I came home to a football-size bubble on the kitchen ceiling. It jiggled when I touched it, swollen with water from a leak I couldn’t see. I was still trying to decide what to do when my phone vibrated with an email. A single sentence from a stranger: Men abuse women because of women like you.
Earlier that week, I’d published a piece about leaving a toxic relationship for a job in Death Valley National Park. It was very personal, even for a personal essay. The initial response was a flood of kindness, which I naively thought would last. It didn’t. The email led me to the comments, the messages on Instagram, Facebook. The bubble on the ceiling expanded, the pressure building.
I called family members, friends. Well, it does come with the territory, one of them said.
The circumstances vary, but this experience is one shared by many writers. We dream of landing bylines and book deals, but few resources prepare us for the attention—and occasionally harassment—that comes with writing for a wide audience. You are not a celebrity, but you still occupy a space where hundreds, thousands, even millions of people can judge you.
In the era of the personal brand, the pressures are even more acute. Being a writer in 2026 means marketing yourself as a public figure. Rachel Taff, whose debut novel, Paper Cut, came out this year, told me about investing her own money into a photo shoot for social media and teaching herself to use Canva and TikTok. To promote my own novel, I bought a ring light, a tripod, and a CapCut subscription. I wrote scripts for myself and recited them to a front-facing camera. I didn’t want to feel embarrassed, but I was.
Growing up in New Hampshire, I used to drive through the small town of Cornish in hopes of seeing J.D. Salinger. Sometimes I’d stop at the general store for ice cream and try to work up the nerve to ask about him. But I’d heard stories about visitors asking how to get to his house only to be given fake directions. His solitude was so important that the town protected it.
The archetype of the reclusive literary figure—someone like Thomas Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy—is usually male. I’ve never heard a male writer agonize over the tension between writing and being a public figure. It’s the women around me who are starting Substacks to promote their books and attending to their social media feeds. A male professor I had while I was working on my MFA once told me I should just focus on the work, but having an internet presence has gotten me enough opportunities to justify being there.
I recently searched #DebutAuthor on Instagram and TikTok and was met with an endless scroll of women’s faces. On Instagram, 49 of the top 50 posts under this hashtag were from women. On TikTok, it was 50 out of 50. The posts that performed best on both platforms were personal in nature. On Instagram, the words I’m an author, but I’m also… appeared again and again above photos of women holding their books followed by carousels of pets, children, and hobbies. Women writers used familiar internet formats: a GRWM (get ready with me) video of an author doing her makeup; a day-in-the-life video of a romantasy author writing, doing skin care, and eating a burrito; and many, many unboxing videos for debut novels. I knew this content. I’d been making it too. They recorded themselves crying as they got book deals. They looked back on the times they almost gave up. They wrote captions about the challenge of balancing writing and family.
Women writers have long been associated with personal narrative, of course. Anne Sexton, one of the most well-known confessional poets, was criticized for using her emotional writing to bring attention to her appearance. The personal essay boom is associated with female-centered websites, most notably the now defunct xoJane, known for the “It Happened to Me” series. Even when our work isn’t autobiographical, people assume it is. In 2017, when Kristen Roupenian’s fictional short story “Cat Person” went viral, much of the discourse referred to it as an essay.
Once, a male friend picked up my book from a shelf, turned it over, and looked at the photo of me on the back cover. My friend Bridget, an accomplished photojournalist, took that picture. We both put a lot of thought into it. Obviously I wanted to look good, but I wanted to look thoughtful and literary too, like a real artist.
“Ha,” my friend said, looking down at it. “Of course you made them put this giant picture of you on the back.”
“I didn’t make them do anything,” I said.
“Sure,” he said.
***
I once put a video on my TikTok that earned (at last count) 1,215 comments, most of them negative. I had made it during my book tour. I’d been recording road-trip videos set to music, which was time-consuming and rarely resulted in more than 100 views. After a day of driving, I arrived at a hotel in Utah, tired and hungry. I thought the hotel’s outdoorsy theme was kind of cheesy, so I texted my best friend a video making fun of it and then posted the video. Like everything I have ever posted to TikTok, I was hoping that if even a few people saw it, they’d decide to read my novel. Instead, I was met with anger and ridicule.
I left a comment apologizing for coming across as mean-spirited. It didn’t matter; the negative comments continued to climb. I read each one. Maybe they were right. I went to the movies with a friend just to get a break from my phone, but when I looked at the video after the credits rolled, there were 648 new comments. The vocal fry is cringe, one person wrote, an insult linguists say is linked to sexism. A week later—the views well above 100,000—a men’s website emailed to say it was writing a story about the video. I spent an afternoon spiraling, imagining how much worse it might get with a male audience pointed in my direction. I remembered that day in my kitchen, the stranger’s email: Men abuse women because of women like you. And then it occurred to me: What did any of this have to do with writing?
I deactivated my account.
***
It’s a knot of contradictions. Women’s writing can be deprecated as navel gazing, but there’s a market for personal essays and memoirs. We’re expected to post personal content to social media in order to advance our careers, despite the criticism that social media can be vapid and self-absorbed. The algorithm rewards us when we show our faces, even though nearly a quarter of women journalists experience unwanted sexual advances online.
Some women respond by looking at their public identity as a separate persona.“A persona does not mean a fake character,” says Chloe Lauter, author of The Flayed Man. “It’s important to me to leave a lot of space between my public-facing work and my actual self, both for comfort and privacy and for my protection.”
Maybe there’s a version of this for anyone figuring out what it means to be a public figure. There are precedents what this might look like: Jia Tolentino, a Joan Didion–esque cultural critic and essayist for millennials; Allie Rowbottom, author of Lovers XXX, whose book events are filled with the kind of spectacle—burlesque dancers, flash tattoos—that Eve Babitz might have appreciated; Roxane Gay, who credits The Handmaid’s Tale for leading her to become a feminist. As my friend the writer MJ Corey puts it, “You have to shape your own persona as a woman writer. Or one will probably be shaped for you.”
Krista Diamond is the author of Close Relationships With Strangers.