Since the inevitable conservative heat death of Twitter, most book dramas are ending up on Threads or Instagram rather than Mastodon or BlueSky, leading to a significant drop in what I, personally, get to witness since I’ve departed to the land of the blue butterfly for the most part. Nevertheless, I got lucky this time as one of the players in this drama has a Reddit account and their post on r/RomanceBooks managed to make it to my suggested posts on the front page. I suspect that in the coming days to months, more drama will end up infiltrating across the internet and I won’t miss too much, but for now things are mostly quiet…save the trials and tribulations of one Lilly Henderson.
Reddit user Funny-Swordfish-1809 (an alternate account) posted in the r/RomanceBooks subreddit a post with the title “Got doxxed and bullied by an author…” on the 25th of November this year. The post describes a pretty common experience for most readers who use GoodReads in the manner in which it was intended. They “read a book, reviewed it on GR and moved on.” What comes next is the part where we all collectively cringe from the secondhand embarrassment of seeing an author who’s too high on their own farts to realize that they shouldn’t be reading GoodReads reviews for validation.
That book's author saw my review, didn't like that it was critical unlike all their other 5 star reviews since at the time mine was the only one, so they posted it on their threads. Started picking it apart by pieces, trolling me, trash talking that included saying that my review was an 'essay', making fun of the way i wrote ( I'm not from US and English isn't my first language) and that i shouldn't have read their book.
-Funny-Swordfish-1809
The book in question was Lilly Henderson’s romantic novel, Until We Touch. Set in the modern day, it features a female main character (FMC) attracted to a man who is extremely averse to physical touch due to past trauma. Having not read the book, I can’t engage in any kind of discussion on how well Henderson managed to pull this off, nevertheless our Reddit reviewer did read it and apparently did not like it. That’s her prerogative, of course, I’m certain there are some awful reviews of shit that I’ve written over the years on GR, I just don’t see them because I’m not looking. Well, apparently that was too much to ask, as it is for so many previous authors who’ve fucked up like this in the past (Didn’t Lauren Hough do this?) and Henderson took this review to Threads where she allegedly shared it and proceeded to allegedly “pick it apart” for her 4000+ followers.
It was at this point that Swordfish’s review became a target as Henderson’s fans descended upon it to write mean-spirited replies in response. Even a fellow author of Henderson’s came into the fray to throw shade toward this reviewer, though at current it is unclear who this author was as most of what occurred is no longer available on the book’s GoodReads page. From here it becomes a “she said/she said” scenario as Henderson allegedly began to state that the reviewer was the one who “attacked” her first though Swordfish suggests, correctly, that the author could have simply not read the reviews or could have done what most people do when someone doesn’t like their work: understand that you’re writing can’t be for literally every single person in the world and that some folks are just not going to like your shit. Even Stephen fucking King gets one star reviews, it’s not super nuts-o for a reader to have a taste for something different that you just didn’t hit on. It couldn’t be that much of a surprise to Henderson that having her main male character (MMC) be revealed to have cheated on the FMC at 98% (right at the end of the book, according to Swordfish’s Reddit testimony) could have cause some serious “ick” in some readers who consider cheating one of those unforgivable sins…especially for a character that is supposed to be touch-averse due to trauma. Another reviewer on GR, Lena, tagged the book with “trash-male-character” and “disgusting-ending-or-conclusion” while complaining in her review that the book was a “waste of time,” lending credence to the idea that the last-minute infidelity (revelation?) was obviously in relatively poor taste. Other One-Star reviews are now, predictably, less about the book and more about Henderson’s behavior.
In her explanation of the incident on her GoodReads page, Henderson claims that she “made a mistake” in venting about what she considered to be disrespectful comments made about her work. She laments the fact that some of her readers “commented in defense” and apologizes for their unkind words despite going on to imply that the initial review was “hate” and that the other side was to blame for most of the escalation before her post “addressing the situation” (always a bad idea, I’ve found). Her claims thenceforth are both true and dubious in turns. Henderson did not “doxx” the reviewer—the usage of the term was erroneous as the reviewer is not a native English speaker and was unaware of the actual connotations of the word “doxx.” She claims secondly to have never “copied a review or mocked anyone publicly” but we have from several sources that she clearly did share something to a large number of followers and even if her Threads account was locked, it would still have had a significant impact and could be considered “public” by those standards. The third assertion of “I never went to a reviewer’s page to comment” seems here to be a moot point as that doesn’t seem to be the claim in the first place and would likely be only an inaccurate assumption on the part of those coming into this late. She again apologizes for her actions though she never describes well what her actions were, rather what they were not, and claims that due to the “overwhelming” nature of the situation she’s decided to step away from publishing “indefinitely,” going on to state that she doesn’t know if she can recover from the level of hate she’s experienced (which is apparently the myriad of one star review bombs she got for mouthing off on the internet).
Now, personally, I know exactly how overwhelming it can be to have a bunch of people online coming for your throat over your work or even just an off-hand comment you made on someone’s (maybe bullshit) take on it. It’s definitely enough to talk to a therapist about, for me it was enough to talk to a GP about getting on an antidepressant (obviously it wasn’t the cause of my depression, more a catalyst for intervention), but it’s definitely not something that entirely warrants hanging up the ol’ typewriter forever. You’re going to write a dud or two and you’re going to make a fool out of yourself here and there in your life. Sometimes you get too drunk at a party and you throw up in a stranger’s kitchen sink—it happens. Sometimes you get your feelings hurt and you make a dumb comment on the internet. This also happens. The inability for us as individuals to pick ourselves up and brush ourselves off is what makes it more difficult to create meaningful change in both ourselves and our environments. It encourages personal and societal stagnation, which is why I think Lilly Henderson should just go ahead and write some more books and never talk about this again outside of therapy and close personal friends.
I don’t know how many times I can say the same thing on this substack: that authors need to leave GoodReads to the readers and not even touch it if they don’t have to. If they have a publicist or even just a best friend who would be happy to half-engage on their behalf with specific rules set down not to even peek at the reviews, that’s great. Better than tempting themselves with that shit (because we all know that if we regularly went on GR for anything, even just a blog or whatever, we would be tempted to look and have our feefees hurt). Other than this, I feel like I need to press forward again with the notion that we need to stop with this idea of an “irredeemable” mistake that has to “end everything” because it’s too difficult to move on. If anything, we shouldn’t be addressing our controversies at all. Live within it. The phrase “That sure is an opinion” is an absolutely fine way to address whatever nonsense has come up and whatever One-Star reviews you’re getting.
Dear Lilly Henderson: Write another book, get rid of that screed on your GR bio, and talk to a therapist about it. Bury any embarrassment you have in books. You did something stupid on the internet but hey…at least you’re not Cait Corrain. Write for yourself, reconsider having your Romance MCs’ arc revolve around infidelity unless that’s a kink of yours (then be disgustingly unapologetic about it), and remember that you should be writing for at most 30 sickos at a time.