Oyler has made a name for herself writing viral takedowns of big names in the Anglo–American literary and media intelligentsia. Anyone who can incite such a visceral reaction from others must be worth reading, if just once. Intrigued, I’ve followed Oyler’s work ever since. Her critique of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror left every woman in his graduate school either writhing in anger or beaming with absolute joy. I caught myself unable to move from my seat, stuck in a dopamine–driven feedback loop of refreshing Twitter, making an audacious tweet, seeing who favorited it, deleting it and hoping a particular person saw it.Īt some point, I found a post from my much older internet friend, who was talking about the polarizing response to Oyler’s new piece in the London Review of Books. Avoiding class, I was sitting in a Pret A Manger in South London that gave off the same sterile, inhumane aura that all Pret A Mangers have. Ironically, I became acquainted with the fiction and literary criticism of Lauren Oyler, whose debut novel Fake Accounts shows the osmosis between online and real experience, through Twitter.
