Alice Hoffman gets angry … on Tweeter

Recently I remarked that some Malaysian authors and publishers couldn’t take criticisms. Apparently this trait is a global one.

After all, Anne Rice let off steam at reviewers in Amazon.com (my earlier post: Anne Rice strikes back at nasty reviewers), so why not Alice Hoffman … on Twitter?

Got the news from Sharon Bakar’s blog that Hoffman was none-too-pleased with one not-so-positive review of her latest book, The Story Sisters.

She wrote over several tweets:

“Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron. How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.”

“Now any idiot can be a critic. Writers used to review writers. My second novel was reviewed by Ann Tyler. So who is Roberta Silman?”

“No wonder there is no book section in the Globe anymore — they don’t care about their readers, why should we care about them”

Ooh, entertaining. But rather than stop there she actually released the email and phone number of the said reviewer to her fans … and my Gen-X opinion: WTF?

Expressing your opinion (no matter how ungenerous) is one thing, but to leak out the personal contact details of a reviewer … er, hello, they call it stalking in some circles. Not cool man, not cool.

Hoffman received mostly boos from the Twitteratti. Hoffman has since disabled her Twitter account and wrote a “sort of” apology but the what’s on the Internet is eternal, sadly, and Hoffman may be remembered by some as being one of the most immature authors around. Which probably may not be true. (I mean, don’t you have days when you behave like a two-year-old?)

But the lesson remains. It’s the Internet age, folks. Think twice before you tweet in anger. Especially if you’re famous.