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 XXIX: “Technically correct, I guess!”

Published 6/3/23
In this installment, I speak with Monica Heisey about her Telegraph review, feminist avatars, screenshotting reviews & more.

Today I'm with Monica Heisey, whose bestselling debut novel Really Good, Actually (William Morrow) came out in January. It was called “tremendously funny and thoughtful" by GQ, "surprisingly hilarious and bittersweet" by the New York Post, and “a cringe-filled, funny—and surprisingly poignant—look at one woman’s self-discovery after heartbreak" by People. But you can't win them all, and we'll now discuss those you, well, lost. Before we jump in, let me ask: Do you read all of your reviews? What about reader reviews on sites like Goodreads and Amazon?

I don’t read them all but I read a lot of the ones in the newspapers. For the most part it’s a real privilege for people to engage with your work that closely, regardless of whether they liked it. I try not to work too hard to read them; if a review is behind a paywall I’ll probably leave it there. 

I skim Amazon and Goodreads from time to time. It’s a really fascinating insight into not just what some people thought about my book, but what a particular kind of reader wants from books in general.

One of the first reviews authors get is on Publishers Weekly. Yours was quite positive, ending with "Readers will gobble up this Bridget Jones’s Diary for the smartphone era." This comparison also appeared in over 50 reader reviews on Goodreads. How do you feel about it?

Bridget Jones’ Diary is a classic, so I don’t mind it at all. I have mixed feelings about comps in general, though. I wish people were a little more interested in picking up a book and just seeing what its vibe was, as its own thing. I guess they can be helpful so readers know what they’re getting into, but some of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had have involved going in totally blind, off a friend’s recommendation or a gut feeling in a bookstore.

You seem quite levelheaded, so I'm extra keen to jump into the mud now.

Possibly your most negative review came from The Guardian, which did say some quite positive things about the book, though three paragraphs in it twists: "But the seemingly tireless facility for jokes and comic self-deprecation can also be wearing. It risks a certain glibness, allowing Heisey to skate over the more serious concerns buried inside the book."

Did you read this review?

Guess you missed The Telegraph! (A much worse review that I read via screenshots, due to paywall.) The Guardian’s review and basically every British review seemed to feel there were too many jokes in the book, which I found really interesting, because of all the critiques I anticipated, that was really ... not one of them. I am a comedy writer, it is a comedy book. The number of jokes in it is very intentional and was one of my primary goals for the novel, because I had read like twelve novels that were billed as hilarious and darkly funny and then contained like one or two pithy observations or funny situations, which to me just makes the book reflective of real life, which is of course a continuous blend of comic and tragic, often at exactly the same time. I still don’t really know how to feel about this particular critique, because it kind of just boils down to competing preferences: we both agree the book is crammed full of jokes, and one of us likes that and the other does not.

The other part of the Guardian critique (and one that has come up in various criticisms) is the suggestion that the prevalence of jokes somehow takes away from or prohibits the book’s emotional depth. This is something I do strongly disagree with. I don’t think a tragedy is any less sad because you were laughing the moment before it happened, or you found a way to laugh in the middle of it. I think Maggie’s emotions—including her relationship to humour as a mechanism for distancing herself and avoiding processing her own pain—are fairly clearly explored in the novel, which does go to some grim places. But at the end of the day, nobody died, right? Like this woman is just getting a divorce. How dark and devastating is that story supposed to be? If you’re not careful you’ll have me ranting about trauma literature. 

Well, never correct an error in your favor. (We'll get to The Telegraph.)

I assume you're referring to lines like this: "...quickfire DM exchanges in an age of internet dating can also read like comedy sketches, obstructing the possibility of real insight."

This strain of thought is given more freedom in The Irish Times’ review:

There are few better examples for the comedic potential of a life turned upside-down than Schitt’s Creek. The beloved show’s incredible reception and critical acclaim was fostered not only by its hilarity, however, but by the depth of the characterisations and the nuanced light and shade of the screenwriting that consistently commandeered the tone.

It is this instinct for tone that is most conspicuously absent from Heisey’s work. The narrator, Maggie, has undoubtedly mastered the art of dry, cynical wit and, although the result is not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, it is often amusing. Some of the high jinks she embraces as part of her “sadness hobbies” and experimental dating are written with great chutzpah and energy that do light up the page. It is quite painful, however, to constantly sit with Maggie’s self-lacerating thinly disguised as self-deprecating humour for extended passages, especially when tonally it tends to repeat the same note. By the time her friends have grown tired of her in the novel, the reader too is desperate for a change in gear and for some progression.

Had you read this review? (It is, after all, also behind a paywall.) It seems the reviewer was perhaps more aligned with what you wanted to do with the book, but didn't think you got there.

Spicy! I honestly can’t remember if I saw screenshots of this or not. The week of publication was very overwhelming—everything kind of came out at once and blurred together, positive and negative. 

I will get to the longer quote in a minute, but, although I feel it is a bad look to argue with negative reviews in general, I do feel compelled to push against the apparent implication that something reading like a comedy sketch means it lacks insight. This idea—that comedy is fundamentally unserious because it appears not to take things seriously, or because a big part of successful comedy is making it seem easy—comes up a lot in our culture, and just feels like such a limiting perspective. I think reading these kinds of takes can be galvanising, in a way. Understanding what others might prefer you to do, or the things they dislike about what you do, helps you define your own hopes and goals for your project. 

As to the longer quote, I’m very open to the critic from the Irish Times preferring the tone of a television series that I worked on to my own tone. As a staff writer your job is to serve the tone of the show and the vision of the showrunner, and obviously my novel was my own, totally personal project, so anyone coming to my book thinking it would be an exact reflection of any of the shows I’ve worked on is going to be surprised at what they find. Although Goodreads seems equally populated with people commenting “you can so tell this writer worked on Schitt’s Creek” and others saying “you’d never guess this person was affiliated with that show in any way,” so it all seems quite subjective, and maybe depends on what you were watching that show for in the first place. 

Speaking of the show and being in a writers room, where collaboration is key, I wonder how you feel about taking feedback on your fiction. I'd imagine a screenwriter would be better suited for notes from agents, editors, et al. True?

I am definitely very used to it. It took me a while to acclimate to how open the notes were from my editors on the novel. Their notes were always the beginning of a conversation, whereas in TV someone above you can just swoop in and say “no, we’re cutting this, we’re doing something totally different,” and that really is that. In general I think it is a pleasure to be edited by someone who cares about your work and wants it to be the best version of itself. It’s not always as comfortable to be reviewed, but I think most of the time there is still that same sense of privilege that someone is engaging with your creative efforts in such a focused, in-depth way.

Now, on to that Telegraph review, which kicks off with a very cheeky headline: "Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey review: this Fleabag-lite is pretty bad, actually." Needless to say, wasn't their bag.

The writer, Claire Allfree, begins by citing an essay by Lynn Steger Strong "on the continuing trend of passive female characters in fiction ... Such novels, [Strong] suggested, foregrounded the richness and complexity of female passivity in the face of still overwhelming social, political and patriarchal systems."

Allfree then conveys her distaste for this trend, placing Really Good, Actually within it and noting that "at least the novels of [Sally] Rooney and [Megan] Nolan suggest that the shift feminism is meant to have brought in terms of female characters no longer defined by their love life is, at the very least, more subtle and complicated than it sometimes appears. Heisey seems to have abandoned all pretence at feminism’s achievements on this score altogether."

Did you anticipate criticism like this? Do you consider Maggie passive?

The headline of this review made me laugh out loud when I saw it. God bless copy editors. 

I did assume I'd get compared with other young women writers, because I have seen it happen to every young (or even just youngish, I'm 34!) female writer friend of mine, particularly regarding their debuts. This review, which I did receive screenshotted in full, was actually more fun to read than most, because she just had such an extraordinarily bad time with the book, I mean it really disappointed her on basically every level. The intensity of it weirdly made it easier on the ego than when they sneak some criticism four paragraphs into a positive review. In that case it's like, hey! I thought you liked this, broadly speaking! and with this it was like, there is no chance of turning this around. The ship has hit the iceberg and we are going down together. Ironically, Lynn Steger Strong, who she cites in its opening, gave the book a very nice pre-publication blurb.

Regarding Maggie's passivity ... hmm. I guess I see Maggie as sometimes active and sometimes passive, because she is meant to be a human being with a variety of different qualities, some of them positive, some of them negative and some of them, if you can believe it, morally neutral. I wasn't trying to create an avatar for an argument about modern feminism, I was just trying to invent a plausible woman and show her inelegantly experiencing heartbreak in a funny way. 

Ha! That's true: for some reason criticism burns so much more in a generally positive piece. But even in flat-out pans, reviewers still tend to throw some out-of-nowhere punches. In the penultimate paragraph, we get: "In the flurry of Tinder encounters that follow the break-up she wonders if she might be gay and has several one night stands with women, but it all feels a bit cheap, as though Heisey is trying to bestow character specificity exclusively by way of sexual proclivity."

When you find a comment you can't make sense of—which I assume is the case here?—do you try to see it from the critic's point of view, or do you discard it out of hand?

I was confused by this comment as well. It felt a little, shall we say, retro. I think sometimes you get a read of your book that makes clear that the reader simply wandered into the wrong part of the woods and would like very much to go back to a landscape they are a bit more familiar with. And that's fine! Though not necessarily ideal conditions for a review that meets a book where it's at and draws its conclusions from there.

I would say I do try to consider most criticism I receive in a serious way, but as a bisexual person myself, I'd already spent a lot of my late teens hearing variations on, "this is a cheap thing you are doing to be interesting," so I felt pretty free to move on.

I don't want to belabor this review, but the word "retro" did ring in my ears as well when I read this: "the homogenising semi-ironic mode of speech that is all over social media, as though the reader is trapped in a stranger’s Instagram feed." 

Do you feel this is an accurate description of your tone, and, more to the point, do you think it's worth noting?

I think it's worth talking about the tone of a piece of writing, certainly, and Maggie is definitely a character who spends a lot of time online, and who has been somewhat irony-poisoned as a result. A huge part of the novel is her journey away from that detached and ironic mode and toward a more sincere way of discussing and being in the world, so I think the reviewer is well within her rights to mention tone. I think it's a reasonable description insofar as it gestures towards the terminally online quality I mentioned, though of course "a stranger's Instagram feed" can be a lot of different things, as anyone still in touch with their high school classmates on there can tell you. Also sort of tickled at the idea of a fictional character as a stranger. Technically correct, I guess! An interesting way of looking at it!

Dissecting these with you is a funny exercise, because we're essentially doing the same thing a reviewer is doing with the original work: trying to figure out what it wants to say and how effectively it says it. In this case, in as polite a way as I can say this, I think there is a generational issue at play. It's giving "kids these days." (Again, I am 34.)

You've made it past the professional review phase of this interview. Congratulations.

Now, onto Goodreads, where Really Good, Actually got a 3.2 rating, out of 5. Does this mean anything to you and, more importantly, do you care?

I don't know if this is good or bad ... it sounds in the middle, I guess. I do not particularly care about my Goodreads rating, and think it is best to try to maintain not caring about it. I think the site is for readers and not authors, and that's fine.

The most liked review is, as you might expect, "Really Bad, Actually." There are a few comments on that post, the last of which is, "glad my mouth wasn't full of noodles when i read this or I would have had to wipe my phone's screen!" Do you wonder why people allow themselves to be so publicly mean towards something or someone? Do you care? 

I'm not sure they think of it as mean. I think they are just giving their opinion the way they would to a friend over coffee, and I have certainly been mean about some books in those situations as well. The fact that this is not actually private, well ... I don't know. Again, it seems like something I should try to maintain my disinterest in.

I really can't get a rise out of you. Can anyone? Has anything you read about the book made you feel genuinely sad, angry, or vulnerable?

I think with Goodreads I do feel a genuine peace about it. It obviously doesn't feel amazing to read a one star, one word review ("drivel") of something you spent multiple years of your life working on, but I think the website is a really interesting window into the kind of experience a particular type of person is looking for from a book right now, and the reviews tend to be a fairly straightforward evaluation of whether that person got that experience. Plus, the sheer number of reviews helps drive home how individual it is. Everyone's sense of what three or four stars means is different, two people will say the exact same thing in their review, and one will mean it positively and the other negatively. When you see a five-star review that says, in full, "I liked that this book mentioned the actor David Tennant" and then a two-star review comparing the book to Sally Rooney or saying the reader was moved to tears, you just think ... everyone really is bringing their own very personal criteria to these reviews that has almost nothing to do with the literary value of this work I've made. 

I will say, I would probably not put a value word in my title again. Every time someone does a little "just okay, actually" or "NOT really good, actually" ... you know, it's not ideal when your own words are used to mock you and your efforts. Feels pretty bad, and further like I should have foreseen that it would be an issue.

Has any criticism of the book, by professional reviewers or otherwise, stayed with you? Has there been anything that might affect how you write a second book?

The criticism of Maggie's likeability and selfishness had a real impact on me. I was surprised how upset it made people that Maggie was, for example, not always a great friend. I don't really understand why you would want to read about a person who only ever behaved well. Almost no one is fully likeable or fully unlikeable, and interesting characters should be as complex as real people. I suppose, if you are desperate for a show of vulnerability from me here, that I was also surprised that people were so intensely critical of Maggie as a person while also assuming that she was a thinly veiled version of me (she both is and isn't, as is often the case). I don't think this will impact future work, because thankfully the next book is not as closely tied to my own experience so feels less personal.

Another issue raised by some of the book's criticism is the question of ... what a plot is. My complaint about a lot of contemporary novels is that an unrealistic amount of capital-L Life Events seem to happen in a short amount of time—people get abortions and are involved in mass shootings and have affairs with their professors and find out company secrets and experience depression and develop eating disorders and are in plane crashes and cheat on their partners and find out their parents have dementia and win awards and learn long-kept family secrets, etc. etc. I wanted to write something that felt more like real life, particularly when you're young: which is you spend a lot of time waiting for things to happen, or wondering what will happen, or obsessing over the one or two things that have happened and really making a meal out of them. But a lot of Goodreads users have complained that the book doesn't have a plot, which is maybe also what that Telegraph reviewer meant by Maggie's passivity; not a lot happens to her. People do not seem to like this choice of mine and wish for more plane crashes or similar. I think what they want is more Story, personally. Plot is just the sequence of events that tells the story, and the story I picked is small. I am working on my second novel now, and trying to ignore the voice in my head that is like, involve these people in a submarine accident, make something someone wrote go VIRAL. But I prefer a small story. Maybe I shouldn't. I get this same note in my television writing all the time. The producers are always like "the show can't just be people being charming to each other in restaurants," but honestly ... why not?

I think that’s a great place to stop, at least before one of us finds out we’re adopted or gets hacked or realizes our best friend wasn’t who they said they were. Thanks for your time and candor, Monica.

I have no idea if I've enjoyed this experience or not. Thank you, Andrew!