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 XXXI: Tepid fluid

Published 2/23/25
In this installment, the tables are turned, and Andrew Lipstein is interviewed by Dan Kois. We talk about being a pompous prick, the worst agent rejection I’ve ever received, my first Publishers Weekly review & more.

Hi Andrew. Welcome to the interview series you yourself created, Thick Skin. You did not subject yourself to this process for your first two novels, Last Resort and The Vegan, so I'm curious why you've decided to do so now. Was there a particular bad review of your current novel, Something Rotten, that spurred this decision? I will note that with that title you have left yourself wide open to abuse from headline writers at medium-sized-city newspapers—your Milwaukee Journal Sentinels, your Sacramentos Bee.

No one took the bait (I think?). In fact, I didn't get reviews at those papers or many medium-sized rags. After all, they're medium-sized for a reason. Maybe if they took a more global view of things (i.e. reviewed literary novels that took place in Copenhagen), they'd find themselves in a bigger arena.

In a lot of ways I see this novel as the end of a stage in my writing career, so why not use the opportunity to look back at all of the drivel produced for the sake of my books thus far? And anyway, I'll do anything for clicks.

You think of your writing career in "stages"? That seems charmingly optimistic to me, a person who views each next thing in his writing career as a fluke, a never-to-be-repeated error by some multinational conglomerate that isn't paying that much attention. What was this stage? What is the next one? Are you one of those guys who finishes his third novel and starts saying, like, "I think of these books as a loosely-organized trilogy..."?

Oy, I'm embarrassed. Just because I consider my first three books as a "stage" doesn't mean I'm a pompous prick. (That's just a coincidence.) It wasn't even my idea! Kirkus referred to my first three novels as a sort of trilogy, and the Times' Books newsletter said something similar. And these are people with degrees.

Actually, the book I'm working on now isn't even a novel, so it's only natural for me to start to think of my writing in a new way. And why not? As much as writers today are supposed to be these gracious little apologists, these submissive children who constantly avert their eyes and turn their toes in, I will gladly admit to thinking up ways to build a more ambitious career and profile. Yah bud: sorry not sorry.

Let's dive into your self-diagnosis as a pompous prick. I've never gotten that vibe off you, exactly, but your public persona does seem well-shielded by irony and some undefinable other quality—preternatural self-confidence? Actual wealth? I don't know. This is all to say that you give the impression of a man with a very thick skin, but the deftness and empathy with which you write about men with very thin skins—so thin, at times, as to be translucent—suggests this is an act, or at the very least just part of a more complicated picture. Where would you place yourself on the skin-thickness scale?

I think thin skin is really two, very different things. The first is sensitivity to the world. (I hope I have this. I hope every writer does.) The second is a need for the world to reinforce the idea you have of yourself. (I hope I don't have this. I hope all my enemies do.)

It's interesting that the two are so easily conflated because they're really at odds with each other. It's no coincidence that the most self-involved, needy people are often the least self-aware. Likewise, being able to observe the world (including yourself) with absolute honesty sort of precludes any hang-ups about how others view you.

But to actually answer your question, I see every chance I have at being a public persona as a chance to have fun. And given all I said about how writers are expected to act—to recap: as virtuous little princes, as self-effacing little pick-me's—to me, having fun means trying to subvert this trope as much as possible.

Tell me the three worst reviews you’ve ever received. These can be reviews of your writing, but they don’t have to be. Reviews given to your cooking by children are ineligible. 

This is easy. They're all reviews of my writing.

The first was a rejection my old agent received from an editor after he asked for an exclusive resubmission (with specific edits), then ghosted us for half a year. It included the line, "I do apologize. I haven’t meant to keep you hanging." This was devastating. I hate him.

The second was a rejection from an agent when I was shopping a manuscript titled, unfortunately, Jouissance. Reading it now, I do feel like a) he brings up good points, b) he sounds lonely and dissatisfied with life: "there was a certain grandiosity about the narrative voice that wasn't borne out by the character it belonged to or the writing itself. Also, the meet-cute seemed rather contrived (which of course it is, it being fiction, the trick is to make the reader forget this, which wasn't the case here) and the subsequent rapid-fire dialogue came off as stilted and curt, which in turn made the characters both seem not very interesting or pleasant; the reader isn't really given a compelling reason to want follow them into whatever is going to develop next."

The third was how, after years of failure, I rejected myself, withholding happiness until I accomplished my dream, which was to publish a book. (By being cringeworthily earnest I am countering the idea that I hide behind irony.)

I also hate that editor, on your behalf, but that isn't a review—it's a rejection, a wholly different animal. You and your agent know about a rejection, but no one else does. And a rejection leaves open, of course, that the future will vindicate you—that some other editor or some other agent will not only disagree with that rejection but erase it, reverse it, with an acceptance. (Admittedly, that never happened with Jouissance.)

A review, a bad review, hurts not only because someone is saying your book is bad, but they're saying it in public. And not even other good reviews can erase a bad one, at least not if you're like me and spend way more energy chewing on things that hurt me than reveling in things that make me feel good. The bad review is always out there. It's on my permanent record. 

Your third example seemed rather contrived—which of course it is, it being fiction, the trick is to make the reader forget this, which wasn't the case here.

So let's leave aside those (harsh!) rejections and focus on a truly bad review. The death of the midsized-city book review means that even the luckiest book might only be reviewed in the trades and maybe one major paper (the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times). So the pickings are slimmer than they might once have been; in the old days, one could always count on some yahoo at some Herald-Examiner somewhere to be baffled by one’s book. Most of your reviews have been admiring, but the Publishers Weekly review of Last Resort, a novel I really liked a lot, must have been dispiriting when it arrived. It's your first novel, and yet arguably the most important trade journal assigned it to someone who straight up didn't get it, who found it "tepid" and "muddy," and who wrote that the book "lands decidedly off target, somewhere between fairy tale and satire." Were you confident enough in your own novel, in yourself, that this opposing view, in an influential trade journal, didn't pierce your thick skin?

On one hand, I want to say that this didn't affect me at all. On the other, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I read it, so perhaps that's not true.

For me, this was an initiation of sorts into how anticlimactic and even confusing reviews can be. They can occasionally feel spot-on, and they can occasionally feel like the reviewer was the exact wrong person for the book. They can even feel like both of these things at the same time! In just a few sentences, I found myself agreeing and vociferously disagreeing with every new turn of phrase: "His regret leads him into a series of schadenfreude-laden missteps (pretty much correct) that, while occasionally entertaining (nice), do little to illuminate why Caleb is stuck repeating old wrongs (dig a little deeper, sir). The underdeveloped characters (I'll have to think about this one) add to the muddiness at the heart of this story (what?). This lands decidedly off target (I'm listening), somewhere between fairy tale and satire (for real?).

Rereading it now, I'm also struck by the fact that, only five words in, the review calls the book "fluidly written but tepid." There's just one thing the words "fluid" and "tepid" make me think of but I won't mention it here because this is a family network.

Where were you, and what were you doing?

I was lying in bed, working.

Great. In the year 2025 the vast majority of critical response authors get is via Goodreads. You're certainly on the site—I see that, as I did, you have posted an arch Goodreads review of your own book. What, if anything, do you get out of those reader reviews?

One of the most interesting discoveries I've made about the whole publishing process is how much more ... heartfelt? real-seeming? earnest? ... reader reviews can be. A random email I get from a reader about what they made of one of my books, what they liked (or didn't) can often feel so much more honest and refreshing than a professional critique. They are coming to the book wanting an experience, whereas many critics are coming to the book trying (often desperately) to come up with something new to say.

The flip-side to this is that, well, often readers on Goodreads should have never read your book! How did it get in their hands? Why did they continue reading? There is something almost charmingly confusing about someone who is the exact wrong reader for a given book saying what they didn't like about it. It's like reading a review of a chair by someone who hates sitting.

As far as the actual ratings on Goodreads go, I almost think there's an inverse logic there. I liken it to Yelp reviews of restaurants. A bakery that specializes in cupcakes is naturally going to get a 4.5 out of 5. A hole-in-the-wall restaurant serving very specific, regional cuisine from some far-flung country is going to get a 3 out of 5. That's just how the world works.

My Goodreads reviews have all started to revolve around a theme: "Really weird," 3 stars. I do find it salutary to be that hole in the wall. 

I agree that emails, out of the blue, from readers are about the most heartening response possible to publishing a book. And one I didn't expect, really! Obviously I expect it from friends, who are legally obligated to read my books and send me nice emails about them. But randos? I never imagined. 

(I have never had a stranger email me to tell me what they didn't like about my book. What an interesting thing to do! Plenty of people have emailed me to tell me they hated an article I wrote, but it's always seemed like the existence of Goodreads serves to deflect such critical responses to books. There's a place to put it, so people don't go seeking out my personal email address.)

Has a review, amateur or pro, ever really changed the way you looked at your own book? Revealed something about it that even you didn't initially see?

I've been thinking about this question for a while and still don't know how to respond. I know the answer—no—but I'm not sure why, or if this is even a good thing or a bad thing. I can see it both ways: either I'm resolute in my vision or too stubborn and rigid and unwilling to see how something I created could be better.

I agree that a review won't make me second-guess what I actually put in the book, no matter how many people tell me they didn't like that my two main characters had the same name. I don't think that's stubbornness, necessarily: The book is done and it's in the past. You finished writing it a year ago or more; you finished tweaking the copy edits five months ago; if you're enduring a book launch in the most healthy possible way, you're already working on something else. I too don't really think there's any other way I could have written a book; if I could have, I would've.

But I do think that even if you're not ready to think about your book being different, a provocative piece of criticism can open your eyes to a new way of thinking about a book—or at least put into words something that you never could about your fictional world. Has a review, good or bad, ever done that for you?

Of course, there are phrasings big and small that reorient you slightly, and remind you that your understanding of the book is, well, just your understanding.

One example is this line in Kirkus' review of The Vegan: "things are never as dissimilar as they first seem—sometimes, the book says, when our lives and beliefs bend so far, they can ultimately make a full circle." I don't even know if I agree or disagree, but I do feel it's an interesting enough statement that it's not really up to me to decide.

An even smaller example is when, in Alexandra Jacobs' review of the same book in the Times, she pointed out the protagonist's name meant deer killer, something I had no idea of.

I have found that exposure to the book review ecosystem (as an editor and as a writer) has gradually changed the way I think about reviews, as I long—contra 2013-era Buzzfeed Books—for more negativity, or at least skepticism. Whatever you might think of Lauren Oyler and Andrea Long Chu (or their targets), I am glad and unsurprised that the two most attention-grabbing critics of the past few years have made their names going on the attack. Hell, I remember wallowing in the hatchet jobs of Dale Peck 25 years ago.

What those three critics have in common, I think, is that they always went after worthwhile targets—not worthwhile in that I thought the books they panned were bad, always (though sometimes they were), but worthwhile in that the books had commercial or industry or movement power; they were successes, even if only d'estime. Obviously a mean review is misguided if aimed at me, personally, but more generally I think of the job of the critic as twofold: to shine gentle light on good books that might otherwise go unnoticed, and to flip that light to harsh and revealing when there's something going on in the culture that deserves greater scrutiny. 

Other than your thoughtful review of your own book on Goodreads, do you write criticism? Do you review books? Why or why not?

Agree wholeheartedly re: negative reviews. I think Oyler and Chu are a few of the exceptions that prove the broader rule: unless the critic has a really good reason for panning, a book review should be largely positive. This is endemic, I think, of a culture which sees books as something that needs to be championed, celebrated, painted with a virtuous brush. It's embarrassing. If you only read book reviews you might think adults should see books as children see vegetables: something that they know they should eat, but at the cost of the experience of actually doing it.

I wrote a few reviews almost a decade ago. I don't have time to write anything now but what I really want to, and that's mostly just books. Also, the idea of it kind of gives me the creeps. When I imagine being assigned a book (or, even worse, selecting one myself), I have a hard time believing that I'd be coming to it as an everyman, or an everycritic, with an open mind and heart. In fact, this is part of the reason I think many reviews are intrinsically contrived, or are at least built on a faulty premise. Of course, a great, seasoned reviewer can critique a book in a way they couldn't have envisioned from the get-go, but I suspect the way reviews normally play out more or less resembles a blind date: the details may be spontaneous, but the fate is preordained. I wonder if you agree.

Sounds like you've been on some bad blind dates! I don't find this to be the case at all, because a book, in general, is an object so dense with language and meaning that whatever a critic thinks she is going to find in it is always going to be overwhelmed by the sheer mass of text, decisions, and ideas in the actual thing. I really like writing criticism; specifically, I like the part where I've finished the book and I go back through my copy, folded page by folded page, and type all my marginalia into a Word document, creating a chronicle of my moment-to-moment responses to those words that will be the frame on which my review will be constructed. There's just so much there—the experience of reading a book is so rich and different every time, whether the book is good or bad—and I find myself surprised every time at how whatever preconceived notions I might have had were irrelevant in the face of all that information.

Does any of that come through when I actually file the damn thing, 1,000 agonizing hours later? No idea. But I really love it.

This process does shine through your criticism, which I'm a great fan of. And of course, any great reviewer must meet the form's fundamental premise: that they are coming to it with an open mind. But I think (perhaps quite cynically) that a great reviewer is a rare, rare thing.

I think we can agree that the only truly great reviewer is MackGetsLit on Goodreads, who precisely identified the theme lying at the heart of Something Rotten: "my main takeaway from this book was that the Danes really like their Pepsi Max, like ALOT."