Must writers be likable? Does it help if they are? And who the heck am I?

Ask anyone who knows me well:  I have my flaws.  Here I am, for example, with my impatient face on, waiting for a berry to ripen.  Not any old berry, mind you, but the berry I want, which is taking its time in the sun.  (I may indeed be insulting the berry for its stubbornness, quietly, beneath my snappish tongue.)

Would my handful of very kind readers read me less (to continue) if they knew that:

• I combine the impossible traits of seeking perfection, impatiently?
• I write long books that become short books because so many of my original sentences are preposterously bad?
• I want to be writing, I want to be finished writing, I want to be writing again?
• (to be clear:  I'm inconsistent)?
• I fall asleep during the runway portion of every single "Project Runway" show?
• I create bullet lists pummeled by non-sequiturs (but not when clients are watching)?
• I love animals and own no animals, which is to say:  I'm a neat freak who remains inconsistent?
• I am mindlessly and heedlessly improperly punctuating this bullet list of flaws, because I think — no, perhaps I presume — that since it's my blog I have a right to do so?

These are among the issues that Jennie Yabroff does not exactly hit on in her Newsweek essay, "The Man We Knew Too Much," her thought-provoking essay on Jonathan Frazen, a man, she writes, who has critics praising his new book, Freedom, "without letting their feelings about the seemingly insufferably self-important writer color their views."  Will readers, she wonders, be as kind?

... the Internet has exposed writers to a level of personal scrutiny formerly reserved for pop stars and teen idols, making it difficult to separate how you feel about an author's personal life from how you respond to his work, despite your best efforts to read the writing, not the writer.  Gawker opines on which writers are "book hot," while publishing blogs report not just on how much authors receive for their books but also how they spend the money.

Yabroff is right, of course—it is difficult not to see, or to try to parse, the cults of personality now growing up among big-name, big-ticket writers—not just Franzen, but Gaiman, Green, Foer, Collins, and Rowling, to name but a few.  I remain, of course, under the radar, my flaws not subject to widespread discussion, my life not the stuff of Time cover stories or Huffington newsflashes.  But this question is interesting, and I present it to you:  Does what you know about who authors are influence your reading of their books?

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