Why didn’t I read the comments sooner?

I adhere to a pretty iron-clad rule: not only do I avoid the bumper cars of social media, but I don’t read the comments after my columns. Many other journalists avidly lap up reader responses to their work, and there’s certainly something to be said for confronting detractors, thus learning to anticipate counter-arguments and to guard against misinterpretation. But for me – I doubt this makes me unusual – one scornful put-down has a more lasting effect than ten gushing compliments. Forbidding myself from hitting that bottom tab is a matter of self-protection. While writing, I don’t want to lose my nerve, and too keen an awareness of your (potentially hostile) audience can be inhibiting, as if someone is reading over your shoulder.

Yet in early October, my sister-in-law implored me to please read the comments under my 28 September column, run after I’d been absent from these pages for nearly two months. With some hesitation, because I wasn’t sure my private travails were of public interest, I explained my disappearance in ‘Whatever happened to Lionel Shriver?’. A cascade of medical catastrophe had nearly done me in: major back surgery, terrifyingly inadequate pain management, mysterious all-body collapse, my own surgical team’s accusation that I was crazy, abandonment to a Cuckoo’s Nest care home and backhanded rescue by grim diagnosis: Guillain-Barré syndrome, affectionately known as GBS.

I took that advice, and I’m glad I read those comments. Over the years, I must have aired opinions that rubbed numerous Spectator readers the wrong way, but in not a single instance did a subscriber take advantage of my infirmity to stick the knife in. To the contrary, across nearly 400 comments, the readership was concerned, well-wishing, appreciative of this column and hopeful that I was returning to form.