Yesterday I got in a Twitterspat with someone who thought I should read the comments on a recent piece to find out why “so many people seem to dislike” my writing.

Ignoring the fact that I have more requests to write for publications than anybody could handle, and that most negative comments on the site are written by the same, like, five people, I tried to respond as if this were true. I said I’m not going to do that. I said I don’t trust people who love or hate me and don’t know me. I should have said “people who seem to love or hate me, based on the intensity of anonymous praise and personal criticism I’ve received in the past and don’t know me;” this is why I’m loath to argue on Twitter. I also loathe comments sections (on almost any pieces, not just mine) because I don’t think most people read very well. So many people just read what they want to read. If they’ve decided I’m a bitchy self-absorbed wannabe prose stylist or whatever, I legitimately don’t even know, they’re pretttttty likely to read everything as bitchy self-absorbed wannabe prose. Most people aren’t strong or willing enough to wrestle with their own biases. I’m not saying they’re wrong, necessarily, or that I’m stronger than they are (I try). I’m just pointing out what I’ve observed to be a nearly universal flaw.

This is the thing. I can understand responding to my strongly worded opinion pieces with equally strongly worded opinions. I don’t quite understand responding to my personal-view, depressive essays on societal entropy with… anything, really. There’s not a lot of agreement/disagreement to be had here. You feel fine about a certain thing, in a certain way. I don’t feel fine. Go read writing for People Who Are Fine, and leave the rest of us how we want to be, alone. (I can’t tell if that was just a joke or not.) (Here is another thing: nuance. Shades of possible meaning. Space to ascertain it for yourself. Why don’t people seem to like this more?)

I had told someone else on Twitter that people don’t like it (I am uneasy with how much I’m saying “people;” I mean readers? No, I mean people) when I’m not as happy as they think I should be. Which is to say: happy with my lot in life. With what I’m sure many people, especially people who refuse to think I’m smart and talented, see as unbelievable luck. As privilege. But if they are reading my stories on an iPhone 4S, I think we’re all in the same Good Ship Privilege.

In the new New Yorker there’s an essay on Edith Wharton and sympathy, on whether you can feel it for Wharton and for her characters, and why that nearly alone determines whether or not you will read her again, on her 150th birthday. 

Would people be more sympathetic to the essay I wrote from the Hudson Hotel if I had said that I paid just $75/night to crash there with a friend for three nights and I couldn’t afford it on my own, at full price? Should I have clarified that I don’t belong there; that I have never been, won’t ever be, a rich girl? That I’ve paid for everything since I was 18 and still owe shitloads of money to universities from which I couldn’t afford to graduate? Perhaps. Don’t care. It would have made the story less good.

Would people be more sympathetic if I told them why I didn’t want to go to fashion week or work or do anything useful? Should I have thrown in easy clinical terms? Relatable life shit?

Do I need the sympathy of strangers, though? Of people who, as my colleague pointed out, don’t believe enough in what they’re saying about me to put their real, own names on it?

On gchat someone said “isn’t it your job to care what people think of you…”

If that is ever my job so help me Joan Didion I will die.

All I care about is the best writing possible. All I care about is whether it makes you think or feel. What you think or feel — in particular, about me — is so not my concern. I wish it didn’t affect me at all, but it does so less and less and less now, and less and less and less still.

why i write like a girl

Because I am a girl, whether you like it or not. Because the whole of human experience is to say the least overwhelming; to divide it in half, to write about female experiences in what might be a female way, is closer to achievable. Is realistic? Is less arrogant. Because I may be a narcissist forever and ever amen but I am not arrogant enough to think that I am impartial, omnipotent, the voice of God, the New York Times. Because writing like a guy has given us Monocle; think about that. Because, despite Monocle, no one seems to complain about anybody writing like a guy. Because Gertrude Stein. Because Virginia Woolf.  Because Daphne du Maurier. Because Simone de Beauvoir. Because Anne Sexton. Because bell hooks. Because Joan Didion. Because we don’t know for anything like sure if there is anything bigger than our selves. Because certainly I am not those things. Certainly I can’t say. Can only speak for me and for people like me, people that tend, after all, to be female. Can only write what I think, feel; can’t know. Can only write “I.” Refuse to think of that as a failing.