7/6/2023 0 Comments Lauren oyler jia tolentino![]() Yes, Oyler - painfully - I feel a lot of this. It’s those intimate moments between author and reader that Zadie Smith calls her ‘I feel this, do you?’ essay technique. If the best fiction is that which verbalises a hidden emotion, a thought or part of yourself that you have been unable to put words to before, Oyler delivers this on a regular basis. I thought of how a few years earlier, I had loved Twitter for the way I could build myself an echo chamber, sit within it and hear my opinions reverberate around me. These scenes are recognisable, if not in ourselves then at least in others. ![]() She stays up late, ‘portalling around from one social media account to the next’. An intern in her office asks her to film her doing some push-ups, to post the video on Instagram ‘so she could show off without having to show off herself’. ‘I tried constructing hopeful analogues to the past to account for the time I wasted online, to convince myself that my drive to collect useless knowledge about strangers and acquaintances was not a new condition,’ the narrator says. ![]() ![]() ![]() And how exactingly Oyler writes of that internet procrastination, the claustrophobia of being confined to one’s head and then the agoraphobia of roaming around online. ![]()
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