How to Give Neurotic Losers the Main Character Treatment

It’s really no wonder that there has been this scattering to the winds of people on social media now, as if they didn’t need another reason to migrate to other platforms. I remember that moment when there was Threads, Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon, and some other ones—and I’m like, this is the fucking War of the Roses.

I dunk on Twitter constantly—I am never calling it X—but can’t seem to quit. It’s still important and useful for many reasons.

From my vantage point, the utility to the writer is it provides a buffet of freak behavior that you would never have access to otherwise.

All the trolls.

Well, you get examples of pathologies that you wouldn’t come across in your ordinary life, but on the other hand, it also has stretched everybody’s imagination of what kind of people are out there. This becomes even more interesting and complicated when you contemplate that people are not really being themselves online either. A reader picking up a book now is going to be, I think, less skeptical about extremes of behavior in a character that’s on the internet, which gives you a lot more latitude to be absurdist in a way that doesn’t skirt realism.

Why was the, quote-unquote, loser or reject such an enticing figure to pursue in this project?

The obvious answer—it’s what’s on my mind. Being somebody who has gone through a lot of rejection, and not really finding a ton of books, to my mind, that engaged centrally about that subject, or books that went beyond treating it as a brief plot point, was the drive for it.

What themes felt important to unpack?

As far as how I connected it to the internet, one, it’s where people go for answers very often, especially answers to questions that are too shameful to ask in real life. They seek out people who’ve been through the same things. This used to be the primary task of literature.

The other thing is, when you’re lonely, especially when you’re lonely in a kind of wounded way, it is extremely enticing to be on a medium that can’t reject you. The internet is never off. Unless you are somewhere without access, there is never a point where you are denied from using it. It creates a zero-calorie form of socialization that will soothe lonely people, at least temporarily. When writing about contemporary life, it’s hard to avoid.

Is loneliness one of the defining symptoms of this current era?

No, loneliness has always existed. In a strange way, our access to witness loneliness has radically increased. There is something to the fact that the availability of a substitute for socialization, rather than in-person meeting, has contributed to that a little bit. Social media being solely responsible for having generated it, is a little bit of a moral panic.