Sunday, May 06, 2012

Too Young, Too Pretty: When Authors Are Criticized For Their Looks


by . Friday May 4, 2012, Flavorpill

This week, Nell Freudenberger’s second novel, The Newlyweds hit shelves, and we’d say we’re pretty excited. The book itself is great, but the reappearance of the author reminded us of her past as a new kid on the block, part of that cyclical surge of young, attractive authors that always seem to take a lot of heat, especially from critics and other writers. After all, it’s not every author who is judged in the headlines to be “too young, too pretty, too successful,” but we like to think that with her newest novel, Freudenberger has pushed past that stigma to be taken a bit more seriously, and perhaps enjoyed with a little less jealousy. Others of her good looking brethren have done the same — or have fallen off the face of the planet. Click through to see our round up of a few authors that have been criticized, ridiculed, or simply condescended to for their looks or age, and how they’ve fared since. And no, we’re not going to get into the whole Franzen/Wharton thing.


Nell Freudenberger
In a 2003 backhanded-compliment-filled Salon article entitled “Too young, too pretty, too successful,” critic Curtis Sittenfeld expressed the all-too typical kind of rage-jealousy that gets directed at young, attractive authors, admitting that he and his friends hated her for things like her first author photo in The New Yorker (“it would be overstating it, but not by much, to say that you could see down her shirt”) and her choice to turn down a large book deal for a smaller one (“Meaning she was, like, virtuous and un-greedy on top of everything else — it was sickening!”). But really, it’s the fact that she’s good looking, “thought not to have paid her dues,” a Harvard grad, and supposedly talentless. Except that last part isn’t really true. And yeah, we’re jealous too, but we’re also glad to see that Freudenberger wasn’t a single, sexy flash in the pan, and that it’s looking like she’ll have a long career ahead of her.

Karen Russell
A more recent addition to the remarkably young-and-hot author club, Russell has been stirring up her own share of jealous/adoring fans. As the Observer observed “Never has a young author provoked such envy since that little minx Freudenberger.” Indeed, we thought Bill Ryan summed up the aspiring literati’s feelings after seeing her read last year: “She is 28, and I’m trying so hard not to be jealous or petty about the fact that she could, as the emcee noted, be on the New Yorker’s “30 under 40″ list twice in her lifetime. Goddammit.” Then again, her work, especially her most recent novel, Swamplandia!, has been so ridiculously well-received, almost across the board, that she’s not getting as much backlash as she might otherwise. We think she’s successfully skipped the buzzy phase and moved right on to “I’m so good you can’t question me” status. As she should be.
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