Gayle Forman's Blog, page 9

bad reviews

I was inspired by Ally Condie's bravery in posting her bad reviews of previous books on her blog. In contrast to her deservedly glowing reviews for her upcoming book, Matched.

Reviews are such a weird thing; you want to discount them when they're bad and rejoice in them when they're good but it's not so easy to avoid the pit in your stomach from a bad one or an elated smile on your face from a good one, be it on Goodreads, which I avoid or blogs, which I like to read or official industry publications, which my people forward to me.

The fact of the matter is that we writers work in such isolation so much of the time. Maybe we have a small group who sees our work in progress but generally, you can count on one hand the number of people who sees my books before they go out into the big bad world. And then not only does everyone sees the fruit of my labor, but, I hope, everyone opines. If they don't opine, it's worse; it means no one cares enough.

So reviews come with the territory. And honestly, a fair bad review is a fine thing. A reviewer who asks: Did this writer set out what she meant to do? and answers no, I got no truck with that. It actually helps me identify weak spots in my work.

Here are some of the less-than-stellar notices I've received in the past. This is from my first book, You Can't Get There From Here, from Kirkus.

Forman writes breezily and pleasantly, though some of her set pieces go on too long and run out of steam. Her book, too, could have benefited from a more closely followed overarching theme of the kind that Franklin Foer worked so effectively in his globalism-dissecting How Soccer Explains the World (2004), which makes many of the same points. A mixed bag, then, of some interest to armchair travelers, if not to Weird Girls everywhere.

Onward then to my first YA novel, Sisters in Sanity. Some decent reviews, nothing glowing, nothing totally harsh. Mixed bags like this one from Booklist:

Although Forman does a good job of capturing teen friendship and angst, the book is not strong on character development. For example, though Brit believes that her stepmother wants her out of the way, readers never gain a true understanding of the father's motivation for committing his daughter, an omission that may be frightening for teens.

I don't know if I agree with that, but, fair enough. The Publishers Weekly review was mostly plot recap, ending with this:

This story line, however, takes a back seat to the exposé-like preoccupation with debunking places like Red Rock, which, however engrossing, might be a case of preaching to the choir.

I have been known to preach to the choir. And the Kirkus review, which was mostly  positive, was so weird that even the ending sounded bad when it was good.

Through the bonds of their friendship, the girls eventually come to face their own demons, leading to an ending not entirely surprising, though not particularly unsatisfying, either.

"Not particularly unsatisfying?" As in…satisfying?

Strange semantics aside, none of those reviews particularly bothered me. Sure, I would've enjoyed a rave. Heartrending! Addictive! Tour de Force! But whatever, they were fine and they were fair. There are plenty of good things in You Can't Get There From Here but at its core is a lack of authenticity, a journalist trying to connect disparate places with a thesis that doesn't always quite work. And, who, because her agent/editor/readers told her to, put a bunch of stuff about her marriage on the road into what had been a travelogue. It's a strange hybrid, an ill-fit like a cute shoe that felt fine in the store but gives you blisters once you walk around in it.  And Sisters in Sanity, it was my first novel. I was still working things out. And I don't love the ending. I had a different ending before but my editor suggested a change and in retrospect, I think we lost some important resolution and also wrapped things up too neatly. LIVE AND LEARN. Listen to your gut. Not your editor's (well, unless her initials are JSG). Or your agent's. Or your readers'.

But there was one case I was not so rise-abovey. One review that made me almost-cry. That put a pit in my stomach. That kept me up at night. It wasn't a review. It was a slam. And worst of all, it was in The New Yorker, at the time, my shrine of all things writerly, the place I desperately wanted to write for. Here tis, in all it's gore. (And you know you're in trouble when the first words are your name and the word "mistake.")

Forman's mistake, in this account of a year's globe-trotting with her husband, is to seek out self-consciously fringe topics—Tongan transvestites, Kazakh Tolkien nuts—in the hope that exoticism will prove enlightening. But her conclusions are so vapid ("Life, it turns out, is as big as you're willing to make it") as to call to mind Chesterton's quip that "travel narrows the mind." Like a voluble neighbor on a long flight, Forman tells us more about herself than we really want to know; a spat with her husband in the Far East makes one almost wish they'd break up for good. Elsewhere, though, she demonstrates a knack for getting interesting people to talk about themselves. The best chapter, set in the relatively unexotic world of Amsterdam's red-light district, examines the difficulties that legalization has brought. One madam complains of being forced to close because her ceilings were not of regulation height.

Oh.My.God. My kind of travel narrows the mind? You want me and Nick to break up? I'm the annoying person on the plane? And the one quote you took—the one quote—was from the frigging epilogue, the last pages of the book when you're wrapping everything up, and in my case when I was describing coming home  home from my first year spent abroad at age 16 and worrying then that my life would never feel as big as it had during that year. Really, that's the quote you used to describe a book about cultural globalization?  Okaay.

I was furious. I couldn't read The New Yorker for a few weeks and did not read their travel issue for a few years.

But, like all things, I got over it. And on the plus side, it has made some of the unfair reviews (which are different animals from bad reviews)  I've gotten since easier to bear (If I Stay as "fluff?" You don't say!) Still, if I ever meet the jerk who wrote that review, I'm going to punch him or her. Or, well, maybe just strap them into a seat and pretend it's an airplane and talk for hours and hours about my deep love of  pedicure technology.

on being an asshole—or not

I'm feeling a little bit cranky. About so many things. And the fact that I have a double ear infection and seem to have a Death Star-like tractor beam for every contagion within a 10-mile radius is just part of it.

But more than my never-ending snot-a-thon, I'm annoyed that  that people can be so, so, not nice. I'm also annoyed because apparently, I was wrong. I have a lot invested in being right. I hate to be wrong.

A couple of months ago, I was all grooving on the fact that Will Grayson, Will Grayson was the first gay-themed novel to hit the NYT Bestseller list (and on top of that to be totally awesome). What made me happiest was what a not big deal it was. How the gay relationships in the book were so not a big deal because to teens today gay relationships were so not a big deal.

Maybe in some circles. Maybe in the hopeful future of awesomeness so imagined by John Green and David Levithan. But here. Now. Apparently not.

Just as the buildup of puss has burst one of my eardrums, the last few weeks of news have burst my bubble of people-can love-who-they-want-because-the kids-are-all-right-with-it-ness. Turns out, some kids, not so much. First we had the arrival of the It Get Better Project—and if you have not seen Dan Savage and his partner Terry's video, watch it now, please—which is awesome and sucky at the same time. Awesome for obvious reasons. Sucky for its pure necessity, which is that LGBT teens are way more likely to be bullied and harassed; one study found that 40 percent (!!!) of LGBT high schoolers had attempted suicide, as opposed to ten percent of the rest of the high school population.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The promise of the projects is that for gay teens it gets better after high school. Which is true. Except when it isn't. I won't go into the Tyler Clementi tragedy here except to say that the It Get Better message got lost on him. Or it got there too late. Or too soon. Only a few weeks into college and he's dead. Maybe if some assholes had shot and broadcast video of him having sex in his junior year, he'd have been able to handle it better. Maybe he would've turned the whole embarrassment into some kind of new social networking phenomenon, the way Mark Zuckerberg turned being a lonely outsider into being a gazillionaire Facbook launcher. Who knows? Not us. We'll never know.

Amid all the Concerned Talk about cyberbullying and privacy, leave it to Sarah Silverman to cut through the bullshit.

"They learned it from watching you."

Harsh words. Harsh truths. And it goes beyond gaybashing. Parents wonder why cyberbullying and every day bullying has gotten so bad. You can blame Facebook all you want—and sure, the disconnect of the Interwebby world makes it all the easier—but, dude! Look what is going on in our country right now. Look how talk show hosts behave. Look how political opponents treat one another. Not as people with ideological differences on how tax money should be used, but as mortal enemies. You can't compare your opponents to Nazis over and over again and let the rhetoric get heated and not expect that toxicity leak into the water we're all drinking.

Dude, we had a President, or have, present tense, for now, whose biggest failing, as far as I can see, is his inability to fight this fire with fire. He's civil by nature. In turn, he's been accused of being a Nazi (really, people, can we at least come up with a new Big Baddie to compare to? Stalin). An evil socialist (again, might I suggest Stalin)? A Muslim extremist (after all, Obama is one letter away from Osama!!!) He tried to be civil in Washington and got mud all over him. Come November 4th, we'll see how far that civility got him.

The toxicity is everywhere. I get that part of it is the economy. People out of work. Scared. Fear makes us behave in not our best manner. Fear makes us look for scapegoats, be it the queer kid at school, the illegal alien "stealing" the job we never wanted in the first place, the Jews, the Gypsies, the….Take a pick. We've all been there. But right now, no one is keeping a check on the incivility, looking at the costs. Hopefully you guys, the generation coming up, are smarter than us. Hopefully you'll figure out a different way to do business.

I don't know much about the people who made that video of Tyler Clementi. But I would bet pretty much anything on this: After they put their video up on the web, after the hoots of their laughter died down, I bet they were left with a hard, heavy kernel of something unpleasant inside of them, whether they admitted to those feelings, even acknowledged them, or not.

The thing about walking around with that kernel in you is that it makes you feel like shit. And when you feel like shit, you do more shitty things. And the kernels multiply until you're walking around with a stomach full of rocks and it's hard to figure out where your heart is anymore and then it's a hop, skip and a jump to  Hey you faggot. What the fuck are you looking at????

Which is such a not nice way to live your life. Especially considering the alternative, which is to be civil. Because every time you are civil, instead of being left with some kernel of disgust with yourself, a little light goes on. A tiny flower blooms. An angel rings a bell. A chocolate-chip cookie is born. Whatever images floats your boat, that's what happens. You feel good inside. Feeling good makes you feel warm and fuzzy and that prompts you do other nice things. It's called a Virtuous Cycle. When you're acting like this, you have less inclination to call someone a Slutbag of Skank on her FB page (unless that is your personal endearment) or to, you know, broadcast someone's intimate private moments. You have less inclination to call someone a motherf$#$%! just because they pulled into the lane in front of you a wee bit too close. You might even find yourself able to sit down and have a conversation with somebody completely different from you and disagree on every last thing and instead of thinking: Oh my god, what a total douchenozzle that person was, you will think: Gee, it takes all types, doesn't it and I had no idea that there were so many uses for fish heads.

And if you happen to meet someone whose opinions or lifestyles are so abhorrent to you that you cannot stand the mere sound of their voice. You know what you can do? Not call for legislation against them. Or video tape them. Or try to ban them. You can just go on living your happy life and ignore them. And if they're running for office, vote against them.

Imagine.

of tornados, phlegm, and doing better next time around

Over the weekend, the weather experts confirmed what I figured out by driving down Sixth Avenue the morning after last week's big storm and seeing scene after scene like this:

And like this:

Yes, Auntie Em, it was a twister. All around my neighborhood of Park Slope, trees uprooted. Not just knocked down but torn up FROM THE ROOTS. Even I, a girl from the Coasts, understood that this kind of specific destruction comes from tornadoes. But tornadoes happen in Kansas. In Oklahoma. In Texas. But in...

and the winners are…

I got so many entries for the Fall Book Bonanza Giveaway (108) it was hard to pick four winners. So I didn't. I picked six.

There was so much demand for ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS that I managed to scrounge up another copy to give away and now there are two ANNA winners and they are:

Robin!

John!

The winner for MATCHED is:

Steff!

The winner for GRACE is:

Laura!

The winner for CONFESSIONS OF THE SULLIVAN SISTERS IS:

Pretty Princess (a good reason to have your real name in your email somewhere; tho this ...

where she went–the full package

Okay, now that you've endured that Teaser Tour, here is the full cover with the jacket copy, which actually gives away pretty much everything the teaser tour did, plus a little excerpt from the book. Plus, if you head on over to the If I Stay site, you can get some behind-the-scenes stills of the video we made (the video should be up pretty soon) take a quiz (it's supereasy) and even read one of Adam's lyrics.

No more tormenting after this. I promise.

Here's the cover again:

And here is the...

the mockingjay effect

I'm a little obsessed with Suzanne Collins's MOCKINGJAY right now. Not obsessed in the way people were before it came out–all that hyped-up anticipation. I was looking forward to it but not drawing Xs on my calendar or anything.

Now, now that I've finished it, I am obsessed—and this post is meant to be a meta discussion, so it will avoid spoilers, but if you want  a totally virginal reading experience (is that even possible now?) maybe give this post a miss.

In a way, Mockingjay has become the ...

fall book bonanza

Boy, oh, boy has it been a bumper crop of amazing books this fall. I've been lucky enough to read some of them ahead of time and now I'm going to list some of my favorites of the season in this epic fall book review—AND GIVEAWAY—post.

I'll start light and move on to dark.

By now, some of you have heard me rave about Stephanie Perkins's debut, ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS. Allow me to rave some more. I had this book for a few months before I picked it up and it was not what I expected. In other...

where she went cover unveiled!!!!!

I know I was scooped by Entertainment Weekly. But in case you didn't catch it, here finally, here is the cover of WHERE SHE WENT:

And here are the two covers next to each other, so you can see how they look as a pair, which is the point. Mia, back from the dead. And fierce.

I know there is much to discuss. Why a girl? Why is she so pretty? What was the process like to get to this cover?

Well, I'm going to do a larger blog about this later in the month, including debuting the jacket copy, which...

where she went teaser tour!!!

I know how excited some of you are for WHERE SHE WENT. Trust me, I'm excited for it to be out there (and petrified and anxious and all the usual stew of emotion). And I know April seems like a million years from now though in publishing, a world slower than my grandfather's driving, it is just around the corner.

But here is something to satisfy the hunger in the mean time, consider it a series of appetizers before the big meal. We're calling it a blog teaser tour. For ten consecutive days...

brief tidbits of awesomeness

First of all: Check out this amazing drawing by Renee Combs. It was in response to my blog post about the bum deal YA gets in review pages (in response to a NYTBR essay about YA). I wrote a line "Wake up and smell the YA" and a bunch of people seized on it as our YA slogan and I said, hey, let's do a t-shirt, with a coffee cup and books coming out as steam and Renee went and drew this AWESOME picture with some of the books I mentioned in the post (and If I Stay, which I didn't mention, but...