Melissa Broder, 'So Sad Today' 

When the Twitter account @sosadtoday started appearing in my timeline a few years ago, retweeted to my attention by various glum-chums, I couldn't work out if it was being written by a human. In a time before the (supposedly unintentionally) beautiful spam account Horse_ebooks was revealed as a promotional 'art performance' – the tweet generation's equivalent of finding out Santa isn't just fictional, but also a capitalist pig – I truly believed that a bot could generate the pithiest millennial melancholia online. 

Then Rolling Stone reported in 2014 that @sosadtoday was actually run by an LA-based writer called Melissa. A year later they went further specifying her as confessional poet Melissa Broder and there was no denying she was just very good at a laconic gallows humour that happened to be synchronous with zeitgeisty social media angst. Her tweets, like the most effective poetry, conveyed whole worlds of woe in few words; “american horror story: waking up”, for instance, or simply: “sext: goodbye”.

This collection of Broder's autobiographical essays, also called So Sad Today, is predictably similarly lacking in a sunshiny disposition, but on occasion more human than the author can handle. The chapter titles alone could double as typical Broder twit-missives, neatly summing up aspects of depression and/or anxiety ('Hello 911, I Can't Stop Time' or 'Honk If There's A Committee In Your Head Trying To Kill You'). But the contents unravel a litany of reasons for personal desolation (beginning with Broder's reluctant eviction from the womb two weeks late) and the idiosyncratic measures she's taken ever since to “generate a synthetic sense of hope and potentiality,” be it though benzos, hookups or nicotine gum. 

At this point I must confess that, as a cis white guy who isn't Scott Morrison, I have no idea what it's like to be a victim of bigotry, and hence cannot effectively assess how relatable some of these essays are. Sorry. While subjects such as anorexia, meeting sexual expectations and the pressure to not age obviously aren't entirely exclusive to women and girls, many causes of Broder's despondency result from navigating a society that still unfairly judges and maltreats them. So her frank and often filthy ways of tackling these subjects, matched with attempts to destigmatise mental health problems in general, still feel defiant and politically charged even in the year of our lord 2016. (Granted, her experience exists on a sliding scale of privilege, which Broder readily confronts: “I feel bad that I brought a Prada bag to a police brutality protest,” she admits, and accepts that her desire to have a dick is “a casual want” rather than a result of gender or body dysmorphia.) 

But I can tell you, even in an age where confessional writing is more accessible than ever, I was surprised at how surprising So Sad Today could actually be. Not because the content itself was unusually shocking – although before breaking the spine of this book I certainly hadn't predicted reading the sext “finger me in a dark alley while jesus is crucified” – but more because it prompted obvious questions I'm startled to have not considered before. The big one being: before these essays, I'd not fully acknowledged that there might be specifics for the author's sadness, allied with abstract concepts such as misogyny and loneliness. Of course, the insatiable holes Broder talks of feeding do ultimately stem from an existential dread I assume we all feel (because, really, who wouldn't be preoccupied with the meaninglessness of existence and the terror of death?). But it wasn't until discussing her husband's debilitating chronic neuroimmune disease – not the root cause of her unhappiness, of course, but undoubtedly a gigantic factor in it – that it dawned on me how elaborate the mask obscuring the depths of Broder's sorrow really was. Despite the humour, I'd barely even noticed it being worn.