Sooner or later, we all come across our critics. Maybe it happens via a stinging romantic rejection, or a meeting about our “disappointing performance” in the job we worked so hard to get. In my case, I came face-to-face—literally—with my biggest critic while walking down the aisle with him. He was the best man at my friend’s wedding; I was the maid of honor. And he’d given my debut novel a one-star review on Goodreads.
For the uninitiated, Goodreads is a (now notorious) website—one which the New York Times Opinion Section declared an “online hellscape”—where more than 150 million users publicly track and rate the books they’ve read. Authors who decide to look up their own books’ reviews do so at their own peril: You might find a five-star review confirming that the story you poured your heart into is, as you secretly suspected, the next Great American Novel. Alternatively, you could encounter a casually devastating review that will haunt you forever.
With my first book, I blithely took the plunge. Most of my readers were friends and family anyway, so I spent far too much time gorging myself on their Goodreads praise. As a rabid people-pleaser who hated the idea of anyone disliking me, it was intoxicating to believe that maybe, just maybe, I’d done the impossible and created a piece of art that was universally loved.
Until a one-star rating popped up. My stomach dropped. I reminded myself that it was bound to happen sooner or later. Then I immediately clicked on the account to see who had decided to tell the internet that my life’s work was trash. I knew that name, didn’t I? Yes, he was a friend of my close friend’s fiancé. And not just any friend, either. He was going to be the best man at their upcoming wedding. And his maid of honor counterpart? That would be me.
I was indignant—and worried. Maybe the book was bad, and my friends had been sugarcoating their responses. But I was also confused. Did this man not realize how uncomfortable this would make the wedding? As the big day approached, I spent a lot of time questioning how best to handle the situation. Should I reach out to him to clear the air? Ignore him completely? Demand that he tell me exactly why he hated the book so that I could tell him why he was wrong?
At first, I tried rising above. Perhaps he’d be so taken by my friendliness and charm that he’d rethink his opinion of the book, even go back and change his one-star to a five-star! As we lined up for the ceremony, I locked my face into a smile, making semi-awkward small talk. I figured he knew that I knew about the rating, but neither of us mentioned it. We simply made our way down the aisle, arm-in-arm, to watch the beautiful ceremony.
But by the time the reception rolled around, politeness didn’t feel adequate. So I got petty. Both of us were due to deliver toasts to the crowded ballroom, and mine would be better! This man might have hated my book, but I’d make it impossible for him to hate my speech. I tried to remind myself that the toast was about celebrating my friend and her husband, not about making their best man regret his life’s choices. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a surge of triumph when, at the end of my speech, the crowd rang with laughter and applause.
Finally, I got drunk. (This seemed, at the time, an appropriate response to Goodreads slander.) As the wedding guests grooved to a dance floor standard, with the encouragement of a couple other bridesmaids, I shimmied up to the best man and slurred-shouted, “So, what would you rate my toast?” (I thought this was very clever.) I don’t think he heard me clearly amidst the guests’ Whitney Houston scream-singing, because he turned to me, confused. “What?” he yelled back. I wasn’t brave enough to repeat myself, so I danced away, Homer Simpson-ing back into the crowd.
We saw each other one final time, at the end of the night. He gave me a friendly wave and told me to reach out if I was ever passing through his city, as if totally unbothered by the feud between us. Or perhaps I’d invented the feud altogether.
Ultimately, my friend got the backstory from him: He’d bought the book as a show of support, and it hadn’t been his thing. He liked to keep track of his reading for himself, so he’d marked it with a one-star review without thinking about the fact that the review would appear publicly. As soon as he realized, he took it upon himself to delete the rating.
Even if he hadn’t, readers have a right to rate books however they wish. It’s part of the bargain that an author makes in exchange for getting their book published. Authors get to control so much when we’re in the writing process. We make up entire worlds where the characters do exactly what we want. We edit and futz with sentences until they shine. Then, if we’re lucky, we release our story into the real world, and suddenly it doesn’t belong to us anymore. It’s not for us anymore. And therefore we can’t expect to—nor should we desire to—control audience’s responses.
If I was going to keep writing, something that brought me so much joy and fulfillment, I had to forgive that best man. But more importantly, I had to forgive myself. I didn’t write a perfect book, and then, when someone forced me to face that fact, I overreacted by getting petty and annoyed. That was okay. That was human.
Acknowledging my own inadequacies ultimately allowed me to be more empathetic toward my characters, my readers, and myself. So my first novel hadn’t blown every single reader away. That meant there was room for me to grow. I would never write a perfect book, but I could use this man’s criticism to write a better one, pushing myself to dig deeper when I tried again—even while knowing that, still, some people wouldn’t love it.
Now, I’m grateful for that one-star rating. It was an early, impossible-to-ignore lesson that it’s not my job as an author to make every one of my readers happy, nor is it my job to monitor and police their responses—however natural the urge to defend myself might be. If there’s a person out there who’s managed to please everyone they’ve ever known—including their haters!—I’d like to meet them. To shake their hand, sure, and maybe study them for science. But also to tell them: If you’re willing to be hated a little, you might grow to love yourself more.
And it turns out that this man gave me so much more than a one-star review. He also gave me the idea for my latest novel, One-Star Romance, a romantic comedy about a maid of honor, the best man who gives her book a one-star review, and what happens when they’re forced back together each time their married best friends celebrate another life milestone. I took risks in the writing of this one, letting my characters make mistakes, trying to honestly capture that disorienting period in your twenties and thirties when, suddenly, everyone starts moving at different speeds and it’s easy to feel like you can’t keep up—that you’re doing something wrong. I knew the feeling well.
In real life, unlike in my book, the best man and I did not fall in love. Instead, I married someone who’s only ever rated my novels five stars. Occasionally, my husband goes on my Goodreads page and tells me snippets of nice things that people are saying. And sure, for One-Star Romance, I might have written down, “Someone apparently called it a masterpiece!!” on my Notes app, and maybe I look at that Note whenever I get anxious about publication. Because it turns out that, while risk-taking might get easier, it never gets easy.
Still, I’m so proud of this book. It’s better than my writing before; I’m better than I was before. I like to think that even my old best-man nemesis might begrudgingly rate this book more than one star. But since I no longer check my own Goodreads, I’ll never know.
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