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Confessions of a Former Literary Book Snob
People don’t want the ache — they crave the fairytale ending, the one million copies sold.
I’ve never read Eat Pray Love, and when I saw the movie in theaters I’d rather get a hundred papercuts to the face. I was a part of a group of literary types who thought we were cool because of our snobbery, not in spite of it. We thought Gilbert frivolous, privileged, deserving of side-eyes and media roasts — and we hadn’t even read her book. We eviscerated a stranger who was brave enough to wake from her sleeping life and see an entire book through — all because she didn’t write what we once considered the big books, the important books.
Whatever that means.
“We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we’re so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth–nobody was ever thinking about you anyhow. –Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
For much of my twenties and early thirties, I was judgmental and I surrounded myself with other judgmental writers. It’s…
