What It Means When Your Reviewer is Mean, Unfair, and Totally Doesn’t Get It

You’ve been hit over the head: the totally unfair review. On Goodreads, on Amazon, at a job performance evaluation. It’s hard to feel that the fault is really the reviewer’s, but it is. Believe me, I know: I once gave the worst review in the world.

It was 1995, and I wasn’t reviewing a piece of fiction. I reviewed, at a medical department conference, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The article that introduced metformin, now one of the medications most widely used for Type II Diabetes, to the United States. And yes, I trashed it. In an oral presentation, for about thirty or forty minutes. Oy.

So I am well qualified to represent the baselessly unjust reviewers of the world. Ask me a question, any question.

You: How could the reviewer trash my baby, my so obviously beautiful work?

Me: Excuse me, the actual piece of work is irrelevant. The reviewer is coming from a place of deep insecurity. In my case, I was feeling at that time in life particularly insecure about my lack of research background. Heck, I was a literature major masquerading as a medical student. I somehow thought that criticizing the study was the way to show myself and everyone else that I knew what I was doing. A psychologist might say I was projecting—seeing lack of scientific rigor everywhere I looked because I feared that lack in myself. I came to the work looking for faults and was blinded to its (many, important) merits. If I had been handed the Hippocratic Oath itself, it would have gotten trashed. You don’t even want to know what I would have done to Ulysses.

You: Was the reviewer trying to hurt me? Ruin my life?

Me: Now, you are assuming that the reviewer thought way more of you than he/she actually did. She did not actually think of you as a person. In fact, she was only thinking of herself and how she may not have chosen the right career path. She was additionally distracted by recently having been dumped by a man three years her junior.

She was desperate to improve her own life by showing her cleverness and create the kind of camaraderie that sometimes arises in group censure. (P.S., it didn’t work.)

You: Didn’t the reviewer notice my awards, my blurbs, my prestigious publishing house?

Me: Possibly, but she was too ignorant of the system and blinded by her own needs to understand what that meant: that people way more knowledgeable than her had already vetted your work. Insecurity and arrogance are two sides of the same coin. Keep in mind that the reviewer has never, and will never, be able to produce any work comparable to your own.

You: Why couldn’t the reviewer look at my work with a positive attitude, looking for merits instead of flaws?

Me: Because that would have required maturity, self-confidence, and lack of personal agenda.

You: Will I ever get over this?

Me: Oh, yes. A few more positive reviews and you’ll be fine. As for your reviewer? It’ll take her, say, seventeen years or so to live down her review.

Originally appeared on Beyond the Margins April 24, 2012