Bob Thomas wrote in the Washington Post about what happened when Ayelet Waldman wrote an essay about motherhood:
Waldman never watched the ABC chatfest anyway. But so what? Why shouldn’t she watch it now?
“Because
Star Jones is ripping you to shreds.”
Another
friend called from Chicago.
“Ayelet,
what the (expletive) have you done?” Waldman recalls her whispering.
“I’ve
never seen so many e-mails in an inbox,” Waldman says.
And
all because she’d admitted — no, asserted! publicly! in The New York Times! —
that there was someone more important in her life than her four beloved kids.
“If
a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I
am not a good mother,” Waldman wrote in a March 27, 2005, Modern Love column.
“I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.”
Inevitably,
she went on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” While getting made up, she heard “a kind
of shrieking” in the background. “What is that?” she asked. Turned out it
was the studio audience.
“Most
of them hate you,” she recalls the producer telling her."
***
Of course it also made her a minor celebrity who went on to write several books. But fear of how people will react is one of the things that keeps some people from writing in the first place, and how to deal with that fear and others is the subject of the first chapter of my book, "Your Writing Coach." One option is to write under a pen name, of course. Another--taken by Waldman--is simply to realize that whenever you take a stand of any kind, there will be those who disagree with you--and so what?
