That's an interesting parallel with Weisberger. She began that book in a writing class with a teacher who became her mentor and provided some of the support she needed to be brutal.

Jackson may have lived the life of her characters to a degree: She's lived on Pineapple Street, and many of her examples are credible if inelegant. But there's a lot of pressure on authors now to make their characters "relatable" (the new "sympathetic"). And she may have internalized it in a way that made it hard for her to twist the knife when appropriate.

It's hard to know what went wrong here, because I've read a lot of books by editors besides this one. And you can usually count on them to avoid the kind of basic mistakes an editor would call out. I hope this isn't a trend.