"There is a price for popularity. Critics look for your weaknesses, your flaws, anything that makes the work seem like a fluke and not seem worthy of all the attention it's getting"
About this Quote
Popularity is marketed as a coronation, but Terry McMillan frames it as a surveillance state. The line pivots on “price”: attention isn’t neutral currency, it’s a transaction that buys access to your soft spots. McMillan’s intent is less to complain about criticism than to demystify it. Once a creator becomes legible to the mainstream, the work stops being evaluated on its own terms and starts being audited for legitimacy. Critics, in this view, aren’t simply responding; they’re policing the border between “serious” art and whatever the crowd has dared to love.
The subtext is about power. “Weaknesses” and “flaws” aren’t necessarily fatal artistic problems; they’re pretexts. The real charge is “fluke” - a word that turns success into an accident, a lucky slip past the gatekeepers. Calling a hit a fluke protects the critic’s status: if acclaim can be random, then tastemaking remains the only rational order. It’s also a gendered and racialized dynamic, especially in the American literary world McMillan helped reshape. When an author writes toward Black women’s interior lives and then sells big, the acclaim can trigger a reflex to shrink the achievement back down to a market anomaly.
Context matters: McMillan’s career sits at the intersection of mass readership and institutional skepticism, where commercial success is often treated as aesthetic evidence against you. The quote works because it names the unspoken bargain of visibility: the louder the applause, the more some people need a narrative that explains it away.
The subtext is about power. “Weaknesses” and “flaws” aren’t necessarily fatal artistic problems; they’re pretexts. The real charge is “fluke” - a word that turns success into an accident, a lucky slip past the gatekeepers. Calling a hit a fluke protects the critic’s status: if acclaim can be random, then tastemaking remains the only rational order. It’s also a gendered and racialized dynamic, especially in the American literary world McMillan helped reshape. When an author writes toward Black women’s interior lives and then sells big, the acclaim can trigger a reflex to shrink the achievement back down to a market anomaly.
Context matters: McMillan’s career sits at the intersection of mass readership and institutional skepticism, where commercial success is often treated as aesthetic evidence against you. The quote works because it names the unspoken bargain of visibility: the louder the applause, the more some people need a narrative that explains it away.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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