Perhaps this is a reflection of the sensitivity read’s origins in children’s and young adult fiction. There are good reasons for regulating children’s reading: it is foundational and formational and may be enforced by school choice or being read aloud to. It is genuinely important, there, to avoid oppressive stereotypes.

But Some Kids… isn’t a novel, nor written for children. Adults are able to put books down if they upset them, so their books may safely contain difficult ideas. I don’t, for example, agree with my Readers that the references to looks, attraction and sexuality in my book should be removed in case readers are hurt by a metaphor as a child might plausibly be. I think adults can endure bings being compared to boils. I also believe that physical human beauty empirically exists, is enormously important for adolescents, and that I can observe its currency and often destructive power, especially for young women, in the classroom. I make an explicit argument about this, which readers may disagree with.

Argument, though, is not a word the Readers use, or even something they seem to think I should be engaging in. “Please avoid generalisations about anyone,” snaps “Comment Button”, another Reader, from the margins, while Excel Reader trails a noisy stream of alerts, like a lorry reversing: “Chosen to make the stance/vent the opinion”, “Author gives her view”, “Author stance”.

I find Excel Reader irritating, but at least they acknowledge I am constructing a point of view. Comment Button, on the other hand, thinks I am accidentally misrepresenting the world because I am not aware of my “benevolent racism”. It’s exoticising, they say, when in my section on faith, I show a group of young people from diverse cultures and religions discussing the terrorist attacks of Paris 2015. “It is as if these children and their friendships are especially praiseworthy because of their backgrounds, rather than just treating them as people, as ‘normal’ children.”

But the young people were behaving in a special way that day: that’s why I wrote about it. I sincerely (Author taking a stance) found hope for humanity in the capacity they demonstrated for forgiveness and communication. I also believe (Author giving her view) that I am entitled to say so.

My Readers, though, have not been hired as literary people. They are there to help create a book that would play better on Twitter, not one that is better written. I struggle with all this. I baulk, perhaps snobbishly, at their language: the imprecision of phrases such as “feels like the kind of saying that could be deemed insensitive these days”, or “white knight tone/verve” (verve?).

It upsets me in particular when so many of their criticisms depend on it, that none of the Readers deploy the word “irony”, but use “sarcasm”, “jocular aside” and “subtlety” instead, always as negatives. Comment Button condemns my entire chapter on prizes as “it shows none of the adults involved in a good light”. Indeed, it doesn’t. They are being satirised, even though one of them was me.

Times change. In 1997, a second edition of my first poetry collection, Slattern, was published with Picador. I was thrilled, and immediately took a copy to show off at a festival in St Andrews. Two poems into reading from it, though, I was startled to discover the words had been changed.

A copy editor had decided my irony, commas and word choices were too eccentric, and had taken it upon himself to alter them in several poems. I emailed Picador, and the next morning found myself speaking (on a payphone) to the legendary Peter Straus, Picador’s publisher. He noted down each tiny adjustment himself and explained he would be ordering the pulping of the books, the carpeting of the copy editor and the printing of a new edition.