Crying Online Like a Normal Person

“As of today, March 26, 2021, I no longer know how to write a poem. I have no idea how I wrote the poems in this book,” Melissa Broder claims in the introduction to Superdoom (Tin House, 2021), a collection of her previously published poetry. The reason for this block is that Broder used to write poems in the Notes app on her phone while riding the New York City subway; since 2013, though, she has lived in Los Angeles, where she commutes by car and dictates to Siri as she goes. Dictation, it turns out, is not great for her poetry. So now she writes prose.

Broder first became well-known as the initially anonymous voice behind @sosadtoday, a popular Twitter account that shares “unrelatable” relatable quips—embarrassing, personal, specific, or abject experiences that are often met with a resounding response of “literally me.” For example:

yeah, sex is cool but have you tried dropping a hunk of cheesecake on the floor at  the mall, scooping it up in a way that conveys “not gonna eat this, just cleaning up like a good citizen,” going to an opposite corner of the mall, and eating it

i want to have sex with donnie darko in an abandoned IHOP

cried a whole sandwich

When it comes to sex, food, and social faux pas, almost no experience is truly unrelatable, at least online, but for many people to really click with it, the experience needs to be presented as weird. One recent popular format was to counterpose some quirk with the phrase or are you normal? It doesn’t matter if the quirk itself is normal, just that it’s now defined in opposition to that. As @sosadtoday herself once put it,

things I'm not:
 
1. normal

Broder eventually channeled @sosadtoday into So Sad Today (2016), a collection of essays that expands her frank riffs on anxiety, self-loathing, and sex. The book is meant to induce a cringe, even though it’s formally inventive and exciting. The essays also ruin, a little, the experience of reading Broder’s novels—The Pisces (2018) and Milk Fed (2021)—which come to seem a bit too much like fictionalized essays themselves than standalone imaginative works. The insufficiently committed boyfriend of an essay from So Sad Today is reconfigured as a merman in The Pisces; certain humiliating circumstances (having sex in a hotel bathroom) and sexual fantasies (vomiting) from the essays recur in the novels.

Superdoom compiles poetry from Broder’s earlier collections—When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother (2010), Meat Heart (2012), and Scarecrone (2014)—along with excerpts from her most recent, Last Sext (2016). It showcases many of her preoccupations: anorexia, binge eating, sexual compulsion, God, and mother issues, along with her favorite word: holes. But the poetry explores these tropes without being tied to narrative, disclosure, or definitive statement. These poems aren't about Broder in some specific sense nor are they about a fictional alter ego in a narrative. For a writer of such performative candor, this distance is sometimes frustrating: as a reader, I feel beckoned in with one hand but forcefully reprimanded by the other.

In A Lover’s Discourse (1977), his fragmentary exploration of romantic longing, Roland Barthes writes, “Let us suppose that I have wept, on account of some incident of which the other has not even become aware … so this cannot be seen, I put on dark glasses to mask my swollen eyes.” As Barthes notes, the glasses are meant on one level as a dignified disguise, but they’re also meant to instigate concern, much like a Twitter account about how terrible one feels resists the same questions it invites. The danger is that this hidden invitation will sail right over the beloved’s head.

But here’s another thing about dark glasses: if you’re looking at them, you’re going to see your own reflection. Like the @sosadtoday tweets, Broder’s poetry is imagistic and associative. People might read it to “see themselves,” but the bigger trap is trying to see the author. If Broder wanted to hide from her readers, the best place might be behind a mirror. The more personal and scatological her poetry is, the more I want to know what it’s hiding. I know the “right” answer is that it isn’t hiding anything. I can’t quite accept that.

***

The opening line of “Prayer of the Teenage Waifs,” the first poem in Superdoom, could also work as the book’s manifesto: “We want security and we want out!” Pursuing desires that encompass incompatible extremes is the subject of much of Broder’s poetry. She’s interested in unhappiness and self-hatred and how those modes create an urge toward opposites: binging and denial, guilt and helplessness, health and illness, being too much and not being enough, disgust and attraction, alienation and smothering, child and adult, never and always.

In Broder’s prose, normal people serve as foils for her self-loathing characters (and, in the essays, for herself). Rachel, the calorie-counting heroine of Milk Fed, hopes to eat a burrito like “a normal person,” one

who could simply take or leave a burrito, no biggie, just coolly have a burrito at rest on her desk, no obsession, no fear, a sane food woman, a woman to whom food was only one facet of a very expansive life, the burrito simply a prop, a trifle to be toyed with, a second thought, a third thought, even.

Broder’s normal people eat only what they want and cease when they’re full; they are not compulsively sexual; they can stop after one glass of wine; they do not know the ecstasies of self-denial or indulgence. They can take a little of everything and be happy.

The men in Superdoom are always normal in this sense, but the women rarely are. “The Tall Lady Never Not Doing Laundry,” for instance, veers between the titular woman doing her laundry, whose mind hums with marketing promises (“Double concentration: / what could be more refreshing?”) and her memories of a sexual past she abjures; each memory is prefaced by a “never again” that feels like both a statement and a dare. Never is the keyword of the poem: it is possible to only sometimes do laundry and spend the rest of one’s time having sex in a soccer field (per a laundry lady memory), but Broder’s lady can’t live in the world of both. She can be only all-clean, obliterating the traces of who she was with every wash, or all-dirty. Her need for extremes gives her away.

Broder’s men can be a lot of different things—caring boyfriends, indifferent love objects, nearly absent fathers—but in their simplicity and apparent groundedness, they represent mostly a means to an end. They stop up holes, have uncomplicated relationships to food (and sometimes even turn the women of the poems into food), and are in touch with reality. Men are, in fact, real, in a way that the feminine subjects of the poetry can’t be. In “Forgotten Sound,” from Last Sext, Broder writes “the men are real / And going on without me.”

Attempts to reverse this dynamic end unsuccessfully. In “Fauna,” a cannibal feast promises to “suffocate / all memory[,]” but in the end the speaker is “still / carrying [her] head.” In “Binge Eating in 2067,” another attempt at cannibalism ends with self-sacrifice, as Broder’s character turns away from his offering of solid food and instead puts her fingers in the cannibal’s mouth. The opening lines of “Steak Night” read, “In husbandland I am made / of hamburger, eggs and potatoes,” but then

A hash has happened
 
the husband is absent
my marriage dress hangs
 
              by the stove.

Without the husband present, the wife begins to eat herself. Even in “How to Give Head To a Sick Person,” one of Superdoom’s tenderest poems, the declaration “I am the priestess of resurrection” is immediately deflated by the qualifier “though I cannot make your body strong.” It’s women who are hungry, but it’s also women who are eaten. Women are deficiency, lack, the void. “I came into the world a young man / Then I broke me off,” says the speaker of “Lunar Shatters,” another poem that posits maleness as a kind of whole state that’s lost and now irrecoverable.

If I’m harping on this dichotomy, it’s because it represents what makes the poems feel familiar as poems while also evoking their worst qualities. Sad women writing sardonic poetry about being women who are sad is a noble tradition (think of Stevie Smith or Dorothy Parker), but in many of these poems Broder edges toward lazy gender humor, collapsing the interior life of anyone met along the way. This isn’t true of every poem (“How To Give Head to a Sick Person” is an exception), but in general, the examination of deficiency leads to attributing self-worth to other people that makes them either superhuman or less than human, depending how one looks at it.

Is normalcy aspirational? Much as in the aforementioned “or are you normal” meme, it is and it isn’t. “Don’t Make Me Grow” initially approaches the subject of a normal self almost optimistically:

A mustardseed of okayness. We’re here
to know our own goodness. I have barely
cried at all. I spent so much time away
from me that when I finally feel me
I might kill me. I guess you sit
with you and see you do not kill you.
Then you live.

As soon as readers have to accept the mustardseed as a serious option, it’s wrenched away: “No nothing / will give me that okayness,” the speaker declares. The possibilities suggested in the first half of the poem, a self-knowledge that is not self-destructive, are not real. Or at least they’re not available for its subject, who wishes to pack herself under layers of other humans as a substitute for “okayness.” People are once again tools, used to make one feel better, in a variety of ways, but also used to make one feel much worse. What those people think of all this (if they think at all) doesn’t matter.

If one is a hole or broken or nothing—all terms used throughout Superdoom—if one is defined, in short, by what one isn’t, then what would it mean to be something? The poetic subjects of Superdoom are something, but even they don’t seem to know themselves except as people who lack what they want, what they need, or what would simply make them okay. Beyond the potential fulfillment of their desire lies a self so unimaginable it might as well not be human. “I Give a Convincing Sermon” opens

I give a convincing sermon. I say The body
 
is a coat. It is a very dark and heavy coat
 
but worthless. Mother Mary nods from the pews.
 
If I give Mary all my atoms she will plant them
 
in a garden where ripened women relinquish
 
their bones to make room for littler women.
 
It is dangerous to grow accustomed to a garden.
 
Just when the flowers soften you, they disappear.

By the end of the poem, however, ideas become the speaker’s “second coat,” a coat that encases the body just as heavily as the body encases the speaker. That the sermon is dubbed “convincing” suggests that it’s not true, but the poem also indicates that the body and the speaker’s ideas are dark, heavy, and oppressive. The conflicted relationship toward other people—sometimes you want them, sometimes you hate them—plays out in turn on every level of the self. What is under ideas or under the body? Anything at all?

***

@sosadtoday is a persona, the novels are fiction, and the poems are images. No matter how many overtures these works make toward intimacy, nothing changes that. Even Broder’s essays, which have some claim to being “real,” are also as much about what they don’t say as what they do, and their forms (one being a chat thread between Broder and her “higher self”) are a clue that they’re truthful in a way similar to how poems and novels are truthful; they are not, as it were, reportage from the front lines of “being Melissa Broder.” But Broder’s entire literary enterprise is also about intimacy—telling secrets, confessing fleshly embarrassments, comparing scars.

The more one reads these books, the more apparent it is that what makes Broder’s art possible is not self-disclosure so much as deep privacy: the trick to revealing anything is to conceal elsewhere. One is left wanting to know … something. But what that could be is hard to guess. There’s no chalk outline of the missing subject, just a sense of being led in a circle. In a mixed review of So Sad Today published in the New Yorker, the essayist Haley Mlotek compares the essays unfavorably with the original Twitter account and, in doing so, highlights the ways in which Broder’s work is both inviting and forbidding:

There are limits to what personal essays can accomplish when they are written from behind such a sturdy wall of self-defense. Yet “So Sad Today”’s shortcomings as memoir only made me more appreciative of what [Broder] has accomplished in the communal realm of Twitter. There, her veneer of lolzy insincerity is exactly what draws us in. It captures how so many of us communicate on social media, crafting a careful persona that hides and reveals.

Here, again, the problem appears to be intimacy: what one wants from these books, tweets, and poems is a structure for one’s own sadness, not sadness in general. The lure of writerly intimacy is being told something that’s personally clarifying or at least recognizable. The more a writer discloses, the more readers want to hear about themselves. The paradox of memoir and other forms of personal writing is that they putatively exist to document the specific and unique but are frequently consumed for the opposite reason. Even the iconic sad women poets are often appropriated to represent a reader’s sadness rather than their own. But readers’ knowledge that they’re being kept at a distance prevents them from turning Broder into an object to help themselves. Instead, her books are meticulously crafted constructions that feel as if the person who wrote them is missing.

I admire this play even as I’m put off by it. As a reader, I am in the unflattering position of resenting whatever’s being kept back, although I know perfectly well I am not owed any admission. The deeper issue, however, is what Mlotek identifies: a defensiveness that’s only strengthened through the kind of self-revelations Broder performs. To foreground lack, as these poems do, is a way of skirting what Broder or her speakers have: the textures and tastes of things, the relationships that really exist, the bodies they inhabit. These qualities and objects are stubborn; they persist; they exist without permission. What isn’t there could be anything: any kind of boy, any kind of food. What is there, on the other hand, is a mystery that only grows. It isn’t that the poems would benefit from any specific detail of life so much as that they suffer from their collective lack of such a presence.

I hope Broder starts writing poetry again, either because she resumes taking public transit or because she figures out a method compatible with life in Los Angeles. Perhaps another way of understanding the frustration this collection provokes in me is that it feels like a complete stage of an incomplete project. I’ve read the poems about hunger and emptiness and holes. Now I want to read what comes next.