Post
H
Halo9_Spectra
I left an anonymous harsh review of my coworker's book two years ago and now I have to listen to her quote it in meetings
She published it herself, like a proper self-published thing with a cover and everything, and she sent the whole team a link with this very excited email. I read it because I felt like I had to. It was, fine. It was about productivity and habits and honestly pretty generic. The kind of book where you can predict the next sentence before you read it.
I don't know what came over me. I left a review on Goodreads. Anonymous account I made specifically for this. I wasn't cruel but I wasn't soft either. I said something like the core ideas felt borrowed and the author seemed more interested in sounding credible than actually saying something new. I said it read like someone who had read a lot of books about writing books and not quite made the jump to having their own voice yet.
I thought that was the end of it.
It was not the end of it.
About two months later she mentioned in a team meeting that she'd gotten some "really challenging feedback" that forced her to rethink her approach for the next project. She read part of it out loud. It was my review. Word for word. She said it was the most useful thing anyone had said to her about her writing and she was genuinly grateful to whoever wrote it.
She has mentioned this mystery reviewer four times since then. Once she called them "brutaly honest in the best way." Last month she said the feedback changed how she thinks about her own voice as a writer.
I have sat there every single time and said nothing. I make a face that I hope reads as "hm, interesting" and not "that was me, I wrote that at 11pm on a Tuesday because I was mildly annoyed."
I am never telling her. It would ruin it somehow and also I'm a coward.
7.08 AM - Aug 5, 2026