AFAICT, most of what passes for literary beef these days is just a status competition, sometimes framed as a Wokemon throwdown (sorry for recycling "Wokemon", Patrizia).
This is why it's largely a matter for women and other humans with more Wokemon status, as cishet white persons of dudeness have so few Wokemon points as to be unable to play that game at any level.
As an example, if a human male invokes the Holy P.C. Trinity to a woman "that's racist, sexist and homophobic!" the outcome and consequences are very different if a woman say this to a dude. Whether this is good or bad is irrelevant. It just is.
I love Wokemon SO MUCH that you can recycle it a thousand times, and each time will bring a great blazing grin to my face!!!
(As a matter of fact, I had to discipline myself severely not to plagiarize it from you since it would have worked so well as a throw-away line in the current Work in Progress.)
Yes, it's too bad about those white male writers. There just aren't enough of them. Maybe we can cook up some kind of grant or incentive program for them. 😀
Also, being FdB is, AFAICT, low-status at this time, so attacking him on any pretext is an easy, low-risk way of furnishing one's Litworld Status bonafides. The actual content of the attack is irrelevant. Any reason will do.
"Also, being FdB is, AFAICT, low-status at this time"
Pretty sure FDB is low-status at all times.
The pic of him on the NFL Preseason Post this Sunday made me realize that to the effete, upper-class and female (but I repeat myself) coded literary world, Freddie-white, weight lifting, football playing, metalhead Freddie-is in their mind basically Steve Lattimer (PLACE AT THE TABLE!) from the Program, and the very antithesis of everything core to their identity. That he's talented just makes it worse.
There's no world in all the multiverses where they would like Freddie; he's too much The Other
"You’ve got your Curtis Sittenfield vs. Nell Freudenberger, which could not have existed without the period of Freudenberger’s white-hot hype cycle. "
You could have absolutely made this up and I would have no idea. I'll nod and move to the next paragraph to see if you discuss the simmering literary tensions between Olga "The Oligarch" Petrinov and Marekeepily Midwinter.
Point being, I don't think the game of literary feud has changed because it's mainly women now Maybe that's a contributory factor, but certainly not the main cause. I think the game has changed because the literary world is so far from the mainstream. I read 30-40 books a year, but I've barely heard of half the people you mention. They command little attention, whether male or female, whether feuding or writing.
"Freudenberger" sounds like millennial snot from about ten years back. "Did you see that takedown of so and so in the New York Review of Books? Man did she get served a freudenberger."
Damn, Freddie wasn’t lying. This is a Goodreads review:
I'd be lying if I said I disliked The Mind Reels—I loved it while reading & up to this point... But having learned/seen more about/from our author since, I can't in good conscience recommend others buy deBoer's work. If that changes, I'll letcha know.
LibraryThing (related site) also does advanced copies, although my vague impression is that LT is a lower-caliber of offering (mostly because than Goodreads is far more important than LT). I often get PDFs of various upcoming ebooks, usually self-published (and usually not good, but sometimes interesting).
Amazon has a feature where they can mark reviews as being done by someone who actually bought the book. It's useful for filtering out drive-by review bombs.
If there is one thing I would want to change about people's brains - just one thing! - it's that when somebody reads "person X did something bad" they would immediately and reflexively think "that's a lie" unless they were shown real, documented, sourced proof of the accusation. Not some other idiot ranting on social media, but actual reporting or proof.
If there's one thing social media is great at, it's smear campaigns - and we're watching one in real time. So disgusting.
Let me say that posting an account in someone else's name and posting as if their words were mine is exactly part of the fun, even getting into character enough to post "please buy my book." It gets attention, which is the reward.
The account writes in Spanish a bunch which I don't think Freddie does. (It's been wiping its history so the evidence here is hard to gether.) Otherwise it was a really good at keeping character.
I tend to read authors first and foremost so whatever is going on in the literary world currently was unknown to me until recently. I did an Amazon search for the best historical fiction novels of 2024 which is a particular interest of mine and the list included 20 books and all of them were female authors. In a vacuum, that is not a big deal as I read books from female authors all the time but I thought it was noteworthy. Was there not one male who wrote a good historical fiction novel last year?
"Was there not one male who wrote a good historical fiction novel last year?"
After reading The Women (which undoubtedly was on that last), I suspect what males would write for a historical novel would not be considered "good" by the standards of the (mostly entirely female) audience for historical novels. I'm sure whatever Jeff Shaara is working on these days is probably pretty good on a purely technical level, but it's also never going to get pushed by the algorithm, because the audience for it is dads taking a light break from reading history*.
*and it feels noteworthy here that a lot of "historical fiction" written by males are written by guys who are also history writers; they're already connected to a different audience.
Thanks for the link to Oyler's takedown of Tolentiono's Trick Mirror. Few things are more entertaining to read than authors savaging the books of other authors.
Which inspires me to link to the most savage book review that has ever been written: Anthony Daniels' takedown of Tiffany Watt's book Schadenfreude. It is an old review (2019), but no-one has ever surpassed it from a pure takedown-as-entertainment perspective:
...Here's the intro, just to foreshadow what is coming:
Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune is interesting, but not because it is good. It is interesting because it is symptomatic of the increasing vulgarity and crudity of intellectual life in the modern English-speaking world, particularly in Britain, where it goes almost unopposed.
The phenomenon of schadenfreude is a fascinating and important one, of course, well worth examination. But since it is usually subtle, undeclared, and often unacknowledged, even by he who experiences it, it requires some finesse to dissect it, which unfortunately the author, Tiffany Watt Smith, does not possess. Even the subtitle of her book is misleading: schadenfreude in its English meaning is surely not the joy, but rather the secret or surreptitious pleasure or satisfaction in another’s misfortune. But the error is a warning that proper distinctions, so necessary to this field, are about not to be made.
You are really grasping at straws here, Freddie. I mean, come on—recycling a 2003 Salon article for evidence of a Curtis Sittenfield v. Nell Freudenberger feud? _Mentioning_ Caroline Calloway at all when she could spend the rest of her life churning out "Infinite Jest"-sized doorstops & all she'll ever be known for is being an Instagram Influencer??
Fewer & fewer people read for pleasure anymore, and those who do generally find a genre & stick to it. It is very, very difficult to get any traction as a mainstream a/k/a literary fiction author.
I will tell you why mainstream women authors are having a moment now & why male authors are not. Two words: book clubs. The only people who read books these days—outside of the dwindling "New Yorker" magazine fan contingent and the occasional smash movie book tie-in—are people who belong to book clubs. And those people are predominantly female.
I am assuming your publisher has only a very small PR budget for your book, yes? Of course, you can safely assume that 40% of the people who read your substack will buy your book. (More than that will _say_ they're buying your book, of course. 😀) But if _I_ were you, I'd figure out a way to target that book club market. I might even go so far as to write up my own book club materials— character summaries, questions to ask—and email them out. Many book clubs these days are _not_ hosted in participants' living rooms but in public libraries or Barnes & Noble cafés, so if you can make it easy for them to promote themselves in this way, they will scratch your back, too, by stocking your book.
You don't understand that the 2003 Salon article you cited was actually a LOVE LETTER from Curtis Sittenfeld to Nell Freudenberger? 😀
But yes, I should have articulated more clearly. What's missing from my insufficiently caffeinated post above: The proof you supply to support your hypothesis that literary feuds nowadays are a female phenomenon is insufficient.
And if it WERE true, your contention above is just plain wrong since ALL publicity is GOOD publicity. 😀
My tabby ass reads all the time, and I could not care less what they say in the "New Yorker".
Still, I get your point. Query: to what extent are book clubs a social and to what extent a literary phenomenon? That's an honest question, and it may depend on the particular club.
But I have at least three writer friends, now comfortably midlist, who got their start doing the book club circuit, driving their own beat-up junkers up & down the coasts, crashing on friends' couches. It's labor-intensive, but it's a sure-fire way to build an audience outside of the lit-crit echo chamber. Call it literary populism. 😀 People who meet you in person, who shake yr hand, who exchange pleasantries with you while you look them smilingly in the eyes, will buy ANYTHING you publish—and will tell all their friends to, too.
This isn't the best way to guarantee future literary sales, of course. The best way is to sell your book to a movie or TV producer. But that one, you don't have all that much control over.
Will preorders from this 'Stack generate enough sales to earn out his advance or inspire a second printing? I don't know how many people subscribe to his substack. But maybe.
Bookclubs are a way to generate buzz outside the digital sphere. And get LIBRARIES & BARNES & NOBLE to purchase copies—'cause like I say, most bookclubs these days are hosted by libraries & Barnes & Noble.
I think there is something to this. For us musicians, the analogue would be the "house show," which I have found yields results similar to the ones you mention. Difficult to not remain fiercely loyal to an indie songwriter once they've crashed on your sofa, snuggled with your pets, and allowed your children to make them breakfast
But… as you mention, their wild success has now created a nearly complete female dominated space. Potentially, their culture and their rules might be, just maybe, responsible for the state of things to which you lament?
And like clock work, you added a preamble that beautifully illustrates my thesis. Also, it made me legitimately chuckle.
Perhaps she can innovate a new arena for literary feuds, so we can enrich the literary corpus by having females conduct critiques of each others work whilst jilling themselves off with dildos*, as the great 20th century patron of the arts Hugh Hefner no doubt would have wanted.
Also I was fairly convinced reading the Kingdom of Speech that the genesis of that book was Wolfe and Chomsky meeting each other at a NYC cocktail party and then despising each other instantly.
The tenor reminds me of this piece of how if rap were solely about putting out diss tracks, Canibus would be the GOAT, since he was very good at that (although he did unfortunately setup one of the great responses ever, eg "99% of your fans don't exist"). Alas, there's more to the art form than that.
*trying to imagine the meeting in the NYT's editorial offices where they try and figure out exactly how they are going to cover this.
1. I'm surprised this essay doesn't mention the Bad Art Friend feud, which certainly exemplifies a lot of what FdB is positing here. LO and Jia are big names, but those Bad Art friends...does anyone even recall their names or read their books? I mostly recall that Celeste Ng's sideline cattiness didn't hurt her career.
2. I said something similar in a previous post, but one is going to have unfair, mean-spirited, and/or uninspired GoodReads reviews. Yes, some may be organized, but I worry about your emphasis that this is some major conspiracy...the idea, frankly, feels too close to home/too close to the experience of your narrator. Of the 15 reviews, most are positive.
Probably because neither of the Bad Art Friends are very successful. Dawn (the kidney donor) is still working on her first novel (which I personally will probably read if she ever finishes and publishes it, as intergenerational novels about sad poor people are my jam). Sonya (the catty one) has published a few short stories, but not a full length book.
Please reconsider the all caps intro. It's a good essay, and letting the BlueSky know they've gotten under your skin is only going to bring more of the same.
I worry that the same way Twitter was bad for Freddie, we're seeing it again. Hate-scrolling the people hate-posting about you is addictive but soul-destroying.
" In all manner of competitive elite fields, the spoils of the competition become noticeably less rewarding once women begin succeeding within them."
Great line. Has me wondering what's the deal with women entering the university at greater rates than men these days. Is it because that game is over and in ten years we'll hear people complaining about the new areas of competition men are entering that women are not?
Where are men going if not to university these days? I never hear that part of the story.
At least with sports, though, the difference between the literary feud and the rivalry is that the rivalry is settled in an objective fashion, on the field. Whereas one thing I think Freddie is arguing is that the female literary feud ends up sidelining their career growth and becoming the main point of their literary endeavors. Rap beefs might be more relevant, although the case for that is kind of like my point about Canibus above-being great at beefs and diss tracks at the expense of making good other tracks (or even albums) does hurt your reputation. Might not matter as much in that having beef with other rappers seems to be THOROUGHLY built into the nature of the game.
Interestingly, in boxing we just wrapped up what is without a doubt the best rivalry in the history of women's boxing (Taylor-Serrano), and the overall mood seems to be that Serrano improved her reputation while Taylor probably hurt hers, although I don't think long term it will matter much.
"And in a culture where women writers are already structurally disadvantaged in a hundred small ways..."
I dunno, Freddie, you made the case earlier in the article that women basically control publishing in its entirety, that men are marginalized.... And still you offer the excuse of "structurally disadvantaged" rather than following through on the very obvious conclusion that everyone, including women, needs to own the consequences of their actions?
I think too much is about going viral these days... sure you are an instant celeb via social media but with the takedown mechanisms built into that media, it's just as easy to cancel people. I am in between the Mailer/Vidal generation (where TV and print ruled) and the Freudenberger/Sittenfield generation (where YouTube and Twitter allow much quicker exposure without so many gatekeepers). I think there are still readers worth reading, but I think the focus on being white hot and trendy probably discourages more meaningful, deep writing.
"You’ve got your Curtis Sittenfield vs. Nell Freudenberger, which could not have existed without the period of Freudenberger’s white-hot hype cycle. (I don’t need to tell you that those expectations were fundamentally unfair in their extravagance and thus unsurprisingly not lived up to.) "
Well unfortunately I can get the dynamic going on here. I really want to read Freudenberger now because there was a reason she got so many readers. I'll get to her when I finish Infinite Jest!
Also, the world of books (readers, authors, and publishers) is far more glutted, shrinking, and made smaller by social media. Feuds look pettier the smaller of a pool they're in. And the more feuds there are. Once, a takedown could have earned you at least some cred, because they were rare; it was an arbitrage opportunity. Now, all the targets are either too big to fail (Gaiman, Rowling), or nobody outside your particular literary circle and/or liberal arts department knows, so you can't even get Righteousness imputed to you publicly.
> But the net result was stagnation. The virality of Beach’s essay gave her temporary cultural relevance, but little career momentum.
Oof I was just forced to recall the worst bombing (performance sense) in the weeks after they had published it and involved my attendance at a live taping of the red scare podcast (strike one) with Caroline Calloway the Special Guest but which devolved into a sort of too-inebriated, free-associative, concerning end 2 the night...
AFAICT, most of what passes for literary beef these days is just a status competition, sometimes framed as a Wokemon throwdown (sorry for recycling "Wokemon", Patrizia).
This is why it's largely a matter for women and other humans with more Wokemon status, as cishet white persons of dudeness have so few Wokemon points as to be unable to play that game at any level.
As an example, if a human male invokes the Holy P.C. Trinity to a woman "that's racist, sexist and homophobic!" the outcome and consequences are very different if a woman say this to a dude. Whether this is good or bad is irrelevant. It just is.
I love Wokemon SO MUCH that you can recycle it a thousand times, and each time will bring a great blazing grin to my face!!!
(As a matter of fact, I had to discipline myself severely not to plagiarize it from you since it would have worked so well as a throw-away line in the current Work in Progress.)
Yes, it's too bad about those white male writers. There just aren't enough of them. Maybe we can cook up some kind of grant or incentive program for them. 😀
Use "Wokemon" all you want far as I am concerned.
I am tryingtoget tabby writers more recognized. Pity there are so few of us.
You didn't read my spell-binding Introduction to Public Librarianship--or do you only mean fiction writers?
You has a colecction of feline writers?
Only that a lot have cats. I broke the mold with pups.
Also, being FdB is, AFAICT, low-status at this time, so attacking him on any pretext is an easy, low-risk way of furnishing one's Litworld Status bonafides. The actual content of the attack is irrelevant. Any reason will do.
It's middle school, all the way down.
"Also, being FdB is, AFAICT, low-status at this time"
Pretty sure FDB is low-status at all times.
The pic of him on the NFL Preseason Post this Sunday made me realize that to the effete, upper-class and female (but I repeat myself) coded literary world, Freddie-white, weight lifting, football playing, metalhead Freddie-is in their mind basically Steve Lattimer (PLACE AT THE TABLE!) from the Program, and the very antithesis of everything core to their identity. That he's talented just makes it worse.
There's no world in all the multiverses where they would like Freddie; he's too much The Other
I was going to say that FdB refuses to play the role assigned to humans like him, which is why he is lo-status and also why I read him.
"You’ve got your Curtis Sittenfield vs. Nell Freudenberger, which could not have existed without the period of Freudenberger’s white-hot hype cycle. "
You could have absolutely made this up and I would have no idea. I'll nod and move to the next paragraph to see if you discuss the simmering literary tensions between Olga "The Oligarch" Petrinov and Marekeepily Midwinter.
Point being, I don't think the game of literary feud has changed because it's mainly women now Maybe that's a contributory factor, but certainly not the main cause. I think the game has changed because the literary world is so far from the mainstream. I read 30-40 books a year, but I've barely heard of half the people you mention. They command little attention, whether male or female, whether feuding or writing.
"Freudenberger" sounds like millennial snot from about ten years back. "Did you see that takedown of so and so in the New York Review of Books? Man did she get served a freudenberger."
With a side of schaaden...😆
Damn, Freddie wasn’t lying. This is a Goodreads review:
I'd be lying if I said I disliked The Mind Reels—I loved it while reading & up to this point... But having learned/seen more about/from our author since, I can't in good conscience recommend others buy deBoer's work. If that changes, I'll letcha know.
What assholes!!
And how could they have "loved it while reading"? It's not out yet!
Umm, publishers often give out advanced copies of publications to Goodreads readers in exchange for reviews.
I am not saying that this took place in this particular incident. Just that it's a possibility.
Ah, I didn't know that about Goodreads. That could be the case.
LibraryThing (related site) also does advanced copies, although my vague impression is that LT is a lower-caliber of offering (mostly because than Goodreads is far more important than LT). I often get PDFs of various upcoming ebooks, usually self-published (and usually not good, but sometimes interesting).
Amazon has a feature where they can mark reviews as being done by someone who actually bought the book. It's useful for filtering out drive-by review bombs.
If there is one thing I would want to change about people's brains - just one thing! - it's that when somebody reads "person X did something bad" they would immediately and reflexively think "that's a lie" unless they were shown real, documented, sourced proof of the accusation. Not some other idiot ranting on social media, but actual reporting or proof.
If there's one thing social media is great at, it's smear campaigns - and we're watching one in real time. So disgusting.
The reddit account with his name is fascinating.
Let me say that posting an account in someone else's name and posting as if their words were mine is exactly part of the fun, even getting into character enough to post "please buy my book." It gets attention, which is the reward.
The account writes in Spanish a bunch which I don't think Freddie does. (It's been wiping its history so the evidence here is hard to gether.) Otherwise it was a really good at keeping character.
*EDIT* wait, reddit has some autotranslation feature. Go to https://www.reddit.com/r/TheBear/comments/1loocsw/the_whole_wedding_underneath_the_table/?tl=es-419 in an incognito tab and it's been autotranslated into spanish. This is messing up my google searches for the account's history.
I tend to read authors first and foremost so whatever is going on in the literary world currently was unknown to me until recently. I did an Amazon search for the best historical fiction novels of 2024 which is a particular interest of mine and the list included 20 books and all of them were female authors. In a vacuum, that is not a big deal as I read books from female authors all the time but I thought it was noteworthy. Was there not one male who wrote a good historical fiction novel last year?
"Was there not one male who wrote a good historical fiction novel last year?"
After reading The Women (which undoubtedly was on that last), I suspect what males would write for a historical novel would not be considered "good" by the standards of the (mostly entirely female) audience for historical novels. I'm sure whatever Jeff Shaara is working on these days is probably pretty good on a purely technical level, but it's also never going to get pushed by the algorithm, because the audience for it is dads taking a light break from reading history*.
*and it feels noteworthy here that a lot of "historical fiction" written by males are written by guys who are also history writers; they're already connected to a different audience.
Thanks for the link to Oyler's takedown of Tolentiono's Trick Mirror. Few things are more entertaining to read than authors savaging the books of other authors.
Which inspires me to link to the most savage book review that has ever been written: Anthony Daniels' takedown of Tiffany Watt's book Schadenfreude. It is an old review (2019), but no-one has ever surpassed it from a pure takedown-as-entertainment perspective:
https://newcriterion.com/article/ice-cold/
...Here's the intro, just to foreshadow what is coming:
Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune is interesting, but not because it is good. It is interesting because it is symptomatic of the increasing vulgarity and crudity of intellectual life in the modern English-speaking world, particularly in Britain, where it goes almost unopposed.
The phenomenon of schadenfreude is a fascinating and important one, of course, well worth examination. But since it is usually subtle, undeclared, and often unacknowledged, even by he who experiences it, it requires some finesse to dissect it, which unfortunately the author, Tiffany Watt Smith, does not possess. Even the subtitle of her book is misleading: schadenfreude in its English meaning is surely not the joy, but rather the secret or surreptitious pleasure or satisfaction in another’s misfortune. But the error is a warning that proper distinctions, so necessary to this field, are about not to be made.
You are really grasping at straws here, Freddie. I mean, come on—recycling a 2003 Salon article for evidence of a Curtis Sittenfield v. Nell Freudenberger feud? _Mentioning_ Caroline Calloway at all when she could spend the rest of her life churning out "Infinite Jest"-sized doorstops & all she'll ever be known for is being an Instagram Influencer??
Fewer & fewer people read for pleasure anymore, and those who do generally find a genre & stick to it. It is very, very difficult to get any traction as a mainstream a/k/a literary fiction author.
I will tell you why mainstream women authors are having a moment now & why male authors are not. Two words: book clubs. The only people who read books these days—outside of the dwindling "New Yorker" magazine fan contingent and the occasional smash movie book tie-in—are people who belong to book clubs. And those people are predominantly female.
I am assuming your publisher has only a very small PR budget for your book, yes? Of course, you can safely assume that 40% of the people who read your substack will buy your book. (More than that will _say_ they're buying your book, of course. 😀) But if _I_ were you, I'd figure out a way to target that book club market. I might even go so far as to write up my own book club materials— character summaries, questions to ask—and email them out. Many book clubs these days are _not_ hosted in participants' living rooms but in public libraries or Barnes & Noble cafés, so if you can make it easy for them to promote themselves in this way, they will scratch your back, too, by stocking your book.
I genuinely don't understand this - I'm saying that the feud has changed in a way that unfairly HURTS WOMEN WRITERS
You don't understand that the 2003 Salon article you cited was actually a LOVE LETTER from Curtis Sittenfeld to Nell Freudenberger? 😀
But yes, I should have articulated more clearly. What's missing from my insufficiently caffeinated post above: The proof you supply to support your hypothesis that literary feuds nowadays are a female phenomenon is insufficient.
And if it WERE true, your contention above is just plain wrong since ALL publicity is GOOD publicity. 😀
My tabby ass reads all the time, and I could not care less what they say in the "New Yorker".
Still, I get your point. Query: to what extent are book clubs a social and to what extent a literary phenomenon? That's an honest question, and it may depend on the particular club.
It DOES depend upon the particular club.
But I have at least three writer friends, now comfortably midlist, who got their start doing the book club circuit, driving their own beat-up junkers up & down the coasts, crashing on friends' couches. It's labor-intensive, but it's a sure-fire way to build an audience outside of the lit-crit echo chamber. Call it literary populism. 😀 People who meet you in person, who shake yr hand, who exchange pleasantries with you while you look them smilingly in the eyes, will buy ANYTHING you publish—and will tell all their friends to, too.
This isn't the best way to guarantee future literary sales, of course. The best way is to sell your book to a movie or TV producer. But that one, you don't have all that much control over.
Mebbe that is a side-effect of this 'Stack, a sort of logistics-lite book club?
Oh, sure! I ❤️ Freddie, so I preordered his book.
Will preorders from this 'Stack generate enough sales to earn out his advance or inspire a second printing? I don't know how many people subscribe to his substack. But maybe.
Bookclubs are a way to generate buzz outside the digital sphere. And get LIBRARIES & BARNES & NOBLE to purchase copies—'cause like I say, most bookclubs these days are hosted by libraries & Barnes & Noble.
I think there is something to this. For us musicians, the analogue would be the "house show," which I have found yields results similar to the ones you mention. Difficult to not remain fiercely loyal to an indie songwriter once they've crashed on your sofa, snuggled with your pets, and allowed your children to make them breakfast
But… as you mention, their wild success has now created a nearly complete female dominated space. Potentially, their culture and their rules might be, just maybe, responsible for the state of things to which you lament?
And like clock work, you added a preamble that beautifully illustrates my thesis. Also, it made me legitimately chuckle.
"Calloway...with...her OnlyFans"
Perhaps she can innovate a new arena for literary feuds, so we can enrich the literary corpus by having females conduct critiques of each others work whilst jilling themselves off with dildos*, as the great 20th century patron of the arts Hugh Hefner no doubt would have wanted.
Also I was fairly convinced reading the Kingdom of Speech that the genesis of that book was Wolfe and Chomsky meeting each other at a NYC cocktail party and then despising each other instantly.
The tenor reminds me of this piece of how if rap were solely about putting out diss tracks, Canibus would be the GOAT, since he was very good at that (although he did unfortunately setup one of the great responses ever, eg "99% of your fans don't exist"). Alas, there's more to the art form than that.
*trying to imagine the meeting in the NYT's editorial offices where they try and figure out exactly how they are going to cover this.
1. I'm surprised this essay doesn't mention the Bad Art Friend feud, which certainly exemplifies a lot of what FdB is positing here. LO and Jia are big names, but those Bad Art friends...does anyone even recall their names or read their books? I mostly recall that Celeste Ng's sideline cattiness didn't hurt her career.
2. I said something similar in a previous post, but one is going to have unfair, mean-spirited, and/or uninspired GoodReads reviews. Yes, some may be organized, but I worry about your emphasis that this is some major conspiracy...the idea, frankly, feels too close to home/too close to the experience of your narrator. Of the 15 reviews, most are positive.
Probably because neither of the Bad Art Friends are very successful. Dawn (the kidney donor) is still working on her first novel (which I personally will probably read if she ever finishes and publishes it, as intergenerational novels about sad poor people are my jam). Sonya (the catty one) has published a few short stories, but not a full length book.
Please reconsider the all caps intro. It's a good essay, and letting the BlueSky know they've gotten under your skin is only going to bring more of the same.
I worry that the same way Twitter was bad for Freddie, we're seeing it again. Hate-scrolling the people hate-posting about you is addictive but soul-destroying.
" In all manner of competitive elite fields, the spoils of the competition become noticeably less rewarding once women begin succeeding within them."
Great line. Has me wondering what's the deal with women entering the university at greater rates than men these days. Is it because that game is over and in ten years we'll hear people complaining about the new areas of competition men are entering that women are not?
Where are men going if not to university these days? I never hear that part of the story.
I wonder if the same dynamic applies to other types of feud. Do sports rivalries and rap beefs between women harm their reputations?
At least with sports, though, the difference between the literary feud and the rivalry is that the rivalry is settled in an objective fashion, on the field. Whereas one thing I think Freddie is arguing is that the female literary feud ends up sidelining their career growth and becoming the main point of their literary endeavors. Rap beefs might be more relevant, although the case for that is kind of like my point about Canibus above-being great at beefs and diss tracks at the expense of making good other tracks (or even albums) does hurt your reputation. Might not matter as much in that having beef with other rappers seems to be THOROUGHLY built into the nature of the game.
Interestingly, in boxing we just wrapped up what is without a doubt the best rivalry in the history of women's boxing (Taylor-Serrano), and the overall mood seems to be that Serrano improved her reputation while Taylor probably hurt hers, although I don't think long term it will matter much.
"And in a culture where women writers are already structurally disadvantaged in a hundred small ways..."
I dunno, Freddie, you made the case earlier in the article that women basically control publishing in its entirety, that men are marginalized.... And still you offer the excuse of "structurally disadvantaged" rather than following through on the very obvious conclusion that everyone, including women, needs to own the consequences of their actions?
I think too much is about going viral these days... sure you are an instant celeb via social media but with the takedown mechanisms built into that media, it's just as easy to cancel people. I am in between the Mailer/Vidal generation (where TV and print ruled) and the Freudenberger/Sittenfield generation (where YouTube and Twitter allow much quicker exposure without so many gatekeepers). I think there are still readers worth reading, but I think the focus on being white hot and trendy probably discourages more meaningful, deep writing.
"You’ve got your Curtis Sittenfield vs. Nell Freudenberger, which could not have existed without the period of Freudenberger’s white-hot hype cycle. (I don’t need to tell you that those expectations were fundamentally unfair in their extravagance and thus unsurprisingly not lived up to.) "
Well unfortunately I can get the dynamic going on here. I really want to read Freudenberger now because there was a reason she got so many readers. I'll get to her when I finish Infinite Jest!
Also, the world of books (readers, authors, and publishers) is far more glutted, shrinking, and made smaller by social media. Feuds look pettier the smaller of a pool they're in. And the more feuds there are. Once, a takedown could have earned you at least some cred, because they were rare; it was an arbitrage opportunity. Now, all the targets are either too big to fail (Gaiman, Rowling), or nobody outside your particular literary circle and/or liberal arts department knows, so you can't even get Righteousness imputed to you publicly.
> But the net result was stagnation. The virality of Beach’s essay gave her temporary cultural relevance, but little career momentum.
Oof I was just forced to recall the worst bombing (performance sense) in the weeks after they had published it and involved my attendance at a live taping of the red scare podcast (strike one) with Caroline Calloway the Special Guest but which devolved into a sort of too-inebriated, free-associative, concerning end 2 the night...