There are no decapitations or dead girls in Nicole Holofcener’s sublime new horror film. The incident at the center of the writer-director’s latest movie is, to a certain set anyway, far more alarming. Beth, a happily married writer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her sweet therapist husband (Tobias Menzies) confide in a friend that her novel in progress is not shaping up to be a masterpiece.
The Pulitzer prize-winning author Benjamin Moser gasped when he heard the conceit of You Hurt My Feelings. Unlike most professions, where a person and their work can neatly coexist, being a writer involves stepping into an occupation that all but demands self-exposure and a heaping dose of vulnerability. Any piece of work – fiction, biography, poetry – is a document of the author’s hangups and preoccupations, flaws and shortcomings laid bare. How could anybody put their work out there for Goodreads evisceration and not find themselves feeling thin-skinned? And then there are the other professional circles of hell to endure: the rejections and iffy reviews, the degradation of self-promotion, the unsettling quiet of an un-buzzy publication.
