Not Attractive or Popular

John Sheirer

A friend of mine wrote a new book recently, a really lovely novel about gawky but well-intentioned teenagers growing into awkward but good-hearted young adults, and the book was reviewed in, well, I shouldn’t say the name, but it’s just about the most important book review publication on the planet, and, normally, I’d be happy that my friend’s book was reviewed there, and it’s a great book by a woman I really like and admire, and the review is about 97% positive, which is better than most authors can expect because this book review publication always likes to blow up any tiny flaw in a book and invent flaws if they aren’t really there, and they have to create flaws to make it seem like they know better than the author or the readers who enjoy the book, but instead of being happy for my friend, I’m really PO’d because the reviewer, in the middle of this overwhelmingly positive review, wrote that he had seen the photo of my friend, the author of the book, on the back cover, and that photo made him understand how she was able to do such a good job writing about characters who are “not attractive or popular” saying this must be “experience-based fiction for this author,” and you can Google it if you don’t believe me because the guy really said that, and when I read that comment, I said aloud, “What the f-word?” only I used the real f-word instead of saying “f-word” because, dude, it was hard to believe that some guy would be so MAGA-level clueless enough to attack a woman’s appearance in the year 2024 in a major publication that people actually read, and my wife looked at me wide-eyed from where she was reading a different (also good) book nearby on our living room couch, and she said to me, “What?” really urgently because I almost never swear, and I told her about the reviewer’s comment, and my wife also said, “What the f-word?” even louder than I did because, and my wife agrees with me that this is just about the meanest, most petty, most nasty, most shocking comment I can imagine in a professional book review of all places, especially the way the reviewer guy snuck it into this particular book review, and the thing is, besides being such a great book and such a rude comment about anyone, we happen to know the book’s author, you know, not like we’re best friends or neighbors or anything, but we’ve gone to readings that she’s done and waited in line to talk with her, and she hugged us when she signed our copy of her newest book, and we’ve been following each other on Facebook for a couple of years now, and she often likes and comments on photos of our cats and grandkids, and we know for a fact that this author is both pretty and popular because, as I’ve said, we know her, and she gets tons of people at her book readings who applaud for real and not just out of politeness, and there’s always lots of glowing comments about her on Facebook from lots of people who know her way better than we do, and, I’m just saying this because of the reviewer’s insult, she’s really very pretty is a quirky and cute way, and I’ve said so to my wife who agrees that she’s very pretty, and, FYI, we’re very happily married, and so is this pretty author to a very nice guy, some kind of architect, I think, just to let you know that there’s no funny business happening on my part in terms of me and this pretty author who is, most importantly, and good person and excellent writer with a great new book, so, back to the main point, this reviewer saying that my friend who wrote the book only does a good job writing about characters who aren’t good looking or popular because he thinks she’s not good looking or popular is beyond idiotic because my friend the author uses a thing called empathy to understand who these characters are and what they might think and how they might dream and yearn and search even though their lives are different from hers but not all that different because even pretty and popular people dream and yearn, obviously, and we’re all a lot more alike than we are different, you now, in this boat together, all rowing against our own storms, so to speak, so there’s a lot more that connects us as human beings than there are things that push us apart, and I’ll bet if this reviewer tried to write fiction, which I know he doesn’t because I looked him up and he hasn’t written any fiction, or at least, he hasn’t been able to get any fiction published, but if he did try to write fiction, by his logic, I’ll bet he’d do a great job writing about mean people because, you know the old saying, “write what you know,” which applies especially well for mean people who don’t understand the concept of empathy like my friend the author does, and I didn’t try to look up this reviewer’s photo to see if his face is as ugly and his ugly comment about my friend because I’m not the kind of person who would look up his picture and then judge him by his appearance, and even though I’ve never tried to write fiction myself, if I did try, I think I’d write a story about a mean guy who is only moderately average looking and who takes out the frustrations of his meaningless life by sticking nasty comments in the middle of otherwise positive book reviews, but you’ll never catch me writing something like that even about a total a-hole like this jerk reviewer guy. Never. Not me. No f-wording way.