Two Stars, One Sentence, and the Fortnight It Ruined: Learning to Stop Reading My Own Reviews
It arrived on a Tuesday, which feels right. Bad news in Britain has a habit of turning up midweek, when your defences are down and the kettle's on its third boil.
I'd been doing so well, too. For nearly six months after my book came out, I'd maintained a dignified silence around the review pages. A friend had asked how I was managing it, and I'd said something breezy about not having the app on my phone, as though I were a reformed smoker chatting about willpower. The truth is I'd simply been lucky. The reviews that trickled in were kind, occasionally generous, and — crucially — infrequent enough that I could resist the urge to monitor them like a stock portfolio.
Then came the Tuesday.
The Sentence
I won't quote it in full, because I've decided I'm allowed to protect myself a little. But the gist was this: the reviewer gave the book two stars and explained that they were deducting points purely because it had made them feel something, and they hadn't asked for that.
Now, on paper, this is a compliment wearing a trench coat. Any writer worth their salt wants to make readers feel things. Feelings are the entire job. And yet I sat there on the sofa, phone in hand, and felt something crack quietly in my chest like an ice cube in a warm glass.
Because here's what I actually read, underneath the words: you got it wrong, Liam. You tried to move someone and you tripped them up instead.
The British Problem
There's a specific national condition at play here, I think. We're raised on a diet of understatement and light self-deprecation, taught that bigging yourself up is vulgar and that the correct response to praise is a mumbled "oh, it was nothing." This works fine at dinner parties. It is catastrophic when you're a writer, because the whole enterprise requires you to believe — privately, quietly, against all evidence — that what you've made matters.
So when a stranger in Rotherham (I'm assuming Rotherham; the profile picture was a spaniel) tells you it didn't, you don't have much of a defence system. There's no scaffolding. We never built any. We spent all that energy learning to say "not bad" about things we were secretly proud of, and now a two-star review has walked straight through the unfenced garden.
For the next fortnight, I did what every writer does and pretends not to. I refreshed. I re-read. I performed elaborate mental gymnastics about the spaniel's probable qualifications. I dragged the review out at 1am like a sore tooth I couldn't stop tonguing. My partner noticed before I admitted it — apparently I'd developed what she called "the face," the one I usually reserve for delayed trains.
What Actually Helped
Nothing dramatic, I'm sorry to report. No epiphany, no wise word from a literary hero at a festival bookshop in Hay. What helped was smaller and more annoying than that.
First: my writing group — the same brutally honest lot from the village hall — pointed out that I could quote this review at every future event and get a laugh with it. "Made them feel something," delivered deadpan, is genuinely good material. Reframing it as comedy did more for my morale than any amount of breathing exercises.
Second: I remembered a thing a bookseller in Manchester once told me, that the reviews people remember years later are almost never the five-star ones. They're the ones with a bit of friction. A book that provokes something — even irritation — has done more than the polite ones that evaporate on contact.
And third, the one I keep coming back to: I stopped reading reviews as verdicts and started reading them as postcards. A postcard from one person, on one Tuesday, in one mood, with one spaniel. It tells you something true about that moment. It tells you almost nothing about the book.
The Rules I've Set Myself
Since then I've adopted three modest rules, which I offer up in case they're useful to anyone else hovering over a refresh button:
- No reviews after 9pm. Night-brain turns two stars into a referendum on your entire existence. Day-brain mostly shrugs.
- Wait a week before responding to anything, even internally. Most stings fade to something more like curiosity if you give them time.
- One review is weather, not climate. You wouldn't cancel summer because it rained on the eighth of June.
I still slip. Last month I caught myself googling the book at a service station outside Doncaster, of all places, and had to physically put the phone in the boot. Progress, not perfection.
But here's what I know now that I didn't know on that Tuesday: the stranger who didn't want to feel something felt something anyway. That's not a failure of the book. That might be the whole point of it — arriving uninvited, doing its work regardless.
Two stars. Made them feel something. I've had worse sentences written about me, though admittedly most were by my old English teacher. And unlike her marks, this one I can actually laugh about now.
Mostly.
