While she has every right to criticize another author’s work, her comment misses the point. Weiner also added that she felt Waldman’s novel could have been improved "if he’d had a sister who had, like, an unfortunate complexion, or maybe wasn’t the cutest girl" to call out his bad behavior towards women. Of Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., a novel about dating and romance in New York that received much critical praise, Weiner tweeted, "Girl writes about kissing from male POV, in Brooklyn, with artsy cover, and impressive blurbs. And if you believed that - if you wrote that way, or if you read that way - then, by God, you were Doing Reading Wrong." But Weiner overreached in her response, taking Messud to mean, "Novels were absolutely, positively not there to serve the petty function of helping people feel connected. There's the case of Claire Messud, author of several critically acclaimed novels, who said in reference to Weiner's amiable protagonists, "If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble." Messud was acknowledging that good fiction is teeming with unlikable characters, from Uriah Heep to Gollum.
She tells Mead she feels compelled to be a mouthpiece, because "if some literary woman were to be known as a gadfly, or a crank, even - somebody who won’t shut up, somebody who is persistent and abrasive - that could hurt her, career-wise."īut when it came to Weiner’s attacks on some of these other authors, she has gone over the line, especially with female writers.
She recognizes that her success in commercial fiction has given her unique leverage that more "literary" female authors may lack, and she wants to use her power for good.
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