Read Please Stop Laughing At Me in two and a half days, and that was too long to spend with the book. I picked it up because it was the last book to get a major marketing push before I left the bookstore at the end of last April. And because I was an outsider in school. I don’t really recall anyone laughing at me, mostly just keeping their distance, but I figured I’d be able to relate to the author.

Not really. She endured some terrible stuff at the hands of her schoolmates, but despite everything they did to her, she always resisted her outsider status. I may not have been happy with mine, but I embraced it, more or less.

Anyway, the book is really hard to read. Not because it’s difficult. Not even because the subject matter is painful. But because the author can’t write. Here’s someone who was so focused on her personal trauma that she managed to miss every “Show don’t tell” lesson ever given. Nowhere in this book does the reader feel any of her pain. You’re always looking from across the room, thinking, gosh, that’s so sad. I stuck with the book to the end, hoping it would get better, hoping she’d learn to stand up for herself. If you’re going to claim unpopular viewpoints, you’d better expect people to disagree with you. And once they do, if you don’t resist the disagreement, either with argument or with stubbornness, they’ll walk right over you. Remind me, what was the point in disagreeing in the first place?