I imagine that task was really challenging as someone who reviews books. But I mean, that's totally what I was going for-make the book good enough so people can't hatchet-job you, right? That's what everybody is going for, I hope. We're so used to seeing more or less positive criticism or only tepidly questioning criticism, but not a ton of harsh book criticism, so I seem like more of a bitch than I think I am. Ha! I don’t think Emily meant that being a bitch is a bad thing necessarily. I first heard about your book after seeing a tweet from Emily Gould that calls you an “enormous bitch” but then praises the novel as “unimpeachably great.” How do you unpack a comment like that? Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĮLLE.com talks with the author about how she deals with her inner critical voice, her lukewarm feelings about social media detoxes, and how she found empowerment in blurring the lines of her online persona through fiction. Left in a social media-hazed mania, the narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on a truly deranged online dating spree and other expat follies.

The unnamed narrator discovers that her boyfriend of several years has been hiding a second life as a popular online conspiracy theorist on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, but as she roves the sea of pink pussy hats at the 2017 Women’s March that same weekend, her boyfriend dies in a freak accident before she can confront him. Now, she’s turned efforts to her own novel, Fake Accounts, which distills much of her critical musings into a timely premise, with a protagonist who feels like someone you follow on Twitter-an Internet writer who lives in New York City. Though her critique is often sharp-edged, it does not sacrifice nuance. More than one of her pieces of criticism have gone viral, a feat for the genre in its own right, but all the more extraordinary for their lack of sensationalism. With bylines in the London Review of Books, New York Times, The Baffler, and more, Oyler often reflects on online phenomena like the popular rise of astrology and the destabilizing effect of social media on our collective mental health.

She once questioned if New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino had ever met someone who wasn’t pretty (yikes!) and asserted that the best-selling novel American Dirt could have “perhaps used a little more self-doubt” (…fair). Lauren Oyler is the kind of literary critic who makes thin-skinned writers think twice about putting their thoughts onto the page.

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