Will I survive getting trolled again?

The first time I wrote a book, I got trolled so badly - by women - I nearly had a breakdown. It took me 10 years to write another. Now I have: will it happen again? And will it destroy me this time?

If only Twitter trolls were this adorable.

I’ve been feeling a little off, lately. A smidge… prone to anxiety, to catastrophising, to envisaging: my flat in flames every time I leave it to go to pilates, that my dog has stopped breathing, every time I don’t check.

Thought it might be about January at first - so miserable, so cold, so long. Then I thought it might be about that time I got a little bit assaulted by a stranger, and rescued by a cabbie.

Finally I realised it was all about me finishing the first draft of my new book, a precursor to it being, you know, published, which (in my experience) is what happens before you get trolled to abstraction.

Trolled into a terrible, all encompassing, sleep-stealing self-worth-demolishing state of shame.

Trolled into feeling really not at all great about leaving the house.

I worked this out, just today, in the park, during a conversation with another dog walker.

AB moved from New York to London last summer. She is developing an app.

“How’s that going?” I ask.

“Ah… nearly there,” AB says.

“Exciting!” I say.

She winces. “Kinda?”

“Launch soon, right?” I say.

AB looks suddenly, completely terrified. Whispers: “Polly - how do you protect yourself from the internet?”

“Oh, babe. You can’t,” I say. My voice breaks. My breath catches. I realise I am absolutely petrified about publishing a second book.

I wrote my first 10 years ago, in 2014. It came out in the spring of 2015. It was called Hot Feminist; it was book about a lot of things. How - if! - feminist politics can ever be truly reconciled with a desire to be sexy, to look sexy, to flirt, and be flirted with. It was about choosing your battles, making sure they actually were battles (there was, at the time, I felt, a trend for impotent poor-me victim-embracing style feminism abroad. I’ve always thought feminism should predominantly be about the things you do for other women, the protection and support you offer, the laws you get changed and so forth - rather than the pity you feel for yourself, the alacrity with which you embrace victim status).

It was about all the times we fail as feminists, because it’s my experience we do, every last one of us, really quite often, even the most righteous among us. Especially the most righteous.

It was a memoir. It was about the times I got pregnant when I didn't want to be and how I managed that. The time I nearly got raped (awful). The time I went out with a footballer (hilarious). The time I worked in a raucous cocktail bar and the times I worked fully in fashion and the times I worked in newsrooms.

It was, above all else, a book about abortion rights, how important it had been to me to access them, how precious they are and how fragile (which, given what’s happened to them subsequently, in the US and Poland, was valid, if nothing else about that book was. I shan’t pretend I foresaw that. I do know that my instinct was that no right could be as useful and liberating to women as abortion rights, without being challenged sooner or later, somewhere or other).

It was (is!) silly and sweet and fun and not without ferocity, deeply flawed of course but, overall, well-written, and well-intentioned. It’s got a big heart, my book. It’s honest.

I can say that now. I couldn't, for a long time. I couldn’t even look at it, for a long time.

It had been incredibly hard work to do. Books always are.

And it got published, in May 2015, then, promptly: destroyed by the internet. By other women, on the internet. By other women who considered themselves to be feminists, and who honestly considered ripping me and my book to shreds, to be a feminist act in itself. It - by extension, I, it was my life story, the cover bore a picture of my face - was called “stupid” and “dangerous” and “silly” and “gross”. “Sloppy” and “vacuous” and “foolish” and “vomit-inducing”.

For a few weeks in the early summer of 2015, I was one of those women it was ok to hate on the internet. It was fashionable to hate me. Knocking me down, was like a video game for women who thought themselves far above being cruel to other women.

And of course I know that people are allowed to not like a book. Of course I know they’re allowed to not like my book. But what happened to me wasn't, for the main part, literary criticism. It was more an exercise in legitimised mass meanness. A literary lynching.

Why? I suppose it was just my turn.

How did it play out? What kind of things were said to me? Oh, things like:

“OMG I’ve just seen your book and been sick in my mouth!” (someone on Twitter, who’d just walked past Waterstones.)

“What an utter piece of sh*t!” (Someone else on Twitter, someone with “feminist” in her bio. Most of them had “feminist” in their bio. Or “Well behaved women seldom make history”. Or that picture of a long line of perfect pink little girl ballerinas at a barre, with a crazy cute wild haired one on the end, doing her own thing, and a caption underneath which said: “Be the girl on the end.”)

“Who’d actually read that f**king bilge?” said a third.

(This is how I knew I wasn’t dealing with legitimate literary criticism. Very few of the people trolling my book, claimed to have read any of it. They were supremely confident they didn’t need to - that to do so, would be a mind-polluting waste. “What did you expect?” asked a panelist on a telly culture review show onto which I’d been invited to talk about the furore, so pronounced, by this point, it had attracted the attention of multiple TV producers. “Honestly? People to read it first,” I said. The panelist tsssked, shook her head in disgust at my naivety - which really helped lift my mood. )

(Actually, I probably should say - the other reason I knew people weren’t reading my book before slagging it, and me, off, was because had they been buying it in a way which correlated with their ire, it would have been sitting pretty at the top of the best sellers list for weeks, which would have certainly taken the sting out of the trolling. But it wasn’t. It was my no means a complete flop - but nor did it trouble JK Rowling in terms of sales. )

Someone tweeted a picture of a copy of it, the cover (a photograph of my face) ripped, scrawled over in pen, at me. “Party game!” they captioned the image.

“You’re the kind of stupid cow who thinks stripping is good for the sisterhood” spat someone else. ( I had said no such thing, but she wouldn’t know that, because she hadn't read my book).

Hot Feminist got a very mixed response from reviewers, from five stars and raves in some papers and mags, to multiple kickings in multiple editions from a newspaper I’d worked for, for years. The most awful was gleefully tweeted back at me, over and over. “LOOOOOOOOOOOOOL” they’d say.

And while some people were lovely - they really were, some of YOU, really were - it was impossible to focus on that. To even hear the loveliness. When one side of your face is (metaphorically) being stroked, while the other is being slapped hard: you tend to focus on the slapping.

All of this really f**ked me up. Like: really. Half destroyed me, honestly. Let me tell you what happens to you when you get trolled on the internet. Let me tell you how it feels, when the whole thing turns against you for a few weeks, when your name gets booted around it, like it’s some kind of disgusting football, or woefully tortured dog:

You. Feel. Awful.

You feel like… Remember those days at school when everyone suddenly, spontaneously, turned on you, when you felt your social stock plummet around you, when jokes about how you smell and what you think and who you fancy (like you’ve got a hope in hell!) and how much you’re loathed and how ugly you are and pathetic and stupid and grotesque and weak are passed around not even out of earshot, because who cares if you hear? You’re nothing. When no one will sit with you and long serving friends will only commune with you after hours and in private because they can’t be taken down with you, and you get it. You know you’d do the same in their shoes…?

It feels like that. And you feel doubly destroyed by it because you thought you’d left that crap - those feelings, that lost, sad, trembling, ostracised little girl - behind, decades ago… But here it is, here they are, here she is, again. Same as she ever was. Desolate, as she ever was.

And, my God! You feel lonely. Desperately, desperately lonely. Because it really is Just You, on your own, with all these Things being said, all this gleeful rage you don’t even understand. And a couple of other people stand up for you, online, but instantly start getting it in the neck/ Twitter feed too, so then, they back off sharpish, and you absolutely don’t blame them, either - but you feel doubly alone, now that they’ve gone.

And you feel threatened. Physically threatened. Like you’ve been suddenly surrounded on the street, by what starts off as a small, belligerent group - two, maybe three people - all early-stages kicking off, all bizarrely convinced you said something you just didn't say, something really offensive and gross, and you try and explain you didn't say it, or that, if you did, it really wasn’t your intention, those weren't the words you used, they maybe misheard? Or misunderstood?

But then? They get angrier with you yet, for suggesting they’re wrong, when it’s clearly you, you’re wrong, everything about you is wrong; and they get rowdier, louder, more threatening yet, accusing you of worse and worse things, things that have no bearing at all on anything you have ever thought or said or written or done or been, but who cares? It’s just happening, now. And others join them - because being mean is fun! Especially when it’s being done in the name of feminist righteousness, a force more potent than cocaine! - and that small belligerent group becomes a braying mob, and you’re surrounded and silenced because, every time you protest, things just get worse, and anyway: no one can hear you any more - so what’s the point?

And that goes on. And on.

And after a bit - a week, say, 10 days - of this happening to you, of you flinching every time you see even the shape of your name, the outline of it, on social media, you start wondering if you are guilty of those things all your internet detractors claim (even if you’re still deeply unsure what those things actually are, because no one’s properly explained). Maybe you went crazy and wrote 80,000 words of hate speech instead of that mild mannered, funny book (which smuggled in some stronger points about abortion and rape); the one you’d planned on writing? You’d check, except lately: the sight of your own book has started to make you flinch; which is particularly unfortunate in my case, because that book has a portrait of my own face on it. Which has left feeling increasingly uncomfortable about my own reflection. Given me the impression it’s also wrong. Warped. So I’ve started avoiding it, too. My own face.

And you find it hard to go out of the house because your nervous system can’t quite distinguish between the internet apparently hating you, jumping on you out of nowhere, screaming at you - and the intention of random strangers you pass in the street. And you’re skin is so incredibly thin that you can’t take the fondest teasing of a dear friend. And you can’t really eat and you can’t really sleep (you keep getting up in the middle of the night to check what horror Twitter’s hurling at you RIGHT NOW), and that doesn’t exactly help your state of mind.

And the worst of it passes in a few weeks, a month; the mean-girls-posturing-as-feminists tweets become less frequent, less vitriolic. A different, newer, shinier target shuffles into their sight lines, you’re only left battling with the ire of stragglers, the late-adopter-haters.

Which should be better, right? Except: in that relative quiet, in the calm after the social media sh*t storm: oh. That’s when the shame kicks in. When you’re left with your intellect wondering what the hell just happened to you - while your nervous system, your subconscious, your deepest, darkest, most hidden, most hurt-ridden parts, going: but of course!

This is what I deserve.

This is what I always deserve.

Because I am nothing.

That’s how getting trolled on the internet feels.

It took me months to pull myself out of the shame hole. Months. I was at a disadvantage: it was only 2015, internet trolling was new, I was the first person I knew to have experienced anything like it. This only added to my loneliness, of course. When it happened to me, concepts like “internet pile ons” and “cancellation” hadn't been identified, let alone named. I had no lexicon or precedent for what I was going through. And if we knew about trolls - we knew them only as those nameless, faceless, extreme right horrors who threatened every woman with an opinion, with rape and murder.

We hadn't yet recognised the harm that can also be done by people - women - who think themselves perfectly entitled, perfectly right - in their focussed targeting of a particular individual, whose crimes are unclear but definitely verified by the sheer might of grief they’re already getting from other people.

They were good feminists, after all!

But I did go through it. Crucially, I got through it. I’m going to tell you how, going to offer a users guide to surviving an internet shame storm, at some point, because I think it’s an incredibly useful life skill - and because, trust me: it can happen to any of us. It really can. We should all be prepared.

(God, the amount of women journalists I’ve seen, teetering on the point of publishing their own books, plugging them for all their worth over all the platforms while simultaneously praying - I swear, I could hear them doing it - “Please don’t let what happened to Polly Vernon, happen to me. Please!” Not a legacy I ever hoped for TBH.)

At the same time as feeling kinda triumphant, kinda: hell yeah, I got through it! Cos you can! And getting through a mass online shaming can only make you braver, make you feel you have less to lose, so f*** it! Write what you want to write, write only things in which you truly believe, in ways you choose to express them, because a load of people hated you for doing that once already, tried to shut you down and shut you up, but they didn’t, not in the end!

This has definitely worked in my favour - not least here, on Substack, hoorah!

At the same time as thinking and feeling all that, I am still f**king terrified of publishing another book.

It took me 10 years (and the approach of a publisher with a really really great idea) to even be able to think about doing it again. And now I’m a third of a way into my revisions, my editing, my fact checking, with a publication date of June, 2025; now I’ve got a cover with which I am absolutely delighted, now I’m planning Forwards and Thank Yous and dedications… Fear of trolling is seeping in round the edges again.

Sneaking up on me when I’m in the park, talking to perfectly lovely women about her app, how scared she is about how the internet will treat her, when she launches that.