Ironically, I became acquainted with the fiction and literary criticism of Lauren Oyler, whose debut novel Fake Accounts shows the osmosis between online and real experience, through Twitter. I caught myself unable to move from my seat, stuck in a dopamine–driven feedback loop of refreshing Twitter, making an audacious tweet, seeing who favorited it, deleting it and hoping a particular person saw it.Īt some point, I found a post from my much older internet friend, who was talking about the polarizing response to Oyler’s new piece in the London Review of Books.Īvoiding class, I was sitting in a Pret A Manger in South London that gave off the same sterile, inhumane aura that all Pret A Mangers have.
Her critique of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror left every woman in his graduate school either writhing in anger or beaming with absolute joy. Intrigued, I’ve followed Oyler’s work ever since. Oyler has made a name for herself writing viral takedowns of big names in the Anglo–American literary and media intelligentsia.Īnyone who can incite such a visceral reaction from others must be worth reading, if just once.
From towering figures like Roxane Gay to Zadie Smith, no one is exempt from her scrutiny. Often, Oyler’s commentary reads like a thread of incisive, brutal tweets. In order to solve the problem of her possible wrongness, she adopts an elevated version of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist programme, constantly contradicting herself and referring to her shortcomings, among which are attention seeking, a desire for control, and equivocation.
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