Against Expectation #5

The Reader Who Cross-Referenced Me With His Wife

A few years ago, someone left a review of one of my novels online that has stayed with me ever since. Not because it was especially savage — I’ve had worse — but because it revealed something oddly moving about the way readers approach fiction.

The review began:

“The overwhelming majority of the books I read are set in places I have never been. I now realise how important that is.”

Which is already a fascinating sentence. The reader had picked up the book partly because they knew the setting intimately. They grew up there. They knew the towns, the people, the rhythms of speech. They assumed this familiarity would deepen the experience.

Instead, it completely destroyed it.

“I found myself questioning the authenticity of everything, the descriptions of towns, landscapes, the dialect.”

This was particularly interesting to me because the novel was set in the exact landscape I grew up in too. The geography wasn’t researched from afar or assembled from documentaries and maps. I know those roads instinctively. I know the weather there. I know the texture of the light on those moors in late afternoon. I know the silences in those villages.

And yet to this reader it all felt somehow false.

I don’t think he was lying, either. I think he genuinely experienced the book that way. Which made me realise that readers often confuse authenticity with recognition. What they actually want, sometimes, is not realism but confirmation. They want their inner version of a place reflected back at them intact.

When fiction diverges from that private map, it can feel almost offensive.

The review then took an even stranger turn:

“There’s something really problematic about a man describing the ‘almost orgasmic’ sensation of breastfeeding. I cross referenced this statement with my wife and she was rather disturbed.”

I have thought about the phrase “I cross referenced this statement with my wife” far more than I should have. It sounds less like a Goodreads review and more like an academic paper undergoing peer review.

But what interested me wasn’t the offence itself. Readers are entitled to dislike anything they want. What interested me was the assumption beneath it: that I had simply invented the sensation irresponsibly.

In reality, whenever I write intimately about experiences outside my own body, I interview people extensively. Especially women. Particularly around subjects involving motherhood, physicality, vulnerability, shame or desire. Not because I think research grants automatic permission, but because I’m aware of how easy it is to write falsely if you rely only on imagination and stereotype.

The line in question came directly from conversations I’d had while researching the novel.

Which means the reader wasn’t really objecting to fabrication. He was objecting to the existence of the experience itself.

And that’s where criticism becomes genuinely interesting to me. Because books are not only read through language. They’re read through biography, suspicion, ownership and projection. Readers bring entire moral frameworks to a sentence before they even encounter it.

Sometimes they are arguing with the book.
Sometimes they are arguing with the author.
Sometimes they are arguing with the idea that another person’s experience might exist outside their own understanding.

The odd thing is, I don’t even dislike the review.

In fact, I think it’s oddly honest. By the end, the reviewer admits:

“I’m sure people will love this book… for whatever reason I just couldn’t get into it.”

That “for whatever reason” feels important. You can feel him wrestling with something he can’t fully articulate. The book and the reader simply refused to synchronise.

And maybe that’s one of the unavoidable truths of fiction. A novel can be meticulously researched, emotionally sincere and geographically accurate — and still feel completely alien to someone who comes from the exact same place.