So Sad Today: Personal Essays

Staff Top Fives 2016

Our favorite books of the year.

Broder's essay collection is shockingly candid, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly moving. She communicates her modern sadnesses in today's world of sexting, Twitter, and anxiety unlike anyone else. Recommended By Kevin S., Powells.com

Melissa Broder always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went through a harrowing cycle of panic attacks and dread that wouldn't abate for months. So she began @sosadtoday, an anonymous Twitter feed that allowed her to express her darkest feelings, and which quickly gained a dedicated following. In So Sad Today, Broder delves deeper into the existential themes she explores on Twitter, grappling with sex, death, love low self-esteem, addiction, and the drama of waiting for the universe to text you back. With insights as sharp as her humor, Broder explores--in prose that is both ballsy and beautiful, aggressively colloquial and achingly poetic--questions most of us are afraid to even acknowledge, let alone answer, in order to discover what it really means to be a person in this modern world.

"Delightful...Broder embarks on an earnest, sophisticated inquiry into the roots and expressions of her own sadness...deeply confessional writing brings disarming humor and self-scrutiny...Broder's central insight is clear: it is ok to be sad, and our problems can't be reduced to a single diagnosis." Publishers Weekly

"Instead of supersizing her angsty tweets, Broder presents a dizzying array of intimate dispatches and confessions...She has a near-supernatural ability to not only lay bare her darkest secrets, but to festoon those secrets with jokes, subterfuge, deep shame, bravado, and poetic turns of phrase." New York Magazine

"Broder may be talking about things like sexts, Botox, and crushes, but these things are considered alongside contemplations about mortality, identity, and the difficulty of finding substance in a world where sometimes it's so much easier to exist behind a screen." The Fader

"At once devastating and delightful, this deeply personal collection of essays (named for Broder's popular Twitter handle) is as raw as it is funny." Cosmopolitan

"These essays are sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous. They reveal so much about what it is to live in this world, right now." Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist

Melissa Broder is the author of four collections of poems, including the forthcoming LAST SEXT (Tin House, 2016). Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Guernica, and The Iowa Review, among other journals. She lives in Venice, California.