The New York Times just carried a lengthy obituary on Anita Brookner, an English writer who, early in her late-in-life writing career, won the Booker (now Mann Booker) Prize for fiction.
Reading this brought to mind an Elle magazine article about contemporary Twitter maven, poet and soon-to-be novelist Melissa Broder. The article came to my attention thanks to "Literary Hub," an on-line font of all things having to do with writing.
What do these two women have in common other than a Jewish background? In a word, angst. Like sex, it seems angst finds an audience.
Ms Brookner, The Times said, was was known for a series of stylistically polished novels depicting beak and disappointed lives. Viewed as heavily autobiographical works, the author was at one point labeled "the mistress of gloom."
In a 1987, Ms Brookner, who had a successful career as an art historian, told The Paris Review that she had begun to write "in a moment of sadness and desperation," which brings me to Ms Broder. Identified as Twitter's "reigning queen of angst, insecurity, sexual obsession and existential terror," she got her start when, initially anonymously, she begin writing on Twitter as "@sosadtoday."
At present, she reportedly has almost 300,000 followers, and tweets such as "no one knows what they're doing and if they do they're a psychopath" had, at the time Elle's Whitney Joiner interviewed Ms Broder, been re-Tweeted 607 times and favored more than 1,500 times.
What such prose lacks in stylistic polish (not to mention logic), is apparently offset by the extent to which it resonates with prevailing sensibilities.
If Ms Bookner's work was thought to be largely autobiographical, Ms Broder's writing is intensely and overtly so. We are, it seems in the age of "extreme confession," which in Ms Broder's case involves matters such as her extramarital affairs, her past addition to drugs and her "oldest and most primal sexual fantasies," which, it turns out are "all about vomit." Really? On the other hand, extreme confession does not include revealing her exact age (too many teenage female followers who might be put off by the truth, it appears), or details of her addiction recovery program.
After reading the lengthy Elle interview, one wonders the extent to which Ms Broder has discovered that angst is more bankable than debilitating. I say that because Ms Joiner says at one point:"when I ask Broder's friends and family if they worry about her, they all laugh or seem bemused."
The novel for which Anita Brookner won the Booker Prize is called "Hotel du Lac" and I may well read it. Those interested in following Broder in more depth can pick up "Last Sext," her fourth collection of poems; "So Sad Today," an essay collection expanding on her tweets, or watch for a forthcoming novel, which Ms Broder said will be about "a woman and her inner conflicts." Who'd have thought it?
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