In her essay My Vomit Fetish, My Self, Melissa Broder describes her barf-related sexual fantasy. She visualizes scenes of people puking on each other while having sex. She imagines these people being doted on despite how vile it may be to throw up. To her, vomiting is an act that renders someone powerless. The vulnerability of it is what turns her on.
My Vomit Fetish, My Self is the grotesque, yet hilarious centerpiece of Broder’s newest essay collection So Sad Today. The collection itself is a vulnerable work. In 203 pages, Broder explores the way her mental illnesses play out in the Internet age. She scrutinizes herself and relays details that are the kind of personal things you’d leave buried in the Notes app on your smart-phone.
The events that led to So Sad Today’s publication actually began with Broder’s iPhone. Though she’s published four books of poetry and her works appeared in dozens of publications, Broder owes much of So Sad Today’s existence to her Twitter popularity. Broder’s account, @sosadtoday, has over 300,000 followers, some of whom are celebs like Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus. On it, she tweets darkly funny quips like “walk into the club already crying” or “whats the yoga pose where you don’t have to be human anymore.” Her tweets manage to lampoon pop culture, social media and meme-speak while despairing in it all at the same time. She told The Fader in an interview that she began it three years ago as a side account from her main handle, @melissabroder, so she could tweet her depressing thoughts anonymously. People found it, and it picked up. This led to her penning a column on Vice. Then, a book deal.
For her followers, @sosadtoday may be an amusing, shadowy reproduction of all the existential dread that is bound to hit almost anyone from time to time. For Broder, Twitter was another one of her addictions. It also brought her some respite from the ceaseless storm in her mind. In these essays, she lifts the veil of anonymity that Twitter provided and shows her scars. By extension, she shows her humanity.
Broder’s 18 essays probe a breadth of mental afflictions. Hers include: anorexia nervosa, panic disorder, drug and alcohol addiction, internet addiction, relationship addiction, a fear of aging and death, and of course, depression. She disarms the seriousness of these topics with her bleak humor. Funny anecdotes and belly-poking one-liners are in abundance. In I Don’t Feel Bad About My Neck, Broder writes “I feel bad that when a younger person tried to suck my tits recently, there were depth-perception issues involving sagging.” Love Like You Are Trying to Fill an Insatiable Spiritual Hole with Another Person Who Will Suffocate in There includes lengthy sext conversations Broder had with a long-distance Internet lover.
There are also some wacky essay formats; Google Hangout with my Higher Self is a simulated discourse between her and her rational mind, structured like a Google chat room. The offbeat essays are a nice respite from her conventional pieces and they’re easy to follow along, though they don’t succeed as well as her long-form prose. One of her best essays, I Told You Not to Get the Knish: Thoughts on Open Marriage and Illness, follows a traditional structure, and its gripping and powerful.
Between the personal observations and prose experiments, Broder analyzes her harmful behaviors and thought-patterns, often providing clear-cut explanations for why she’s so self-deprecating. For some readers, it may invoke some skepticism. How well can anyone understand their own psychology? But overall, her self-awareness serves as self-help. Distressing, yet powerful reflections on love, gender, mortality and nothingness pervade this book. She doesn’t have the answers (and who does?), but her thoughts are validating for anyone whose mind may toil in similar ways. Broder communicates her insight in an ironic colloquial that reflects the language of today all too well. Some passages read like elongated versions of her tweets. As a prose style, it succeeds wonderfully. It grounds the book for her main audience: the teens and twenty-somethings of the world.
So Sad Today is a swift, funny, engrossing read, fit for any subway ride and worth picking up. It’s for people looking for honesty in a world of Internet avatars and flimsy social media approval. It’s for people who sometimes get very very sad. And don’t we all.
