What’s the most

gallingly hypocritical

criticism/insult

you’ve ever received?

 
There’s nothing better than constructive criticism that helps you transcend a personal blind spot and reach true self-improvement, but the truth is that this kind of criticism is much rarer than those who think they are dishing it out believe it to be. Very often those who think they are engaging in constructive criticism are just being opinionated jerks who are adding nothing to the conversation than revelations of their own personal failings.

Here’s a specific example from my own life: Several years back I published a book about urban legends that was imaginatively titled Urban Legends. For some reason it proved to be my most popular book in terms of attracting interest from reviewers and journalists (as a result of it I even ended up being quoted in a popular LA Times article that was eventually adapted into a less popular horror movie), but one review in particular stood out from the rest.

It turned out to be my first bad review (which isn’t saying much when you consider the first online review of my work I had ever found had been written by a fourth grader, who thought my Haunted Schools was “miraculous”), which would have been fine were it not for the fact that the reviewer had decided to expand his critique beyond the book itself and into the realm of personal attack. Time has deleted the review from the Internet, but he ended it by suggesting it was obvious that when I wrote the book I was far more preoccupied with that night’s date than I was in the prose itself.

Honestly, I was kinda flattered he assumed I had that kind of rich social life (I really, really didn’t), but I was mostly taken aback by this because–as the author of the book–it was crystal clear to me that he hadn’t read past the first chapter, since none of his references extended beyond the first 25 pages and most of his critiques were invalidated by stories that occurred later on in the text.

I was being called a lazy hack by a book reviewer who hadn’t even bothered to read the book he was reviewing.

Can you think of something similar that happened to you? A moment where you couldn’t believe someone had the chutzpah to call you out for something they were far more guilty of than you were? How did you deal with it? Did you just let it lie (like I did in this instance) or did you call them out on their BS?