I'm indifferent to Goodreads reviews of my nonfiction books. But I have to say that, when it comes to my first novel, I find it sad and disturbing that

1. Before the book was even available in galleys to anyone, there was a “review” (since deleted) that said that good people should not read or review the book because of my transphobic policy positions, which is interesting because I have entirely conventional progressive trans rights positions

2. When I commented on that review to say that it was not true, a bunch of other reviewers showed up to say that I was harassing reviewers there on Goodreads, and had also supposedly set up accounts on Instagram and Reddit under my own name that also harassed Goodreads reviewers, which would be both a very stupid thing for me to do and made no sense given that, again, almost no one had read the book except for me and my agent and my editor at Coffee House at that point

3. Goodreads sent me an email saying that I could not comment on reviews of my own books and that I risked having my account being banned, despite the fact that I was never arguing about reviews of quality but rather claims about my behavior or beliefs that simply weren't true

4. A huge number of reviews of the book refer to it as being in the first person when it is in written entirely in the third person and in fact was explicitly constructed to never refer directly to the interiority of the character in terms of her conscious thoughts or motivations, only to the psychiatric symptoms that she was experiencing; If there are a number of complaints about her supposed internal monologue, which simply doesn't exist in the text

5. A bunch of reviews refer to supposedly cringey sex scenes when less than 40 total words in the book refer to sexual acts at all and the acts in question are deeply sad and disordered portrayals of a psychotic woman being sexually exploited because she was incapable of saying no, not overwrought or hammy depictions of consensual sex

6. A stunning number of the reviews are just reviews of me, and have almost no reference to the book at all.

I've been doing this for 20 years and I have always received a lot of criticism, which it's too be expected, and I'm not at all afraid to receive bad reviews. But it's bizarre to have so many people making outlandish claims about online behaviors I've never participated in that I was then forbidden from disputing, and then for so many of the reviews to misrepresent basic facts about the book or to simply not reflect on the book's quality at all, just their perceptions of me, perceptions which again flatly misrepresent core, moral and political values of mine.

I used to love writing Goodreads reviews but I've just entirely soured on the site. There's such a deeply entrenched toxic user base there that loves to bully authors, and neither Goodreads nor their owners at Amazon seem at all interested in reforming anything.