"Authors from Hell" Find a Guardian Angel

We have not been led to expect much from Citizen Girl, the second novel from nanny diarists Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin...and most of the reviews--see, for example, Carol Memmott in USA Today or Ruth Davis Konigsberg in the NY Observer--have focused on the authors as much if not more than the book. That's in addition to the reportage: last November, NYT style reporter Alex Williams turned in an almost-schadenfreudean profile detailing how "the darlings of the book industry have been poked, probed and dissected by the unforgiving New York literary world." That piece was fairly tame, though, in comparison to a dispatch from February in the Observer (by Sara Nelson, now with the Post) which reported that "the authors have committed the unforgivable sin of making themselves unlikable in both the book and the journalistic worlds."

Amidst all the negative coverage, Kraus and McLaughlin have a champion in the form of Sacha Zimmerman, the New Republic reviewer for bestsellers. She calls Citizen Girl "wickedly funny and well written but not dogmatic or finger wagging."

"How refreshing! [Zimmerman later enthuses] This year, I have read about the painfully frumpy women of Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, the saccharine plight of the widow looking for love in James Patterson's Sam's Letters to Jennifer, and the masochistic marathon sexcapades of a vampire huntress in Laurell K. Hamilton's Incubus Dreams. In nonfiction, I learned How to Make Love Like a Porn Star thanks to triple-X phenom Jenna Jameson, I read Alexandra Robbins's illuminating expose of the lurid lives of big-college sorority sisters, I was taught The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands under the tutelage of Dr. Laura Schelsinger, and I was urged not to "waste the pretty" in He's Just Not That Into You. Thank God for Citizen Girl."

It's Karen Joy Fowler, by the way, but the error reflects as poorly upon the TNR copyeditors as it does upon the reviewer...and though I've expressed my low opinion of her "Pulps" reviews in the past, it does appear that Zimmerman is articulating her positions more strongly than she was when the column launched--and, in all honesty, I don't know whether I would disagree with her here, not having seen Citizen Girl yet. One author who might agree with her is Rachel Kramer Bussel, who interviewed the pair for Gothamist recently.