My Good Friend’s Partner is a Terrible Writer and I HATE IT: Am I the Literary Asshole?

Hello and welcome back to another thrilling installment of Am I the Literary Asshole? , the advice column that wants you to consider anonymously sending me your hot takes in lieu of simply tweeting them out and causing a five-alarm literary fire. I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I’m happy to be here with you all today. It’s nice to have a moment of levity in the midst of a cacophony of horrors, isn’t it? Thanks for letting me share this goofy, drunken space with you. Today I’m serving up a batch of sangria because to be quite honest with you, I genuinely need the nutrients that come from eating the wine-soaked fruit. (What, it’s healthy! And wine’s technically a grape.) So why don’t we just sit back, relax, and slip into something a little more comfortable. First up on the docket? Audiobook quandaries… 1) I know, I know—audiobooks are real books, it’s ableist to say otherwise, etc. I know this fully and at least mostly believe in it. I’d love to ask, dad, if you think I’m an asshole for thinking that the quality of narrator greatly impacts the literary experience of a book, and also that as a writer who reveres form and shape, surely there is something missing if you don’t know anything about a story’s written page??? I don’t even want to talk about this with my friends, because the discourse goes straight to the flat and uninteresting “audiobooks are real books (and btw I play them on 3x speed and listen to one a day at work).” I feel so frustrated by how textureless the discussions are, given how much I personally think we’re giving up with audiobooks. Do I listen to them? Sure—but only for authors where I’ve got a good grip of their craft and I’ve read them before, or (okay maybe I’m an asshole) books where I don’t care about their craft at all and I’m just in it for the genre. Secretly, when someone says they’ve listened to my audiobook, I feel obviously 110% grateful but am a little disappointed. […]

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