So Sad Today: Personal Essays
Melissa Broder
[Grand Central Publishing]
So Sad Today is a collection of autobiographical writing from poet Melissa Broder, author of the celebrated Weird Twitter account of the same name. The book is a curious hybrid: a deeply traditional addiction narrative blended with a treatise on cybernetic selfhood. Broder catalogues her marauding obsessions, her “shame spirals” and chemical highs, in tweet-sharpened language which swings between brutality and grace (“I’m also a bad bitch who is scared of dying”). Avowedly “dopamine’s girl”, she speaks to the click-addled mind in prose that’s distilled into listicles. This wears thin at times, straying too close to the self-help rhetoric she parodies elsewhere, but Broder cuts deepest when interrogating obsession itself. Partners are “drug people” waiting to intoxicate her, while online relationships are acts of mutual self-fashioning that forge hypersexual fantasy selves to distract from our flesh and blood base material. She describes hypochondriac symptom-Googling, the “structured magic” of disordered eating and the perils of meeting men through cougarlife.com. She writes, “I feel like I have two hearts, a physical heart and an emotional one,” but Broder’s other heart lives on the internet.
At one point Broder describes a relationship where she and her partner exchange screenshots of their own favourite sexts from previous months, and we realise that this book is also horrifying insight into the lives of viral people. Why does Broder so often defer to her readers, framing her compulsion to confess as feminism? Why is her recovery built on public call and response? Melancholy self-laceration abounds, but for all the sadness there are meta-sadnesses which remain unaddressed. The internet did not invent this brand of confessional writing, but it has evolved it in a particular direction and, for Broder, addiction can be tolerated as long as it is to the internet itself. In this sense, her suffering is symptomatic of an age. So Sad Today has been saluted as realistic: despite not offering a golden bullet of recovery, a 344k-follower count remains a redemption of sorts.
Words: Róisín Kiberd
