A few months ago, in an act that can only be described as an expression of long-repressed masochism and self-loathing, I read through all the one-star reviews The God of Animals has received on Amazon.  In general, I try to avoid exposing myself to such criticism ever since a “friend” from grad school gave the book an early “review” in which he announced that the only reason it had gotten published was because I slept with my professor (if only it was that easy).  It was not the sting of that “review” which prevented me from seeking out others of the kind, but the histrionic overreaction that I experienced upon reading it:  Basically, I handled the jab with the grace of a rabid hyena that’s been starved for weeks and poked with sticks.  Bad reviews make me clinically insane, I reasoned when I came back down from Crazy Mountain, so I’d best not read them.  Also, I don’t really see the point in reading bad reviews.  Maybe you hated my book, but there’s not much I can do about it now, is there?  So I deleted my Google Alert and resolved to stop going in search of bad news. 

Resolve is a wonderful thing, but I’ve found that it’s no match against the lethal combination of angst, boredom, and an entire bottle of gruner veltliner.  Sometimes, I believe, it’s sensible to face your fears head-on, to get the whole picture, to see yourself as others see you.  It’s sort of like standing naked in a three-way mirror:  I wouldn’t want to do it every day of my life, but at least a few times a year I think it’s a good idea to find out what’s going on back there. 

Enter Amazon. 

Say what you will about Amazon, but I believe I speak for most neurotic author-types when I say that we need it like junkies need their fix.  It’s all there:  the good; the bad; the sales rank.  Personally, I stopped looking at my Amazon page after a video was tacked onto it of me looking fat and talking about how much I love horses.  But on the night in question, even an unflattering video full of banal, earnest statements by yours truly could not keep me away.  I was drunk and I was sad and I was going through a Very Bad Breakup.  What I needed--and oh, I needed it--was to read every mean thing everyone had ever said about my book. 

I don’t know what, exactly, I was expecting, but the experience was somewhat anti-climactic.  There were a lot of horsey people who were pissed that I’d gotten a lot of horsey details wrong, which doesn’t bother me that much because, basically, when they say that certain things “don’t” happen, what they mean is that they “shouldn’t” happen.  Many of the horse training methods in my book that readers object to are things that I witnessed as a child.  Yeah, I fudged a few details here and there for the sake of plot or character development, and if that’s the reason you couldn’t tolerate my novel, I’m cool with it. 

Mostly, what I learned about my book is that it’s depressing.  Not just depressing, but “pointlessly depressing”; “brutal”; “disturbing”; “unrelentingly bleak”; and “appalling”--just to touch on the tip of the critical iceberg.  One reader claimed to be so disturbed by The God of Animals that, upon finishing it, she had to medicate herself with sleeping pills. 

It’s not like this all came as news to me.  Many readers have not been content to simply post their outrage on Amazon and have instead taken the time to contact me directly.  I’ve received emails which threaten to report me to PETA, been told that I ought to be ashamed of myself for the harm I’ve caused to animals, and had it suggested that my entire family should be put in prison, which I find a little baffling since my family owns not a horse ranch but a small wholesale HVAC business.  Also, it was recently brought to my attention that my book has been added to a list of Amazon products that should be banned.  There’s my novel, next to books on cock fighting and books on dog fighting, canned foie gras, and (someone please explain this to me) the second season of Seinfeld. 

Does it bother me?

Sometimes.  A little.  Sometimes, a lot.  

“You should write something happy,” people tell me, and I don’t understand.  Happy like Anna Karenina?  Happy like The Grapes of Wrath?  Happy like Lolita or Catch-22 or Revolutionary Road?  Happy like Hamlet? 

What, I’d like to ask people, are these “happy books” you speak of, and who is writing them?  I was an English Literature major, for sobbing out loud!  I’ve never read a happy book in my whole life!  Unless you count Jane Austen, who could usually be depended on to wrap things up with a wedding.  But Jane’s been dead a good long while.  She didn’t have to watch the oceans fill with oil and garbage, didn’t have to see her country turn its back on the education of its children in favor of marching off to steal someone else’s gasoline, didn’t have to watch that video of the lone polar bear paddling through an iceless arctic sea to a distant but most certain death.

You want to talk about animal cruelty, I’d like to say sometimes, then why don’t you start by telling me what you ate for dinner last night.  Steak?  Chicken?  Do you drink milk?  Eat cheese?  What are your shoes made of?  How about your purse?  

The planet, dear readers, is a sad, sad place, and if you do not see that, then your eyes aren’t open.

Which doesn’t mean there’s no respite.  I really don’t think of myself as a misery-chick.  The world is full of beauty; I see it everywhere.  It rises out of all the pain and ugliness, again and again and again, it rises.  Beauty and kindness and grace, they show up for all of us, even the most damaged, the most undeserving.  Strangers are kind for no reason, and people who owe us nothing are inexplicably generous and tender.  Connections are forged under the most unlikely circumstances.  During times of war and crisis, people fall in love.  These are the great miracles of life.  And they’re all around us all the time.  Denying the sadness of the world would be denying the magnificence of the beauty that exists in spite of it. 

Criticism is the hardest to take when you know there’s truth to it.  Which is maybe why I cringe a little each time I hear that my work is bleak or depressing.  When I was writing The God of Animals, my life was not exactly the stuff of fairy tales.  I was poor and lonely and living in a crappy apartment over a meth lab.  My love life was a Chernobyl-sized disaster, and I didn’t understand why life was so hard, so raw, so unfair.  I took my fears and questions and worries to the same place I always take them--the page.  I let my characters ask the questions I couldn’t give myself permission to ask, allowed them to explore the desires I was ashamed to admit I had, gave them the space to make the mistakes I was terrified of making myself.  Night after night, I took my heartache to that ranch, and night by night, it saved me. 

One of my favorite pieces of writing in the world is the short story “Escapes” by Joy Williams.  The story is about a young girl and her very troubling relationship with her alcoholic mother.  During the course of the story--which you should promptly find and read--the narrator is driven around by her drunk mother in her drunk mother’s convertible, the sense of danger rising and rising and rising until, as a reader, it’s almost unbearable.  In the very last line of the story, the narrator says of her mother’s car, “I got out of it, but it took me years.” 

It’s not a happy ending.  There’s no white wedding.  No prince.  No sunset.  But it’s a hopeful ending.  And it’s an honest ending.  And something about reading it makes me feel less alone in the world. 

I don’t expect everyone who reads my books to love or even like them.  Hard as it sometimes is, I try to remind myself that compared with the kind and lovely things I’ve heard from readers, the unbelievably generous and gracious emails that strangers have taken the time to write me, the criticism represents a very small percentage of feedback.  And while I sometimes feel a surge of anger that makes me want to write back and point out the hypocrisy of people scolding me about animal cruelty in my fictional novel while cheerfully shopping at Walmart and eating Tyson chicken, I don’t.  Because I think that most people are like my characters--flawed and limited by the sad world they live in, but doing their very best to take care of each other and live right and find beauty. 

Besides, if everybody thought my books were swell, however would I summon up the angst to write another one?