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In October 2009, I received my first one-star review. The rating didn’t bother me much, because the reviewer’s other one-star reads included two of my favorite books plus an Oprah club pick. But a particular line in the text of the review haunted me for nearly three years: “The writing was so unsophisticated.”
After I read that line, it hardly registered when other strangers described my book with words like “compelling”, “important”, “heart-wrenching”, and “superbly written”, because my brain kept going back to so unsophisticated. I had never in my life strived to be sophisticated–I’m not even sure what it means–but suddenly it became the measure by which I judged every passage I wrote. Continue reading “Sooo Phisticated”