How to Handle Negative Criticism, thoughts by Alice Gilmore, author of Alice, A Memoir

Welcome to the book tour for Alice, A Memoir by Alice Gilmore. Today she is opening herself up by sharing her thoughts on how to handle negative criticism. There's also an excerpt from her memoir for you to read before you download your own copy. Please leave her comments and enter the giveaway below. Be sure to also follow the tour to learn even more about her.


How to handle negative criticism

Negative comments on this book will be like armour piercing bullets because, although I have no literary ambitions, I have laid my life out there for anyone to trample on. Or perhaps I will be impervious. It is my life and I have loved it so say what you like? I wonder.

The obvious thing to say is: just ignore negative criticism. Easier said than done and I think I will soak up everything said about this book. Because of the content I expect quite a lot of negative remarks about it and my whole life story. Although I think that negative remarks about this particular book will simply be people reviewing their own prejudices.

I hope there will plenty of good ones too. I think and hope that I am prepared but I doubt if I am sufficiently. Negative comments and opinions directed against you always hurt, sometimes dreadfully, not just in art.

But if you publish or perform or paint or whatever you are fair game so grin and bear it. Were I a professional writer I suppose I would try to learn from what is said about my work, be it positive or negative. But professionals tell me that critics rarely get to the root of things or say anything that can be used as learning fodder. What did Brendan Behan say of theatre critics? Something like, ‘The eunuchs in the harem. They see it done every night but they can’t do it themselves.’

And if you go back to 1702 there is that bitter couplet in a prologue by Thomas Farquhar:

Our dreadful foes the critics, when they spy
They cock, they charge, they fire – then back they fly.

Critics were not only foes; they were also cowards, in his view.

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Alice, a Memoir

Few, if anyone, could have had a life like Alice Gilmore. It was almost unbelievable yet carried on under the cover of a respectable middle-class existence.

You might strongly disapprove of what she did, but Alice was determined. She overcame insurmountable obstacles to keep the love she longed for.

Her single-minded fight to live out her love makes a gripping, riveting story that one eminent literary person called ‘staggeringly readable’. It is shocking. Her methods will upset some, but are you with her or against her? Your decision.

This is no misery memoir. It’s a story told with joy, wit and fervour – the astonishing story of the overwhelming love Alice Gilmour was determined to live out.

Read an excerpt:

I am going to tell you our story, my darlings. It is really only for you three and one other (you know who) but I can’t help hoping that the world will read it, which is why I shall probably publish it. But not for some years. When you’re fully grown up and have flown the nest. God knows what they will make of it, the world I mean, whoever they are, but I am not suggesting that any rules or taboos should be changed by our story, or new rules made. Leave all that alone. Our story, perhaps I should say my story, just is. You could tritely call it the exception that proves the rule. Perhaps that is just what it is: unique. I doubt that but it is certainly extraordinary. I have carefully chosen those words. Any old event of yawning banality is called ‘amazing’, ‘fantastic’, ‘unbelievable’, ‘fabulous’ in our current jargon. Whatever else people may call my story it is certainly extraordinary.

It is, above all, a love story, an all-consuming love story, though I have never felt consumed by love, rather continually renewed. But isn’t that what love should do to you? Consume you and renew you constantly like the phoenix. And it brought with it another constant emotion: fear. And pain. The fear of pain. The fear of the pain of losing it, this wonderful state. The word love doesn’t fully express what I/we felt. Another word that is more or less totally debased.

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About Alice Gilmore

If you want to know about my life and background read this book. I can scarcely add to what I have written about myself in there. I earnestly hope that the rest of my life is too uneventful to even consider writing anything else, I am no novelist. The life I have described was full enough and rich enough for me. God knows what I would come out with if I had to invent. If you find you need a good chef I shall consider anything not too energetic – which rules out most jobs in the kitchen.

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