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What Do You Do When a Reader Writes a Nasty Letter?
You write back. Sort of.
Yesterday morning I received the following email:
“How predictable. A writer from one era who finds herself in an extreme position of privilege as an editor decides to throw stones from the top of that pedestal at young creative talents from more youthful generations.”
This was not the only email I got telling me that a piece I wrote several weeks ago for the New Yorker’s website, about The Queen’s Gambit, was bad. It was probably the tenth. Maybe the eighth. It was the only one I wrote back to:
“I don’t understand how I am a writer who finds myself in an extreme position of privilege as an editor. There’s a lot going on in that sentence. I am not an editor. I think you have confused me with someone, possibly someone with the same name as me? I don’t know. Also there are a lot of mixed metaphors in this. Also I hope you’re not a writer, and certainly hope for your sake and for everyone else’s you never suddenly, over the course of a sentence, become an editor.”
I erased that. Then I wrote:
“I think it’s funny that you think I am in an extreme position of privilege. I am a Freelance Writer. I capitalize that as a joke because it’s not even a title. I do not have a lot of power. The fact that…
