America will absolutely stand for it. I think what people miss about the book The Handmaiden’s Tale which the show barely addresses was that everyone did accept it through indifference and/or blindness. They kept saying “this will never happen,” “someone will stop it,” etc. except no one did because by the time it was…

You’re making the assumption that there won’t be people there with guns pointed at them while the law is enacted.

someone compiled a log of all the YA authors who piled on in the harassment/hate campaign against Ms. Nelson on Twitter. It should be used as a “Do Not Read” list. There are so many good and worthy authors out there, that authors who engage in this type of behavior are not worthy of your time or money. Find other…

Like a suburban cargo cult built around a Precious Moments edition of Lean In.

she saw something she felt hurt by, called it out, and friends supported her.

Yes, Event Horizon reference!

I do imperfect and stupid things all the time. But I agree with the other people below; if she was sad/hurt/angry, she could have called or emailed a friend. That option is still available to all of us. She decided to make it public, and turn it into a debate about a bigger issue. Bad day or no, she can be called out…

She should be immune to it by this point in her career, and IMHO, it is pretty sad that she’s not.

She also should be very aware of the potential consequences of her calling out something like this on her Twitter and called, texted, or DM’d a friend instead.

Of course, Dessen and other authors are humans and can be…

She really should have turned off her google alert then. 

From Dessen’s bio on her own website:

I opened the replies to Dessen’s tweet and immediately developed the Sam Neill madness from Event Horizon. Like a suburban cargo cult built around a Precious Moments edition of Lean In.

I’m a YA author, and I’ve been hurt by reviews, too. But *they’re not for me*. They’re for readers who might be curious about my work. If I need to, I vent privately to friends and then move on. I would never publicly set my huge following on a stranger for having an opinion about my work. Does this person from the…

Plenty of times. Did I then turn to social media so that my thousands of fans could help me pile on a single person? No. No one handed Sarah Dessen a clipping from the local news in Aberdeen, South Dakota, saying “you’ve got to see this”. She sought that out, and then felt so hurt that the internet didn’t return…

she didn’t go on an all-day rant, though. not at all. but hey, congrats on your ascension and never getting upset about anything or having a rough time, truly. 

Truly, the person who compared this to Larry Nassar’s systematic abuse of girls and women needs to get a hold of themselves. That they thought one very successful woman’s bruised ego was equivalent to the pain caused to tens of women who were sexually assaulted multiple times is incredibly insulting to his victims. 

It’s why preteens like her books so much; she acts and thinks like one.

That whole thread was absolutely the MVP. Just hysterical.

“Inclusion absolutely matters, in the classroom and outside the classroom, but yelling at a single woman with absolutely no sway in the publishing or academic worlds, is not the way to get it.” 

I was particularly disturbed by Dessen’s tweets about how this one young woman’s opinion was ‘mean and cruel’ and had ruined her day. It seems this 50 year old woman has less emotional maturity than the 15 year old kids she writes about.

The problem with this is the power difference. Bestselling, millionaire authors with large fan bases are attacking an unknown college student and pretending the criticism actually hurts them in any real way. It doesn’t.