Exactly. When I read the first story about this, I couldn’t get over a professionally successful adult being that personally hurt by a single work-based criticism by a 20-year-old student at a small college. The counter-criticism about the value of YA lit/genre fiction/women authors is fine, even if I really only…

Is this Dessen’s kinja account? Someone giving tepid praise to your book is “being an asshole”? And if Dessen can react this poorly to someone making an offhand comment about her book and you defend that, I’m not sure why you don’t also think everyone else has the right to think she’s unhinged in reaction to her.

Oh good lord, can’t college kids flex their newly critical muscles without people thinking it’s the end of the world? When you put something creative out in to the world you relinquish control over it. And college students are notorious for hating stuff from their youth, both reasonable and unreasonable.

She probably has identical maturity to the characters she writes about. #WriteWhatYouKnow

This is the most disappointing thing about all this

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.

Well, for one thing Dessen would had to have gone out of her way to find that quote. In any event, even if it is inevitable that at some point, because of a bad day or bad series of days you will lash out at someone who doesn’t and deserve it and accuse them of something they didn’t do (it’s not) that doesn’t make it…

Yes, and someone brought up in the comments on the other post that Dessen’s books themselves are super white. I think there’s a lot to be said about that in particular, given that Dessen is decrying someone calling her books “fine for teen girls” when the audience for those books is very likely all white teen girls…

This whole thing was a classic example of peak white feminism (TM)

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…

I didn’t see anyone saying ‘These books are bad and no one should read them’ this person literally said ‘These books are not at a level that really fit a college programme’ which is fine. There’s many different books out there at varying levels and not everything can be pulled apart at a college level. 

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. 

She didn’t join the committee to prevent anyone from being exposed to it, she joined the committee because she didn’t think that Dessen’s work, which was apparently under consideration, was up to the standards of what the program was supposed to be. How is that an issue that she had a particularly strong opinion about…

“The issue here is that what she did went well beyond “not liking the book””

One thing I’ve learned from following writers on Twitter is that 99 percent of them, no matter what level of fame they’re at, have Google Alerts on their name.

A Bret Stephens level of fragility is a good place to start.

From her tweets, she seems like the type who very closely monitors the Google Alert she set up for her own name.

Right? Someone has some Google alerts for their name mentions.

how in the world did this writer find out about this article to begin with?