The novelist Jennifer Weiner has described Jonathan Franzen as the “worst internet boyfriend ever” after The Corrections author attacked her for “freeloading on the legitimate problem of gender bias” to promote herself.

In an interview with Butler University’s literary journal Booth, Franzen was asked for his thoughts on Weiner, who has campaigned for years against the skew towards male authors and reviewers in the literary world. In 2010, the bestselling commercial novelist singled out the attention paid to Franzen when his novel Freedom was released, describing the situation as “Franzenfrenzy” in the wake of wall-to-wall media coverage, including a Time cover story.

Franzen said the issue was “tricky because there’s something about Jennifer Weiner that rubs me the wrong way, something I don’t trust”, saying that the author of works including In Her Shoes “is asking for a respect that not just male reviewers, but female reviewers, don’t think her work merits”.

He added: “To me it seems she’s freeloading on the legitimate problem of gender bias in the canon, and over the years in the major review organs, to promote herself, basically. And that seems like a dubious project that is ideally suited to social media, where you don’t actually have to argue, you just tweet. Where is her long essay about this, where she really makes a case? She has no case. So she tweets.”

There is “no case for why formulaic fiction ought to be reviewed in the New York Times”, according to Franzen, who earlier in the interview had said that “most of what people read, if you go to the bookshelf in the airport convenience store and look at what’s there, even if it doesn’t have a YA [young adult] on the spine, is YA in its moral simplicity. People don’t want moral complexity”.

Weiner, according to Franzen’s interview with Booth, is “an unfortunate person to have as a spokesperson” for an important issue. But he admitted not having read any of her novels. “I have yet to hear one person say, ‘Oh, she’s really good, you should read her.’ And basically if two people say that about a book I’ll read it. I know no one, male or female, who says, ‘You’ve got to read Jennifer Weiner.’”



Weiner initially responded on Twitter , a medium which Franzen had told Booth was a “terrible match” for writers. “Once more, with feeling (w/r/t Franzen interview): I’ve never asked for more regard for my work than what male genre writers get,” she wrote, adding that “I’ve never bashed another writer’s work without reading it” and that “if Franzen believes I’ve never made a serious case for what I believe – ‘she just tweets!’ – than maybe his Google is broken.”

Describing the author as “the worst internet boyfriend ever” on Twitter, Weiner wrote more fully about the situation online, in a piece in which she lays out how “Great American Novelist Jonathan Franzen – the best writer of our time, y’all … dismisses my quest for respect and reviews for genre women’s fiction”.

She wrote: “I’m bewildered by Franzen’s continued attacks. He’s on the cover of Time, he’s got the Times writing curtain-raisers about his new book a year before it’s published, he’s been Oprah-anointed not once but twice, and is the subject of an upcoming biography. He is respected – nay, revered – in all the places that matter … and he’s calling me names?”

Weiner pointed out that she has “written many essays about my case”, and argued that “Twitter is a lovely and appropriate medium for voices that have traditionally been shouted down, shut out or ignored by the places that court the Franzens of the world”.

Genre fiction by women “deserves the same treatment and respect as genre fiction by men”, she said, as does literary fiction by women, and “as upsetting as it was to know that our Great American Novelist and his pals have such a low opinion of me, as painful as I find it to picture Franzen on a stage dismissing the work I’ve done with a snide ‘good for her’, it’s nothing surprising or new”.

But “luckily, there are lots of people who like my books, even if Franzen’s never met them”, she wrote, and “Franzen can call me a freeloader and a self-promoter, whine about which way I rub him, turn up his nose at my books. It won’t turn back the clock, un-invent Twitter, erase the internet, or take back the power it’s given those of us who are not Jonathan Franzen.”