Books

Happy Times for the Internet’s High Priestess of Depression

Melissa Broder is renowned for defining a specific digital sadness. But with a new novel and a thriving career, she has a reason to smile.

Books

Happy Times for the Internet’s High Priestess of Depression

Melissa Broder is renowned for defining a specific digital sadness. But with a new novel and a thriving career, she has a reason to smile.

By Lindsay ZoladzMay 2, 2018, 10:30 am UTC • 15 min

On a Thursday afternoon in mid-April, the writer Melissa Broder misses my call for a quintessentially Melissa Broder reason: She left her phone in the car while picking up her dog’s Prozac.

“Pickle Dog Broder,” as he’s known in the CVS database, is a four-year-old Chihuahua mix rescue with severe abandonment issues. “He has so much anxiety — he was found in a parking lot,” Broder (the human) tells me when we first meet, about two months earlier, on the leafy patio of a coffee shop in West Hollywood. She is not sure the Prozac is doing anything for Pickle, though, so she has cut him down to a smaller portion (“he’s microdosing”) and added a little CBD oil to his regimen. Broder has been sober for 13 years, so the first time she put the CBD oil on Pickle, she frantically called her friend to make sure that touching the substance did not constitute breaking her sobriety. “I was like, Oh no, I relapsed by putting CBD oil on my dog!” she recalls. “But they told me it was fine.”

If there is something to worry about, the 38-year-old Broder will find it, feel it, and then make an absurdly macabre 140-character joke about it. Though she is also a prolific poet and essayist, Broder is best known as the proprietor of the popular and morbidly hilarious Twitter account @sosadtoday, which has nearly 650,000 followers and, over the past six years, has helped turn a kind of deeply deadpan feminized sadness into a recognizable internet aesthetic. (A representative tweet: “911 what’s your emergency? i exist.”) In the half-decade that Broder has been running the account, she has become an expert chronicler of bad feelings, identifying and savoring their notes like a sommelier.

“I have a good friend who describes anxiety as one of those old sing-alongs on TV with the ball that bounces from word to word,” she tells me. “The ball is always bouncing — it’s just what’s it landing on today? What is it choosing?”

When we meet in Los Angeles in February, though, the bouncy ball seems to be momentarily suspended in midair. The internet’s high priestess of depression has, for once, a lot to be happy about: Her debut novel, The Pisces (an erotic love story about a woman’s fantasy life with a merman — trust me, it’s great), is out now. The film rights were optioned by Lionsgate months before it was even released, and Broder has just finished her second draft of the script. “I’m proud of it,” Broder says of The Pisces, bestowing upon it the closest she’ll come to complimenting her own creation. “I haven’t hit that point where I’m like, ‘This is a foul piece of trash.’”

When people who know only Broder’s internet persona meet her for the first time, they’re often surprised that she doesn’t, in her words, “look like Wednesday Addams.” She would actually be hard to pick out of the crowd of regulars at this chic West Hollywood café: Her long, cascading hair is honeyed with blond highlights, her fingers are adorned with delicate jewelry, and a small, anxious dog scurries at her feet between teetering high heels. (“Who’s being … not good but decent?” she coos to Pickle in that universal voice all owners use when speaking to their dogs. “Who’s being, like, a 6?”) Broder has lived in L.A. for more than four years; she and her husband recently moved to the Canyon. “We’re a couple streets away from the Manson murders, so that’s really nice,” she says. “Allegedly the knives were washed on my street.”

As the @sosadtoday account steadily gained popularity, and after Broder released a jarringly candid essay collection of the same name in 2016 (sample chapter title: “My Vomit Fetish, Myself”), she has faced criticism that she is making light of depression or “romanticizing mental illness.” “I’m always like, I’m not romanticizing it!” she says. “I’m just talking about it with humor. It’s my mental illness. It’s not your mental illness. I would never make a joke about something that wasn’t my experience.”

Broder has written extensively about the treatments she’s sought for depression, anxiety, and addiction, hoping that it will encourage her legion of followers to seek one that works for them. “Any kind of work there is, baby, I’ve done it,” she says, noting that the methods that have been most helpful to her have been a daily meditation practice (once in the morning and once at night), cognitive behavioral therapy, and a specific branch of mindfulness-based treatment called acceptance commitment therapy.

“I’m like, give me a fuckin’ anxiety worksheet,” she says, sipping an iced tea. “Let me track it. I love that shit.”

I first came in contact with Broder’s poetry about four years ago, when it was an open but not yet widely known secret that she was the anonymous scribe behind @sosadtoday. After seeing her perform several of her own poems at a reading, I was thunderstruck. She seemed to me an enlightened 21st-century being — a hot-pink Buddha in a miniskirt who said “fuck” a lot. I remember that she rocked on one leg throughout the reading, seeming not nervous but that she had worked out through her own body an elaborate method of generating her own nuclear power. Her work reminded me a little bit of I Love Dick author Chris Kraus, the way it turned the word and concept of “GIRL” into something barbed. In the days following, I searched the internet for half-remembered fragments of her poems later. This was one of them:

I must holy up the ground
I sanctify the ground and say fuck it
I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death
I say fuck it and fall down no new holes
And I ride an unwinged horse
And I unbecome myself
And I strip my poison suit
And wear my crown of fuck its

Part of the subversive energy of Broder’s work, she says, comes from the fact that she doesn’t like to compose it in a conventional setting. “I don’t like writing at a desk, because then it feels too perfectionist,” she says. “So I like to write when I’m not supposed to be writing. Like, in a bathroom at a party, just hiding in there for half an hour. On the subway, or just walking around New York on my phone.”

Broder has by now published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, 2016’s Last Sext, includes a poem for which she won a Pushcart Prize. Because of the visibility of @sosadtoday, Broder is occasionally lumped in with the (sometimes bemoaned) trend of “Instagram poets” like the absurdly popular rupi kaur, but there is a complexity and a macabre quality to her poems that does not exactly render them easily viral. “Broder doesn’t offer easy answers,” the poet Edward Derby wrote in a laudatory review of Last Sext. “kaur’s [work] arcs towards expressions of her own healing and emerging self-love, where Broder leads us into the darkness.”

“Poetry is not an attempt for me to solve anything. That’s what I love about it,” she tells me. “The mystery can very much live there. And I just feel like right now — I don’t want to talk too much about ‘right now’ and ‘the world’ — but right now, for me, it seems like there’s such a feeling of certitude. People’s beliefs are all about certitude. And poetry is not about certitude.”

Broder grew up outside Philadelphia and, from kindergarten through 12th grade, went to an all-girls school across the street from Bryn Mawr College. “Men were not part of the equation,” she says of her schooling. “I think it gave me a distorted worldview in some ways, but there was never a question that a woman could do anything. Because we did everything. We played the male roles in the play. We were class president. The best writer was a woman. The best actor was a woman. Every best, top whatever was a woman. And so I never got the message to pipe down, you know?”

A self-described “bad student” (“very in my own fantasy world, very out to lunch”), Broder found that she became a better and more focused student when she started smoking cigarettes at the end of high school. “I think I must have always needed a stimulant, I just didn’t know,” she says. By the time she went to college, she’d moved on to Adderall and harder drugs.

“That was when I started learning, Oh, you can have these systems — you just have to know what your system is,” she says. In college, her system for writing and getting work done happened to be pulling drug-and-cigarette-fueled all-nighters. “It was sort of like a little party,” she says now. “Because I was high, and I would just chain-smoke on Adderall.” This, she thought at the time, was how you write.

After college, Broder learned, in her words, “you bring yourself wherever you go.” She had moved to San Francisco in hopes that living there would make her laid back and anxiety-free. Instead, she “just ended up in a blackout for two years.” Drugs and alcohol became Broder’s coping mechanisms for the anxiety, depression, and addictive tendencies she’d experienced her whole life (from the first page of So Sad Today: “Day one on earth I discovered how to not be enough”). They helped until they didn’t. “One thing that’s especially sad about alcoholism and drug addiction is the way something so beautiful and sacred turns so ugly,” she writes in one of her essays. “The thing that saved my life, that made the world magical and livable, had turned on me.”

When she was 25, Broder admitted she was an addict and got sober. She hasn’t had a drink, drug, or cigarette in over a decade (though she has written about her subsequent dependence on Nicorette gum). But she had for so long equated writing and poetry with addiction and stimulants that she worried recovery would stall her drive to create. “When I got sober,” she says to me, chewing a piece of Nicorette, “I was like, I wonder if I’ll ever write again.”

“She was serious, but also very laid back. She seemed comfortable with herself,” the poet Jason Schneiderman recalls of Broder, the “star student” in his Gotham Writers Workshop poetry course. (It’s something of an ironic compliment, given that there were only three students in the class: “I was surprised Gotham let it run!” Schneiderman says.) But even finding a tiny writing community gave a newly sober Broder the drive to get back to writing poetry. Some of the work she did in that workshop would become her first collection, When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother. She also started publishing her poetry on websites like HTML Giant and The Awl while slowly working on a graduate degree that her day job in publishing partially subsidized. “I did ultimately get an MFA in poetry, which you don’t need,” Broder says. “I would say that the internet was my MFA.”

The most harrowing essay in So Sad Today is about Broder’s husband, who, not long after she met and fell in love with him, was diagnosed with a chronic neuroimmune disease. (He said that she could write anything about him just as long as she changed his name to “Ron Jeremy.” Broder, so adept at joking about the hard stuff, must have known this was also a way to keep the essay from being unreadably sad: “But over the years we have been married, Ron Jeremy’s relapses have become more and more frequent, to the point that he is never not sick.”) In 2013, Broder and “Ron Jeremy” moved to Los Angeles because the climate would be better for his health. It was difficult for her to leave her life and writing community in New York, though, and the cross-country move triggered the bout of depression from which @sosadtoday would spring.

When I ask Broder whether it’s different — or even easier — to be depressed in L.A. as opposed to New York, she pauses for a moment and decides, “It’s the same.”

“I was scared to move out here because I was scared I wouldn’t be able to run from myself the same way that I’ve been able to run from myself in New York,” she goes on. “Just because in New York everything’s so accessible and you can always be moving. But I’ve come to find you can run from yourself out here just fine.” You bring yourself wherever you go. The weather definitely helps, she admits, but on the other hand: “It can be hard, with depression, to be in traffic all the time.”

And yet, improbably, without traffic So Sad Today and The Pisces might never have been written. When she left New York, Broder missed the clipped, intense rhythms of writing on the subway, so she started experimenting with writing in the place she’d begun spending most of her time: her car. “I was driving now, so I started dictating, and the lines started getting longer. That’s how the essay collection happened. Because it was no longer poetry, it was prose. Then that’s how I did the novel, too. I didn’t believe I could write a novel, but then I was like, What if I just do three paragraphs a day? It was, like, an experiment. I’m just gonna experiment! I kind of have to just find these games, you know? And since then I’ve written two more [manuscripts of] novels.”

Dictating saves time in the writing process. But it isn’t necessarily any easier. “While I’m dictating, I use Siri and Simplenote, and I don’t go back and fix anything while I’m doing it,” she says. “So there are a lot of words that I read and I have no idea what the fuck I was talking about, because sometimes it will be the wrong words. The other day I was dictating something and it was supposed to say, ‘I was so ravenous,’ but it said, ‘That’s so Raven!’ That first edit is literally just decoding and fixing things that have been autocorrected.”

The younger Broder who worried she’d never write again would be relieved to know all of this. “I’m neurotic,” she says of her three-paragraph-a-day rule, “so a day doesn’t pass where I don’t do it.” Creation and self-destruction often run off the same fuel, though only the latter is finite. The former, when properly harnessed, can go on forever. “Despite the best attempts of history, time, weather, and churchmen,” she writes in The Pisces, “the desire in Sappho’s poems had survived as though it were love eternal. Perhaps desire was not so ephemeral after all.”

“Mermaids, mer-creatures have never been my mythological thing,” Broder tells me on the patio in Los Angeles. “I’ll take a Pegasus over a mer-creature. Anything horse-related, give it to me.” She pauses and takes a sip of her tea. “Not to fuck, but you know what I’m saying.”

The idea for the Pisces came to Broder when she was sitting on Venice Beach, reading a novella by the writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (“dead Italian guy,” she says, fondly) called The Professor and the Siren. “It’s about a student of a man who was once in a relationship with a mermaid,” she says. “It’s fucking gorgeous.” It got her thinking about the myths of the Sirens, the origins of the Little Mermaid fairy tale — these stories were so much darker and, well, more goth than she’d ever realized. But they all followed the pattern of an “older dude” falling in love with a “younger mermaid.” What if the genders were flipped?

And so The Pisces tells the story of 38-year-old Lucy, a woman living in Arizona and working on a never-ending PhD dissertation about Sappho. Lucy has just extricated herself from a decade-long relationship with a man who could not fully commit to her. Lucy’s wealthy sister, who owns a gorgeous house on Venice Beach, invites her to dog-and-house-sit for the summer, and also to try to get her life back together as a single person. There are cringeworthy dates, terrible Tinder sex, fruitless therapy sessions — and then, suddenly, a sexy and adoring merman named Theo.

And yet The Pisces is not a tale of human-on-merman sex (though it is definitely that) so much as a meditation on the bliss and dangers of escapism. Lucy becomes obsessed with her fantasy life with Theo, so much so that she starts to neglect the people and the world around her. Aside from the merman (who for the first half of the novel appears to Lucy as a swimmer she just never sees from the waist down), The Pisces is a novel of finely wrought realism — its overall groundedness is what makes the mythical twist work. Broder’s smartest, slyest trick is to point out the “fantasy” elements of our everyday projections: Lucy’s wish that the Tinder bro in an open relationship will suddenly leave his girlfriend and fall in monogamous love with her after they hook up once is perhaps as great a delusion as the existence of a merman. “I knew that what I wanted was something that couldn’t exist,” she says, before she even knows Theo’s secret. “But that didn’t mean it wasn’t something I wanted.”

Although Pickle is sufficiently medicated that afternoon in April, Broder sounds more nervous than she was the last time I spoke with her — her first novel is days away from coming out. “Now I’m in the full terror of it all,” she says. “All the feelings of fraudulence, all the feelings that people are going to find out I suck.” At least she’s able to turn the terror into fodder for some memorable new @sosadtoday missives. As she tweeted earlier that week, “honk if you’re sick of your own bullshit.”

Broder tries not to engage with people who criticize @sosadtoday, but one day not long ago, that is where the bouncy ball of anxiety happened to land. “I like your account,” someone DMed her, “but do you ever get the feeling you’re encouraging mental illness?” She sent them a link to one of many pieces of writing in which she’s chronicled the ways she’s sought help. The person apologized, telling her, “Sorry, I’m just really into spreading positivity right now.” This cliché rubbed Broder the wrong way. “I was like, how is that spreading positivity?” She unfollowed them. Then she felt bad and refollowed them, and then felt even worse, so she sent this stranger several messages trying to make them feel better. What transpired was like a free therapy session within the @sosadtoday DMs: Eventually the person told Broder, “I think I asked you that initial question because I feel like I should be better, but I’m not.”

“And I was like, ‘There you go!’” Broder recalls. “It’s OK to not be better than you are. That shame of ‘Why am I not farther along?’ or ‘Why am I not more positive?’ That compounds mental illness! That shame is a fucking nightmare.” That is the appeal of Broder’s work: She exposes that private shame to the blazing light of day.

Though depression and anxiety are now woefully common conditions of modern life, it’s still something of a taboo to speak of them out in the open. Broder’s work confronts that taboo with humor, edge, and at its core a surprisingly deep empathy. “I don’t know that feeling and depression is a linear thing where we’re just rendered better,” she says, speaking for herself but also perhaps from the experience of caring for someone with a chronic physical illness. “I think it’s kind of ableist to be like, ‘You should be better by now.’ Sometimes you do all the right stuff and you’re still sick and that’s OK. You can be taking care of your health and getting enough sleep and going to therapy … and sometimes you just get a fuckin’ cold.”

She sighs deeply; it sounds cathartic. What she says next sounds like a tweet or a line of poetry she’s workshopping in real time.

“I’m like, as long as I’m never enough for myself,” she says, laughing a little, “I’ll probably never starve.”

Lindsay Zoladz