was unbearable to me was the thought that a friend might be congratulating me on my success one night and chuckling over my idiocy with their great pal the WSJ reviewer the next. If the reviewer had been totally unknown to me, I wouldn’t have found the piece so piercing. I might even have found it funny—why is he so mad!—as I think I’m almost able to do now.

Out of curiosity, would you prefer a reader come to your work having read Cusk or not—or are you ambivalent?

I also think that last point is very interesting. The world of writers, editors and reviewers can feel quite small. When you read bad reviews (and I think only published reviews count here), how much of the negative feelings you have are, in general, around the "social" consequences (real or imagined), as opposed to something more like a personal reevaluation of the work itself?

I’m ambivalent—I think a reader who comes to the novel with Cusk in mind is alert to slightly different features than the reader who comes in with no knowledge of the Outline trilogy. But I wouldn’t privilege one reading over the other.

Many of my negative feelings—about reviews, yes, but also about much else—come from this fundamental fear: what if the person saying something nice to me is in fact lying; what if my friends in fact hate me. Worth noting perhaps that I no longer live in New York; putting some physical distance between my self and the literary quote-unquote scene was crucial to the writing of the novel. 

I do want to make clear: I think negative reviews are an essential part of a healthy literary ecosystem. And there’s something to be said for the mid-century model: excoriating your colleagues in print in the morning and drinking with them in the evening. Then again: literary culture has expanded in the past seventy years, and that’s all been very much to the good. The people reviewing the books and the people writing the books don’t all occupy the same square half mile anymore, if they ever did. So there’s a power differential to factor in now as well. I don’t think I’m quite prominent enough to merit a takedown; my WSJ reviewer seems to disagree.

Well then I have to ask: In your estimation, how much of negative reviews in general (or, I guess, all reviews) is about who the writer is, exclusive of the material at hand?

No idea! And there are certainly times when who the writer is is relevant to a discussion of their work. It’s for every reviewer to decide both how much of the life is worth bringing in and whether any aspects of the life make a particular kind of review more or less appropriate.

Well you've been very gracious and articulate, and I'll let you off here. But before you go: Was there a review you held especially dear? Before the book was published, what point of view or take were you hoping for more than any other?

There was a very generous piece in the Boston Globe that also happened to be the first professional review of the book I read. That one has a special place in my heart. Also the review in the San Francisco Chronicle; the writer there picked up more or less exactly what I’d hoped the novel was putting down.

What I wanted above all was thoughtful engagement. I was very lucky to get that in almost every case.

Yes, and thoughtful engagement is vital for a book like yours, which only becomes stronger when it's filtered through contradicting perspectives. Thanks again, Miranda!